BRICKED after 2 years 

Youve had me bricked for 2 years

We should make these companies pay for creating E-waste.

I like the idea of people filling charge backs on this and sending the device to Spotify’s headquarters

I thought Linus didn't remember what the product is called, but it's actually called Car Thing. Turns out Spotify wasn't too excited about naming it.

Worst part: when opening other apps like RU-vid, it works as a generic media playback control device. So it literally already functions as a generic Bluetooth multimedia controller.

Spotify should give all users of the device 1 year of their premium service. Spotify could offer an update allowing people to repurpose the device.

thats called a rugpull.

Fun fact for everyone, the day this video was published (May 28th) a class action lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York over the intentional bricking of the Car Thing claiming Spotify misled customers. If it's successful Spotify will be forced to compensate everyone who purchased a Car Thing. I personally hope they choose to make the device itself open source (even if they don't release the software it's running) so that we can reuse the device for other things, like a media controller for Windows for example. For now I'll look into jailbreaking mine and finding another use for it.

they really should just release the code so it can be open source, even if the block spotify from it just let people run their own system on it and play with their thing

Spotify should unlock the bootloader and open it up for custom firmware so owners/tinkerers can set them up as something useful like an IOT device.

I just got mine as a gift...

Speaking of e-waste, about 50% of all Windows PCs will be ineligible to upgrade when Microsoft pulls support for Windows 10 next year, leaving them without security updates.

I use my car thing every day for 1 year and 8 months. I really hope they open source it

Louis Rossmann suggested a DIY refund from Spotify for the car thing: Just keep doing disputes and chargebacks against them for your subscription.

The car thing was something that I really wanted to get into, especially owning an older car. The "invite" only part is what got me mad. They (at least to me) advertised it as being a free device when you sign up for the invite. Did not hear anything on it for a VERY long time and when it finally was available to me, they wanted the $90?! I am very glad that I am cheap and did not pay for a glorified phone app with a knob....

I love my Spotify Car Thing because it gives me *physical buttons* for my music, which is the best!! Very sad to see it being killed

As a software engineer who runs services that struggle with search and has to duplicate data in some instances to make certain searches faster, I could give an educated stab at why the RU-vid creator thing Linus was upset about has two "databases". Shooting from the hip, I'd guess the creator side of things may return more data or allows you to search on data, or order by data that isn't otherwise present on youtube proper. Doing so at scale can be a pretty DB heavy task without the correct indexes on that table (the more indexes you have, the longer time it takes for youtube to manage those indexes while adding/mutating their video comments). It seems likely to me that to allow for more complex searches, they duplicate the comment data and reindex it after the fact (assuming that the creator studio need not be 1:1 exactly up to date with the live site). Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me to keep comments for videos running smoothly. Again this is just me taking an educated guess.

Honestly, the easiest thing for them to have done, and gotten away with, is just give 6 months of free spotify to whoever bought one, and that would've been the end of it

That HAS to be illegal. Disabling the service sure, that would suck but remotely killing a physical device you've paid for just has to be against some sort of law.

instead of bricking it, give it an update that wipes it of all previous code, but roots it, so no intellectual property concerns, and people can do whatever they want with it.

Spotify royally fucked up with the marketing of this thing. Do you know how many people I know that have older cars that could’ve used one of these? Imagine if they just marketed this correctly and sold it in stores

I got mine for like $30 when it first launched because there was a crazy discount. I didn't use it that much but I did kinda love the thing, it was a fun interface and useful in older cars too. This saddens me greatly :(

Don't forget even before RU-vid removing public facing stats on Dislikes to the videos, the Dislikes on comments and replies DON'T TRACK AT ALL. All they do is show if you disliked it.

