You literally can’t buy them anymore! Spotify quietly canned the project. Support pages are still up but I can’t find a purchase option anywhere.
I bought one pretty early into launch and even then they were already heavily discounted. It was a weird choice for a peripheral, but personally I really wish they had tried a bit harder instead of giving up outright
They never even came over to the uk and I really wanted one. Nobody else makes anything like it either. I don’t know why they canned it, I’ve only ever seen praise for it on YouTube and the like
Sometimes you don’t want to use your phone for everything. Plus car thing to me seemed much more interesting outside of the car. Like to use as a media control panel in the kitchen etc.
There’s a niche. I’ve only ever driven older cars with less than stellar stereo setups for phone play. The idea is getting a small-footprint and quick to navigate stereo interface without actually having to replace whole ass stereo, and I find it pretty appealing!
For me the problem was connectivity. I assumed the car thing would act as a go-between for my phone and stereo, and it would remain always connected to the car audio system. Instead it’s just another thing you’re connecting to. It actually slowed me down significantly more than it helped.
If it could send/receive audio and just used your phone as a source, that’d be ideal for me. Like a suped up bluetooth receiver with spotify connectivity.
I have a car thing, I use it at my desk for media controls. It is pretty great.
But the product description was pretty clear that you needed premium to use it. The same goes for using any third party Spotify client. Shouldn’t have expected otherwise.
Public companies obviously intentionally want to make everything as shitty as possible, just to extract money, but lets accept the hypothetical that subscriptions will actually be banned. Wouldn’t that be great?
You would basically be treated the same as Tier 1-3 ISP’s, pay for the cost of the routing to the company. That phone plan that costs ?? €/$ a month becomes “Pay as you use it”. Flat fee per gigabyte / message etc. These plans were at least here in Finland, and I think my phone bills were around 4-5 EUR a month and a cap that you cannot exceed that month, though smartphones and data plans weren’t a thing. Now everything is a subscription.
Now back to hardware vs software. You obviously pay for the software also when buying the hardware, but for whatever reason the user doesn’t own any kind of rights around it. This has obviously become much worse the past few years (TV’s have ads etc). I really don’t think that the issue is anything you listed, the issue is that greedy companies want to use the subscription model rather than play fair. Phones and modems are EOL at best in a year. I have a PFSense router that cost me less than a router from my ISP used and it’s EOL and security is something I don’t have to worry about.
Modems and routers have most of their features dedicated to home networking and are not usually made by the ISP. Them connecting to the internet is one of the smallest features they have. The other features are related to offline networking and tight security, you can actually just plug an ethernet cable to the wall and get connection from your ISP. Same as using a modem and putting it in “bridge mode”, which will completely bypass the features of the modem/router.
The issue here is that the companies don’t want to provide value, they just want to extract as much money as possible, which is wrong. Laws and regulations are desperately needed and even something as radical as banning subscription services for user devices would be a net positive. Renting Tier 1-3 operator infrastructure for your router/modem to work is completely different than “You have the device and the software, but we block you from using it, since you don’t pay”, which in my opinion is ransomware, not subscriptions.
For right to repair and owning these devices, I completely agree with you.
So what use is a consumer modem without an internet service?
You can still use it to network with other computers over the telephone network. Heck you don’t even need to do that via the actual telephone service you can just run some wire.
But I think what was actually meant by OP is “tied to a specific subscription service” as well as “disables features that don’t need a subscription service when you aren’t subscribed”.
Phones, arguably, don’t perform their primary function without cell services.
You can use them as e.g. smart home remote. The cellular modem is going to go unused (at least apart from emergency services) but that’s only a small portion of the hardware, and modems were only ever locked to subscriptions (at least over here) if the phone is subsidised by that subscription. I don’t think they even do that any more, they replaced it with minimum contract durations. In any case even back in the days you could unlock it after some time or coughing up some money.
that’s why I think it should be root-able, serviceable, and speak in standard open protocols
Yep I wish rootability was included in the new EU regulations, it would solve so many issues at once. OTOH: It would solve the issue for people who are tech savvy enough to do such things, gotta be careful with our own elitism there. Enjoying consumer rights should not hinge on being a grease monkey.
