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Amazon Echo Look discontinued...

ralphjy

After she retired my wife got serious about sewing as a hobby.  For Christmas 2018 I got her an Echo Look from Amazon so that she could document and share her projects online.  A lot of people had concerns about the use of this device - it was intended as a style consultant/advisor but for my wife's purposes it worked great as a hands free camera and it provided the standard Alexa capabilities.

 

 

Recently got an email from Amazon that indicated that the device would stop functioning soon.

 

Kind of a nasty surprise to find out that something that you use will be shut down.  I guess this is the problem with using a proprietary cloud connected device.  I'm just disappointed that they killed the device and service after only two years.  At least they could have found an alternative to leave it functioning but I guess it's too integrated with the service in their cloud.  It would be great if they would provide the hardware documentation as the device has a lot of useful features and it would be nice not to just put it in the garbage.  I don't hold out much hope for that.  Maybe at best someone will reverse engineer it.  I'll certainly open it up once it ceases to function.....

Anonymous

  • Good Day,

    well, so much for planned obsolence. You have my sympathy, Ralph!

    It still gives me great grief when I am thinking about the change from "DAB" to "DAB+" public radio services in Germany a few years ago. The unwillingness to provide Firmware updates or at least some form of compensation had made thousands of DAB-radios, which were in perfectly working order, obsolete over-night. Easy money.

    Cheers,

    M.

  • Sounds like it's time for a tear-down.

  • It is disappointing when tech that is still working is retired against your will. I have a BT Internet Radio, which still works (I assume it does anyway) which I used to listen to BBC Radios 1 - 5. Unfortunately the BBC decided not to continuing broadcasting their radio stations in the format used by this radio so I can no longer listen to these stations. It was a present and it just seems a shame to throw it away but I do not have use for it now.  Maybe I'll make it into a mobile robot one day, or possibly make it into something else.

     

     

    Dubbie

  • in reply to shabaz

    I should give Amazon some credit.  My wife told me that they are going to send her a replacement device - an Echo Show 5.  Unfortunately it does not provide the same functionality but at least they are providing some compensation.

     

    I guess I'm mainly complaining about the loss of functionality and loss of a perfectly good device that is working and as you say not much notice.

     

    I do worry as proprietary cloud devices and services proliferate for IoT that there could end up being a lot of useless devices if vendors obsolete services.  But maybe that's just the nature of the business....   I sure have my share of useless stuff that could still be functional.  Hopefully most things will last more than a couple of years though.

  • Hi Ralph,

    Sorry to hear that. It is getting common for businesses to treat consumers this way. There should have been some migration method, compensation for the inconvenience and at least a years notice I feel..