When Google ended support for Stadia, the refunded the money people payed for the games they bought on their service and offered a patch to their Stadia controllers to become generic Bluetooth controllers as previously they only worked with Stadia or plugged in directly via USB. I bought a Chromecast Ultra with an included Stadia controller that was on sale for $22. I mainly got it just for the Chromecast and getting the controller basically as a bonus. They automatically refunded my money after a year+ with no questions a month after they had announced Stadia's closure. That pretty much quelled any backlash people had as the controller would have been effectively e-waste without that update. The only thing Google didn't refund was the monthly subscription people payed to use their services for Stadia. Without knowing more info, Spotify can do better for the people who bought it and the potential new old stock that may be available that people could still use and let it die a slow death or make it open source. Im sure hackers/modders will find a way to repurpose it and make it workable to some degree; not necessarily to work with Spotify but for other use cases.

Generating e-waste needs to be outlawed. I’d make it a criminal offence with jail time for the ceo.

This reminds me of Google Stadia, but with Stadia you can still reprogram the controller into a standard bluetooth gamepad via a website Google made themselves, no way Spotify couldn’t do the same with the car thing. I had only ever heard of the car thing due to this situation and my first thought after seeing it was “Wow! A tiny android powered touchscreen with a dial and physical buttons? That sounds pretty cool!” and now they’re getting completely bricked? I hope someone makes a custom firmware for this because the hardware has amazing potential.

Logitech did the same thing with one of their IR blaster devices. It required a SSL connection back to Logitech and they didn't want to renew the SSL certificates so they killed the device. I have actively looked for devices that do not require a connection to servers that are out of my control.

Buying hardware that is tied exclusively to a proprietary cloud service has **always** been a bad idea. We increasingly see that each time a company pulls this kind of bullshit.

How can you possibly revoke the access for this. First, they take our digital assets if they feel like it. But now they're doing this with physical assets!!?? This HAS to be illegal!!

I think we need a proper distinction between goods and a service. A service can end but goods should not become inoperable at a company or manufacturers will.

Yet another reason I won't use services like Spotify to pay to listen to content I already paid for and own. Those services may make sense for people too young to have owned records, cassettes and cd's, but for me? It makes no sense. 90% of the stuff I listen to I originally bought on cassette, then again on cassette when the tape wore out. Then a few years later, I bought it again on CD, and then yet again on cd after the original got scratched. Finally digitized my collection around 1998. Why would I ever choose to pay yet again to listen to my owned content? And why would I ever given some company control over how and where I listen? Crap like this is also why I have my movie collection digitized as well. Does it make any sense to pay Amazon $15 or $20 to "buy" an old movie I already own, then hoping 15 years from now they still allow me to access it? Those purchases will only be honored for as long as it makes fiscal sense for Amazon.

Australian Consumer Law is going to absolutely lose their shit over this

It was just announced recently that Spotify is refunding people for killing the car thing.

my pebble still works, using it everyday lmao

Spotify probably has a deal with phone companies that makes it more profitable to sell $1000+ phones to use in cars rather than $90 Spotify only device

No idea why they just don't make it open source. Shame on these cloud based closed source companies

I found one yesterday while cleaning I went to looked up what it was because I hadn't seen it before and was greeted by announcements of it's death lol. Turns out wife won it as a prize at work not long ago and just hadn't used it yet.

Thank you for talking about this

"I didn't forget about it. I never knew it existed." SAME

The worse part is that it didn’t even connect to any servers, just to the user’s phone

I've used the CarThing since release! I got sent an invite early. It currently sits in my 1994 Mazda B3000 (Ford Ranger) which currently doesn't have a working radio. So I bluetooth to a Speaker and the CarThing which is mounted in the truck. It was great because I never had to touch my phone to simply change the music. Spotify killing the CarThing is really devastating for me. I don't have the money to put in a new stereo and speakers in my 94' truck. I wouldn't be as upset if they offered at LEAST partial refunds or free months of premium to make up for us buying into this only for them to kill it.

My now ex GF has this in her 2007 vehicle and i cant help but cackle at her but overall the situation suuuuuucckkssss

The whole Car Thing was just a money grab. With its release, Spotify app in my phone stopped supporting Spotify "app" in my Pioneer car radio. Since then I have to use just bluetooth audio. It is not bad but dedicated Spotify app offered more features.

