It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
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Man, Amazon is giving Google a run for their money on enshittification and product cancellation.
This is more hilarious because the spy device not only cost more for the ability to show you photos, but it ALSO had a subscription fee to do so on top of that.
I’m completely befuddled as to what the hell they were thinking, and why they think replacing family pictures with more ads is somehow going to make people do anything other than Ron Swanson these stupid things into the nearest dumpster.
That device has gullible written all over it.
A $2/mo subscription for a fucking screensaver?!
Samsung already did this for their Frame TV, and charged around $5.99/month
Samsung Art Store | Art For The Frame TV | Samsung US - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/digital-art-store/
Digital photo frame as a service. Wow thanks big tech, so innovative, I can ask it about the weather.
“Now fetching the weather, but first a word from our sponsors!”
Don’t forget the spyware
Some people really are that dumb. I guess the silver lining is that there weren’t enough dumb people to keep this dumb service alive.
Here’s to hoping the development of a good local replacement from Home Assistant. Like the Lenovo teams screen thing.
In September of 2023, Amazon announced the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition. It looked just like the regular Echo Show 8 smart display/speaker but cost $10 more. Why? Because of its ability to show photos on the home screen for as long as you want—if you signed up for a $2 monthly subscription to Amazon’s PhotosPlus. Now, about a year after releasing the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, Amazon is announcing that it’s discontinuing PhotosPlus. That means Echo Show 8 Photos Edition users will be forced to see ads instead of their beloved pics.
i’m sorry but if you were enough of a rube to sign up for a $2/mo subscription for that then this might be darwinistic capitalism
Clearly not enough people were. I’m taking this as a W for the common man
A lot of people really have a hard time parsing what they’re buying with digital products and I think it’s unfair to expect them to compete with international mega corporations that love to surprise folks with gated featured/subscriptions as you go “caveat emptor.”
The description of that device and subscription is so fucking stupid I’m not even mad. If you fell for it that hard, you deserve whatever they throw at you.
“You’re stupid so you deserve to be screwed over by massive corporations”. What a shitty take.
Unless the ads are being served by the same server as the photos, this is probably trivial to block using a Pi-Hole or other type of network-level ad-blocker.
I do wonder if it’s unable to pull up ads, if it just reverts back to showing photos. Would love to get one secondhand to test it out. Sure as shit never going to pay for one.
You shouldn’t need a fucking subscription to display your photos on your hardware.
The subscription is for the 25gb cloud storage space… Of course a 64gb USB Stick would be cheaper and doesn’t rely on an online connection.
mhm, is there a way to root the echo show?
I kinda doubt it, since Fire TVs can’t be. Then again, FireOS is just a remux of Android. Edit: it seems like Echo Shows can in fact be rooted, but it’s a difficult process. Side-loading seems to be the easier option in this case. XDA Forums link: https://xdaforums.com/f/amazon-echo.6148/
oh nice, thanks for the link. I gonna scourge that forum now.
time to open fraud complaints with your credit card company
Now you’re talkin’.
I’ve noticed that threatening to do that works extremely well with Amazon. they recently started charging $8 for a UPS pickup when you do a return, and all I have to do is tell them that I will initiate a fraud complaint if they actually charge me for it and they just refund me
Just as a little tip, in the US if you switch your Echo’s language to US-CAN it displays way less ads :)
Ah, similar trick works with some viruses. If you set the keyboard layout or timezone to Russian, the ransomware will not encrypt your files.
Those things have ads? Why would you intentionally buy an advertisement billboard for your house?
It’s a toss up, but it pretty much only shows just photo/link ads. The one that they’ve really been pushing recently is that Disney platformer game on the Switch for some reason.
Yea but you still willingly put a little billboard in your house and you even paid them to do it 🤷♂️
I love paying a faceless corporation that hates humans to remind me everyday that capitalism is killing me!
Oh look, more e-waste.
Companies should be forced to pay per pound of their shit that people throw away before a certain time
Should be allowed to return products at a full refund when they do something like this, and for an additional 25% value in a gift card for the inconvenience.
Huh, I never knew this existed, or I might have bought a couple.
I’ve been thinking of digital picture frames both for myself, as my kids go off to college, and my Mom, as her grandkids go to college. However I’ve never been happy with how easy they are to manage
- I want mine to just work, and incorporate new pictures as I take them
- my Mom is not very tech savvy, so it really has to just work regardless of what she does, plus I need to be able to update it remotely
I see a variety of digital pictures frames and see how they try to make updating them easy, but I don’t see why they’re not completely automatic.
My phone automatically detects faces as I take pictures: I have a kids album that’s automatically updated whenever I take a photo of my kids. That’s how easy I want it
A Google nest is that easy.
