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This is the best summary I could come up with:
For a moment there, it seemed like Amazon might pivot its Astro home robot to enterprise by giving it a better job as a camera-equipped patrol dog.
On September 25th, every one of the 20-pound wheeled robots will stop working, and Amazon will automatically issue full refunds for the $2,349.99 bot, plus a $300 credit.
Amazon isn’t commenting on how many business bots it actually sold since the November 2023 launch, but the company’s VP of hardware engineering, Lindo St. Angel, says he’s “increasingly convinced the progress we’re making in home robotics is where we should focus our resources.” We’re sharing his full internal memo below.
GeekWire first reported the news and said Amazon isn’t laying off any workers due to the pivot because they’ll just start working on home robots instead.
The Amazon Astro for Home robot is still listed as an invite-only Day 1 Edition product, years after its release.
Last year, leaked internal documents hinted at a new version with conversational generative AI that “remembers what it saw and understood,” is able to “engage in a Q&A dialogue on what it saw,” and can potentially spot hazards in a home like broken glass on the floor.
The original article contains 375 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
can potentially spot hazards in a home like broken glass on the floor.
There you have it! The killer app for home robotics! This is exactly what everybody’s been calling for. /s
This is why you don’t buy any hardware that requires “the cloud” to function with no option to self host. At least they are giving refunds this time, but that’s usually not the case.
I bought a Rabbit R1 for half off used on eBay, but only after I learned you can install full Android on it.
Why? Its hardware is dog shit.
I mean, it can be fun to tinker regardless. I have a shitty Dell Inspiron from 2012 that I run Linux in CLI-only mode just for fun.
In fact it used to run my entire smart home, run long-running background tasks (like syncing huge files from an NFS share to Storj); hell at one point it was bringing in passive income as I rented out hard disk space.
4 gigs of ram, 100+ gigs of storage, and a cute design. Meh. At least it’s not totally useless.
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 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.
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.
Before launching products*
walled gardens are only a little less awful when still supported
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any good petition writers? I’d sign something like this in a heartbeat.
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.
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.
For robotics and embedded system - My DIY or the highway