I have one of these. It's been really useful in my older car. Thinking about all the e-waste generated from this abandoned device really bums me out.

times like this really make the case for jailbreaking/rooting. i hope the hacker community finds some way to crack the hardware

What's really crazy is that I'm pretty sure if a parent comment gets deleted all the child comments get spilled out into the main feed like a balloon bursting. I've often seen comments with @s in them clearly responding to another comment that it's not actually attached to. It's also really annoying that you can't mute comment threads. I keep getting notifications on comments I left years ago that I'm no longer responding to, but I don't want to delete them because they've become their own conversations. So every couple of months I get an email telling me what someone else said in response to a conversation I'm not even having.

I got an invite for one of these things, I do own it and was using it a bit before I moved. Kinda curious what it can be hacked into now.

I received mine as a gift from Spotify at a time when I wasn’t a Premium subscriber, so that brought me back in! We had them before I installed CarPlay compatible radios, but with or without that, it was a nice way to have a dedicated screen for maps while CarThing controlled the music. It had nice shortcut buttons to pull up playlists and worked pretty well, if a bit redundant. Had I not received it as a gift, I don’t think I would have purchased it but it was a cool thing to play around with!

There has also been a VERY long-standing issue- pretty much since they came out, with boot looping and issues connecting to Bluetooth that they simply never addressed. I'm not sure which reason it is between them simply not caring or sunsetting it so quickly, but the end result is the same. Mine worked for maybe 6 months and by the time it started experiencing issues they no longer supported it or would do anything about it.

The only stipulation I have with them bricking it is the fact that the Spotify car thing can also work over Bluetooth so you can connect your device to the car thing via Bluetooth and just use is as a normal external Bluetooth device for your car or wherever you may put it and use it like that which doesn’t entirely make sense as the reason to brick the whole thing when it also has a Bluetooth feature not many people overly knew about

We need Australia type consumer laws. Goods must be reasonably durable. Consumer can choose replacement or refund for unrepairable goods.

Not sure how most people don't know this, but you can buy short range FM transmitters that are powered off your cigarette lighter port. You connect your phone via Bluetooth and tune your radio to the station. I used one all through college because my beater came out before Bluetooth radios.

They can open the bootloader up and open source the entire project. The community will find a way to make it work again.

On the RU-vid and Studio thing, the limited comments in the feed on Studio may be more of a UI thing than and API thing. Studio may just be built with more limitations than the main site. In the main site, replies made to video comments max out as 500, while I believe the full comment section maxes out at 5000 comments (I may be wrong tho). TBF, the comments tab in Studio is mostly designed to monitor and moderate flagged comments, so I believe thats the reason why public comments are limited.

For the RU-vid Studio thing, I am sure this isn't the problem here, but the Studio gives you messages based on filters. One of those filters is "comments I haven't responded to". If that filter is active, no way you're seeing your own message. That's the whole point. Again, I don't think that's the problem here, but I am sure there are other criteria used by Studio to filter comments as well.

On the RU-vid comment inconsistency: TLDR: redundant data and work allows teams to work independently, vastly improving productivity due to the reduced communication and coordination overhead the most likely reason is that each of those software components keeps its own, local copy of that data and gets/polls comments update when convenient from a server load perspective. The reason as to why it would replicate rather than use the same data source is that it removes coordination need between the creator dashboard and the comments storage teams: comments storage can now freely change its internal structure as long as they maintain the copy/poll interface - this would not be possible if the dashboard hooked directly into this internal data structure as to why they use two different ways of copying/polling: 1) it might just be the same way but that way might be nondeterministic. i.e. network routing and server load causes different behaviours when the same action of copying with different destinations is performed 2) they might not use the same way of copying, which again decouples the teams: now changes to the creator dashboard data model will not affect the below-video-comments team so while it does seem counterintuitive, being redundant and even doubling work has proven to allow big organizations to get more done more cheaply as it allows people to work out of lockstep with each other.

You can say.... the problem is a parent.

I have two of these, one for my car and one at my computer desk. Very very pissed.