Every single modem and cell phone I’ve ever owned have worked without a subscription to anything. My internet and ability to make cell calls were limited after my subscription ended, but the devices themselves were easily repurposed to other uses.
You misunderstand. I have no knowledge about how smart you are. You could easily be smarter than me. What im saying is you need to reassess your tone and delivery, because it, and your edit only shows me and others that you are arrogant and therefore unable to properly assess other points of view.
Address the possibility that i have a point on your own time, after your ego-required final comment to me. Whether you will address youself or remain as you are, it’s completely up to you.
But the point is that the description of the product clearly stated it needs a subscription to function. You literally buy it with that understanding. If you didn’t read the description then it’s 100% on you.
Whether it should be legal or not, or whether it’s ethical or not, is a different discussion. But the product wasn’t disingenuous about how it works, so complaining about how it works exactly as advertised is a bit silly.
Look out! Communists are coming for your toothbrush. Better vote for harsher penalties for modifying stuff you bought. The DMCA still allows throwing away or disconnecting the computer locking you out of your heated seats.
That’s so sad I really wanted one of these, shame man. I hope you can flip it or return it or something. Don’t listen to the people telling you it’s stupid, it’s a cool idea I had my eye on it as well. Thanks for the warning
in my 1998 car i just put in an Bluetooth capable radio with good speakers and a subwoofer and nobody can disable anything because it’s not connecting to anything except for a Bluetooth device. i’m never gonna by anything newer just because i can repair this cars myself and i really don’t want the mechanics in my area to fix it because i can’t trust them to fix it and not make it worse
Same but with a 1999, keep at it. You’ll never regret practicing at learning how things work. Some of the skills transfer even when you change what thing you’re troubleshooting.
Remarkably, I did the same, and still had something disabled…by Spotify.
The unit had Spotify compatibility (as in, an input mode where you also got access to liking a song by pressing the volume button).
Spotify dropped support for it in the app, so it’s not useful any more. It’s not really a problem, Bluetooth input and media controls still work, and I’ve disabled the Spotify input. But remarkable how possible it is for companies to ruin something!
yeah my pioneer radio also has a Spotify mode that dosen’t work anymore. i woud not use it anyway. and that’s why i don’t like electronics that need to connect to a server even if it doesn’t need to
You purchased a device that presumably has no local storage and are upset that it needs you to login to a server that can then stream you the music?
Or is this an issue of not having a paid account?
I guess Spotify didn’t realize someone who didn’t pay for Spotify would be likely to pay 100 bucks for a device to stream Spotify, and in most cases I’d say they’re probably right.
I pay for a family account, but apparently that’s not the same as a premium account. I’d have the same problem using this device without having to upgrade my Spotify account.
You can use an O(n) radix sort on the Z-values because IEEE-754 floats share the integer property that leftmost bits always have higher values than rightward ones.
Yes, but… “leftmost” in this case means MSB-sidemost, so little-endian systems will start sorting from the MSB only after loading the full value in a register; if you try sorting directly from memory in binary chunks smaller than the float size, first locate where the MSB is stored.
Oh that just made it click in my head why they would do it as sign, exponent, mantissa and not sign, mantissa, exponent. I mean yes I’ve been taught it’s for sorting purposes, but this really helped it fit better. Thanks!
I just bought a CD player a few weeks ago. It’s not very good (it’s a combination CD player/alarm clock, and the speakers are crap) but it’s nice being able to just put a disc in and press “play” instead of booting up one of my game consoles or plugging in my USB optical drive. I’ve started hitting up second-hand stores for CDs to play with it.
I just download from youtube with yt-dlp or using blackhole app to import spotify playlist or using some telegram bot to download songs from spptify links.
