Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds

Welcome to the "brand new world" of IOT hardware where you are the product and continued service depends entirely on how you can be monetized.

All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

Man those parents. Oof.

I do not wanna be in their shoes.

Telling your kid that needed an emotional support robot friend that the robot friend is going to take a nap for a long time and might not wake back up? Ooo boy.

Helping a kid through a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.

No thanks. I'll get an emotional support cat and you can't brick my cat. Take that, big tech!

Christ, even Amazon refunded everyone who bought a Glow.

I would like to think the community could work out the API's and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.

It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.

Wait, you can refund your kid?!

See there's the problem right there. They shouldn't have sold the robot. It should have been a subscription model, with micro transactions. That would have kept the investors flocking in.

I'd like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it's the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.

But the short-lived, expensive nature of Moxie is exactly why some groups, like right-to-repair activists, are pushing the FTC to more strongly regulate smart devices

Which will be harder in the next 4 years. On the other hand, maybe it sensibilizes more towards cloud-indepent operation and Open Source.

Buy anything that must login to a web server not located at your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn't work anymore. Simple....don't. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.

I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can't pay its bills anymore.

The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn't. And... He failed to secure more financing.

I have mixed feelings about products like this... If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet's worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn't have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you're in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they're new.

Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.

What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?

What's the opposite of "eating the onion"? I thought this was satire for sure.

Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.

Emotional support brick their CEO's face

I hate people.

Will it also brick for kids with refunds?

you come across headlines nowadays and have no clue this was even a thing people were grifting children about, man..

Jesus Christ it's like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.

Sorry Sally, Geoffrey has to die because a company wanted to make their products utterly dependent on their servers. We'll bury him in the yard next to Gertrude.

Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can't you just use openAI api as the backend??

I already experienced this with that one small robot a few years ago. It was resurrected a few years later but required a subscription.

That was the beginning of me not caring for subscription based products and being weary of products that relied on servers instead of being locally hosted.

Read the title as "Starbucks will brick..."

I was thinking that there's a lesson here in not buying things that are non-core to the companies operations