Absolutely, if you sell a product that requires a constant service to function, if you decide that you can't support it any more it should be a legal requirement to provide the minimum tools for others to support it. Spotify should push an update that removes intellectual property, and then opensource that version, doesn't need to work as original, but needs to be accessible and updatable by others

Let's figure out how to hack and preserve it as a community. You can dump and back up the OS already, but hopefully we can figure out how to fight back and preserve the device

I bought one. It was pretty neat. Still have it. It just needed to be more like the phone app. The OS they used felt pretty limited on Navigating and interacting with it.

we need sue Spotify as a group! what hell this is a crime...

I literally have had mine in a bag for a year and a half. I was about to use it as a Spotify control for my listening station instead of the controls for my last vehicle lol…

Cool video idea on this would be to buy one and make a simple open OS for it allowing all users to access any music app? May well be more difficult than that though but would be a massive FU to Spotify!

Speculation that the way you pull from the same API would yield less results. It's probably not ordered information, so pulling less total entries that you then sort by latest would give different end results for the user.

After 2 years is CRAZY

Finally someone actually speaking about how ungly and broken comments in youtube. I'm often receive notifications, that I can't determine if they talking to me, or to someone else in whole comment thread. Why it's even notify me, if someone replied not to my reply?

I have an issue with RU-vid mobile where comments I make on videos either outright disappear after I refresh the comments, or they show up on a different video, especially in shorts.

Remember when google shut down Stadia and they refunded purchases on ALL software AND hardware? They even pushed an update to add bluetooth to the controller. Honestly think they held off until just after the two year warranty in the EU.

I’m probably the only one in my province with one. They weren’t available in Canada and I had to go through a few hurdles to get one. I actually enjoyed using it, I thought it was very user friendly. They won extra points with the inclusion of multiple mounts and a stick on cable management “holders”. Sucks they got rid of it.

Sounds like an issue of "eventual consistency". As the huge scale that Google has every read and or write will more than likely be hitting different nodes with different levels of cache / update.

And the big companies talk about how much they think about the environment. It's just a facade. The most environmental friendly thing is to reuse a thing. Not empty promises of recycling.

I am getting sick of the bullshit of these companies claiming to be environmentally sound, then creating unfathomable amounts of e waste at the push of a button with all of this planned obsolescence. There need to be laws against completely bricking electronics, they should have given us a fucking means to use if without the original service, hell even using it with limited functionality. I guess this might as well have a fucking small charge in it that self destructs in this situation. Spotify can get bent for all i fucking care. I am glad I kept my goddamned CDs.

Yep they definitely bricked my Spotify car thing (probably one of the last and most up-to-date models they made), after not even a full 8 months of using it. I used it plugged in to my pc via usb, and it worked fine, on a VERY simple OS. I don’t understand how or why they just disabled it. I got it as a birthday gift and it didn’t even last a full year. F Spotify for that. Thank you for talking about it

Hire one team to invent Craigslist. Hire another team to invent eBay. Hire third and fourth teams to coordinate documentation and integration. Hook it all up to the same data source and tell me you'd expect parity on day one, if ever.

Based on some glitches I've experienced, I think the Spotify app is creating a software frame buffer of some kind, and pushing it to car thing. For example, I have had my car thing display what would be like stationary CRT rolling, but the interface buttons would work despite being dislocated. I don't think they will actually "brick" them, just remove the components from the Spotify app that generate the interface and receive input. I think the BT-LE compression that makes it possible (since car thing doesn't explicitly show up on Bluetooth devices, like a Tile tracker wouldn't) might be the proprietary part.

Great, I now have a little piece of E-waste

I think the direction we need to go is similar to video games: We need laws that force any online services like this to advertise their end-of-life date from the beginning. Companies can always extend it, but right now customers can't know if their online game will continue to work for 1 month or 10 years, and that completely changes the value of the product (the whole reason we need this as a consumer rights law).

On the plus side, it's pretty easy to root so you can continue to use it after they cease service.

This has me bricked up fr fr

Reasons to make a sort of custom - offshoot - interface: save bandwidth. lots and lots of bandwidth. You could agressively cache, REALLY turn down the sample rate etc. You could also do marketing shenanigans because you control the eula for the device.

