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Amazon is bricking its Astro business robots less than a year after launch
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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We need laws that make this illegal. I get it that they don’t want to support it for whatever reason, but electronic waste is already a big problem and you can’t convince me everyone is recycling their used electronics.
Amazon bricks your expensive new-ish device and now you have to pay to have it recycled? Hell no people aren't recycling them, and that too should be illegal. Amazon should be legally required to take responsibility for recycling those devices, and how the device is recycled should be part of the device design process.
The article says that Amazon has a recycling program and has provided free assistance and home pickup for these as part of the sunsetting.
I have an hard time believing they will handle it properly, given that they prefer to trash many returned items rather than putting them back into stock when it suits them.
100 percent true. Any item created by a company should be collected back by that company for full disassemblely and recycled fully.
This should be true for any thing, such as tvs, microwaves, fridges, couches, beds, plastic bottles, fast food packagings. Companies should accept the item back at pickup points easily accessible, and take back any item no matter how old. Think of beer bottle collections at your local beer store.
We as tax payers should really stop allowing corporations to use public funded landfills and garbage collection for "free". These costs should really be part of the products created internalised by corporations.
This is pretty close to how it works here in Finland, although I'm not sure if it's based on national or EU legislation. The cost of recycling is baked into the price of any electronics, and as a rule of thumb, you can drop off any small devices to be recycles at stores that sell appliances. When it comes to bigger appliances, the stores only need to take your old one if you're buying a new one. You can of course also bring them to municipal recycling centers.
Any good petition writers? I’d sign something like this in a heartbeat.
The article says that Amazon has a recycling program and has provided free assistance and home pickup for these as part of the sunsetting.
I’m pretty good about either giving away or selling off used electronics pretty cheap, but in the worst case I take it to Best Buy as they have free electronics recycling.
I’m not sure if they still do it (it’s been a long time), but I kind of hate that you’re relying on the goodness of their heart to offer it.
Amazon did this with their cloud security cameras as well.
Spotify did it with their "Car thing"
It's common and I agree, should be illegal.
Should be required to open source it and unlock everything before sunsetting products.
Before launching products*
walled gardens are only a little less awful when still supported
This is what gets me. Why don’t they do this? They’re turning down profit by discontinuing support, but probably their logic is someone else will benefit from the hardware without bringing in profit, so that’s bad forsomefucking reason.
Good luck. Sounds similar to the problem that the movement Stop Killing Games is trying to solve as well, which I doubt will get anywhere.
To be mildly fair to Spotify Car Thing lasted for at least 3yrs. The worst part was, imo, it was really good. Like sure, my phone does voice commands but they work like 1/5 times. Car Thing worked nearly 100%, responded to anyone in the cars voice (pro/con depending on situation lol), and was a nice display for my preAndroidAuto headunit. Honestly I think the biggest mistake was that it was tied to a car, I used it on my desk for a while as a dedicated music control surface and it worked well. If more time went into making it just a universal Spotify controller it would have been much better as a thing. Have it mounted next to your receiver, or slap a battery in it and put it on a coffee table during a party and that would have been cool AF and requires zero phone interactions.
We'll just get robots to collect the used electronic waste.
Then we'll get bigger robots to collect the used smaller robot waste.
Done, done, and done.