Convenience is because you have been using it and made your liked playlist there. I download the songs I like and play it locally because that is even more convenient to turn of mobile data or put airplane mode on and play song with much longer battery life and no other app notifications. Also you can play it on any device with the added benefit of not getting tracked and getting advertisements
Offline mode on spotify is local media with extra steps. Offline mode is premium only. Also you still get tracked with the proprietary app. Spotify songs cannot be played in your favourite music player, device or whatever. I can copy some songs into sdcard to play it on an old speaker set.
Pirated music gets more convenient than what you paid for. Moreover, restricting saving and sharing media is kinda dumb and does not actually hurt artists or their revenue
Offline mode on spotify is local media with extra steps.
It’s really less steps. I don’t have to do anything other than click a single button once.
Pirated music gets more convenient than what you paid for.
It really doesn’t. I like piracy, and I have a Plex server with around 6 TB of media but pirating music on a large scale is just annoying as fuck and my PC would have to be on all the time for my phone to access all my Music. My phone obviously can’t fit 5000+ songs.
I even have Radarr, Sonarr, and Bazarr; and I am of a few private trackers. So I am not unfamiliar with piracy.
All I play is 75 songs mp3s and i pkay it in shuffle. When i really like a song i downloads it. I really hate having to load every songs from internet to play it, everytime. Still having to load from your pc is easier than having to load from internet, for me. Also you get tracked online, always. Offline doesnt work for non premium.
Btw 5000+ songs with each 10mb file size would be 50gb and you could fit it in phone
Yeah, I love streaming for music. About $10 a month and I get seemingly every song I’ve ever looked up. Streaming video has a lot of problems with fragmentation, but music doesn’t seem to have nearly as bad of an issue. I use YTM and have never not found what I wanted to listen to. $10 is like the price of a single CD (or was – it’s been well over a decade since I’ve even looked at the price of CDs).
I’ve also listened to a lot of full albums on streaming (it’s often what I do when I discover a new artist that I like) and there’s never an album that I’d want to buy every song from. My music tastes are also very diverse. My liked songs are full of tons of songs that may as well be one hit wonders to me. That doesn’t translate well to buying CDs.
I actually really love the idea of spotify, but their execution is fucked. Joe Rogan’s getting billions and musicians who make up the overwhelming majority of the plays get microscopic returns per play. That’s bullshit.
Seriously, what does this do that a phone doesn’t? Am I missing something? Even early Android/iOS devices could run Spotify in their time (although not always anymore). What does this do?
Whenever I’m driving, my phone is almost permanently mounted as a GPS. I also own the car thingy, it has very intuitive hardware buttons and a dial on top of being touch screen. This way I can leave my phone on the GPS screen and adjust Spotify controls on the car thingy without taking attention of the road.
The only real shitty thing I would argue is that you NEED Spotify premium not just to control your Spotify, but also to control youtube/mp3 player/ any other media that you would want to play through your phone.
A photo of a Spotify Car Thing with the text displaying on the screen under the Spotify logo: “Need a Premium account To use Car Thing you need to be logged in to a Spotify Premium or Premium Family account on your phone.”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Which is fine for the majority. However, if you like to pump the volume or care about quality, bluetooth is very lacking. AA/ACP works over either USB or wifi, and the quality is muuuuch better.
Even USB-C is lacking as far as volume is concerned. I recently had to upgrade my 8-year-old phone to a new model that only has USB-C and no audio jack. My car has an aux-in plug and I got an adapter for the new phone, but the max volume is only about half what the old phone was. How the fuck am I supposed to destroy my hearing with USB-C?
When playing music from USB-C the audio precessing is happening in the adapter, not the phone. You may want to get a different/better adapter and that should solve your problem with low volume.
This one from Amazon sounds good, gets crazy loud, and is very inexpensive:
USB Type C to 3.5mm Female Headphone Jack Adapter a.co/d/40sa5qF
Do you have any suggestions on which one of those to get? There are so many choices but they all have very bad English in their descriptions or spam Instagram ads so I don’t trust them
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