Bit by Bit is a weekly column focusing on technical advances each and every week across multiple spaces. My name is Adam Conway, and I've been covering tech and following the cutting-edge for a decade. If there's something you're interested in and would like to see covered, you can reach out to me at adam@xda-developers.com.

Old tech doesn't have to go to waste, and I think the best example of that being put into practice is Spotify's Car Thing. It's a product that was sold in 2022 for a short period, before being discontinued with a promise to be entirely killed off by December 9th, 2024. For the uninitiated: it's basically a little Android Auto device, except it only runs Spotify, and you can use it to control your music in a car on a 4-inch touchscreen with a single knob.

Whether or not you feel the device has any sort of utility isn't the point; it was a $100 device that some people bought, and it was made obsolete intentionally when paying customers had purchased these devices. In essence, Spotify had manufactured e-waste, but users took things into their own hands. The Spotify Car Thing has a booming custom development community, and it proves that old tech doesn't have to go to waste.

Spotify's Car Thing specs are terrible

It was made open-source a couple of years ago

Spotify's Car Thing has terrible specs, powered by an Amlogic S905D2 with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali G31 MP2 GPU. On top of that, it has 512MB of RAM and just 4GB of eMMC storage. With the right hardware though, modders discovered that you can put it in burning mode to gain complete access to the device and install your own software. Spotify's making it open source made it possible for people to understand it and install what they want on it; otherwise, your Car Thing might have remained paperweight.

Right now, there are some impressive bits of tech you can get going on it. For example, DeskThing is one of the best and most interesting ways to repurpose your Car Thing. It's an alternative OS that brings community app support, integrating with plenty of different applications and pieces of software to assist you on your desk. You need to keep it connected to your PC, but the point is that it works, and you can use it to assist in various different things on your PC, even just for information at a glance.

Another piece of software you can set up is Nocturne. It's a complete re-implementation of Spotify on the Car Thing, restoring all features but requiring a host device like a Raspberry Pi to power it. The point is that the entire development community behind the Car Thing has got behind it, making it so that your devices won't go to waste, even if Spotify has literally asked people to dispose of it.

Spotify's Car Thing proves that planned obsolescence in tech is a terrible policy

Even if the tech seems "weak"

Even if tech seems weak and unable to process modern-day workloads, people will find a use for it. That includes something like the Car Thing, which lacks the power to do most conventional things a car display would be able to do. Even if it's not good enough in the eyes of the Spotify engineers, people who bought one expecting more than a couple of years of usage (at most) out of it will obviously be sorely disappointed.

Planned or not, obsolescence like this is bad for consumers and bad for the environment. Spotify is contributing to e-waste in its decision to kill the Car Thing, and given the work that's taken place by the community since its discontinuation, it's clear that it never needed to happen. It's quite common for products to be replaced by their successors in a way that software support dies off, but it's even more egregious when there's no replacement and it's still killed off so soon.

If you have old tech, there's often so much you can do with it. An old phone, laptop, or PC can be used for a lot of different projects, and the things that people can pull off with those older devices is incredible.