I have one and think it is great, and this is frustrating - I really hope they open source it, or someone is able to hack it and install custom firmware / software on it to allow us to continue using it in some form or other

Jokes on you, I have been bricked for 20 years 💀

this should be a class action lawsuit, they need to be made an example of

I feel you Linus. I turned off my watch history because I don't like how it controls my life and how I veiw things. The control feels like a cage to me and want to break free.

Potential answer for the differences in content on the RU-vid front ends: Different development teams own the different front ends, and these teams don't communicate with each other. Even if they call the same API for the comment data, they may not be passing the same parameters or updating their data on the same schedule. And/or their front end filtering logic differs in some way.

So, it's a physical Spotify GUI? Nice.

I purchased my unit, new from Sportify, mid-October 2022 so I must have been very near the end of the sale window.

To answer the "what if the code has company secrets in it" they could give these 2 options to the users : 1. Continue to use the rotting closed source software that has the proprietary secret source code 2. Switch to a different open software (via pc or something) that is open source so you techy nerds can make and use programs for the device Just like when stadia closed, people had the option to keep the old controller firmware that was rotting or to switch to the new bluetooth mode that gave it a new life

Abbott: Hey Costello, have you heard about Spotify's Car Thing? Costello: Spotify's what thing? Abbott: Car Thing. It's a device for your car. Costello: The car's thing is a steering wheel, Abbott. Abbott: No, no, this is different. It's Spotify's Car Thing. Costello: And what’s it called? Abbott: It's a Car Thing. Costello: So, Spotify has a thing for cars? Abbott: Yes. Costello: And what do they call it? Abbott: It's the Car Thing. Costello: I know it's the car thing! What’s its name? Abbott: That’s it!: It's the Car Thing. *A while later* Costello: Okay, what does this "Car Thing" do? Abbott: It helps you play music and podcasts while you drive. Costello: So, it’s a radio? Abbott: No, it’s more like a smart assistant. Costello: Oh, so it talks? Abbott: Well, you can talk to it, and it plays what you ask for. Costello: Like my phone? Abbott: Yes, but designed specifically for your car. Costello: And it’s called Car Thing? Abbott: Exactly! Costello: So it’s a thing for my car to play music from Spotify? Abbott: Right. Costello: Who came up with that name? Abbott: The folks at Spotify. Costello: So why not call it Spotify Car Player? Abbott: Because it’s called Car Thing. Costello: My brain is starting to hurt. Abbott: It's simple, really. It's Spotify's Car Thing. Costello: But it could be any car thing! A seat cover is a car thing! Abbott: True, but this Car Thing is for playing Spotify. Costello: I think I need to lie down. Abbott: Why, what's the matter, Costello? Costello: I'm just trying to understand why they'd call it something so vague. Abbott: Don't overthink it. Just remember, it's the Car Thing from Spotify. Costello: I'm going to need more than a lie down. I think I need a vacation. Abbott: Maybe you can listen to some relaxing music on the Car Thing during your drive! Costello: Oh, Abbott, not again! Abbott: Alright. What are you going to do on your vacation? Costello: I don't know. Watch some baseball, maybe. Maybe I'll get to third base with my girlfriend. Abbott: And when are you starting your vacation? Costello: Tomorrow.

Spotify are now offering refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking them, but I still think they should not just brick them and make them e-waste and make them open source.

One of my questions is why they couldn't give it an OTA update, much like how phones, Teslas, etc do. If it's an issue with them losing the network they served it with, I guess they could make it WiFi only, or else design a new network modem for it.

no joke, i was literally contomplating getting one like a week before the announcement lol

Another day, another company f*ing over their customers

If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing

Companies should be required by law to offer 5 years of support for "purchased" software, media games, hardware or give a refund.

Music labels also like to sue people for downloading their music so that could get a bit frustrating

I would put money on the reason for the bricking of the device being that its API is being used to download music without encryption or, given that the device has been rooted, encrypted with known keys.

When i heard about this from Lewis Rossman, I immediately canceled my Spotify plan and i use youtube music now.

The worst part about RU-vid comments is that they'll let you think you posted a comment but you'll come back later and realize it wasn't actually posted because you did something that isn't allowed. (Links, bad words, etc.)