Amazon Is Going To Kill Your Dash Button 40
Amazon said Thursday that it will turn off the capabilities of all its Dash buttons worldwide on August 31st. "The decision follows Amazon's move in February to stop selling new buttons," reports CNET. "At the time, the company let folks with existing Dash buttons continue to order stuff with them, but an Amazon spokesperson said usage "has significantly slowed" since then, resulting in the company pulling the plug completely on the program. CNET reports: The Dash button, the ultimate single-use device, lets you buy an item on Amazon with one click. [...] Amazon has replaced the physical buttons with virtual Dash buttons on its website, which will continue to be available. The company said it's seen growth in other options, too, such as voice shopping through Alexa as well as Dash Replenishment Service, which allows appliances to automatically reorder items like printer ink when they're running low. Subscribe & Save is another popular option that should help fill the shopping void left for any longtime Dash button enthusiasts. While those buttons will no longer work by month's end, folks will notice Dash's core concept of more seamless shopping remains alive in just about every smart home.
"Your" Dash Buttons? (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline here is wrong. These were never "Your" Dash Buttons. Amazon was just letting you use "Their" Dash Buttons.
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I bought one. I firewalled it off and used it as a doorbell button for a while. Bit of a hack detecting arp requests, but decent range.
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I had two - one for razor blades which I kept on forgetting to order, and one for Dentastix for my dogs. I used the razor one a fair amount, the Dentastix one was more troublesome as they kept changing the product it pointed to from the 56 pack to the 28 pack (it wouldn't order the wrong thing, it would just alert that it couldn't place the o
Why kill something which (Score:1)
Why kill something which still works very fine, even if it’s only a small percentage of customers, they are still using them !!!
Re: Why kill something which (Score:2)
I miss my QueCat.
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I can't tell if this is a joke about how everyone here mixes up cue and queue, or just an example of it.
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It costs money to maintain the software and servers that they connect to. As usage dwindles, eventually it reaches a point where they're losing money to keep it running.
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They're keeping the virtual buttons. They can literally point to the same infrastructure. And they're a leader in virtualized cloud computing. I can't imagine a point where it ever costs more than is made up by a single order.
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I'm not an expert in these things, but isn't that the point of having abstraction layers in the fist place?
Wording. (Score:3)
Single purpose, not single use.
One means an item has just one thing it can do, the other means it can only do a thing once and then gets thrown away.
Repurpose them (Score:5, Informative)
They can be easily hacked to be used by Raspberry PI or other projects:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/... [makeuseof.com]
In fact, Amazon at point point offered IOT versions if I recall correctly. But buying regular ones were cheaper (they usually came with a $4 or $5 off coupon).
I have a bunch laying around. It would be fun to hack them to work with my home automation systems.
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Will the IoT buttons keep working. They use generic endpoints on AWS to work.
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Depends on the distance. Mine were 100% reliable (but extremely slow) when they were in good range of the AP (wouldn't work as a doorbell outside). But they have to power on, connect to WiFi, and then do a DHCP request. Really useless for a doorbell. Also why I decided not to get a battery-powered Ring or similar (don't want a camera - just a reliable remote switch).
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It's a nice idea unfortunately a bit wanky in practice. I found they weren't completely reliable (wouldn't do what you asked about 10% of the time) and were very slow to respond; randomly taking up to like 10 seconds which is no good for what I hoped to use them for (light switches).
That's basically on par with the X-10 system I've been using for 20 years now. I had to readjust a receiver antenna just yesterday because of a change in the radio environment in my house which had ruined the reliability of receiving the signal.
All 5 of them? (Score:4, Funny)
Somewhere, a single rich dipshit is trying to figure out how to overpay for toilet paper without some dumb piece of tech 'helping' him do it.
We really are sliding ever closer to idiocracy.
Ohhh! piece of candy! Ohhh! piece of candy! Ohhh! piece of candy! Ohhh! piece of candy! Ohhh! piece of candy! Ohhh! piece of candy!
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It adds to the electronic waste stream. Amazon probably made 100,000s of these things.
Dumb home FTW (Score:2)
Oh fuck no. Iâ€(TM)ll be keeping my dumb home as is and my devices safely firewalled off from phoning out.
Amazon will recycle your Dash button too (Score:5, Informative)
If like me you ended up with a few of these because Amazon occasionally sold them as a loss leader, and you don't have a use for hacking these for a different purpose, Amazon will take them back free of charge through their recycling program:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200197550 [amazon.com]
(The link you want goes here: https://amazonrecycling-us.re-teck.com/ [re-teck.com])
They'll generate a UPS label, all you have to do is chuck them into an envelope and drop them off. I sent mine off a few weeks ago, got an email confirmation about a week later.
Bonus: if you have any old cables or power adapters they'll take them too. Obviously don't send anything in that has real resale or trade-in value...
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I was just starting to warm up to these. We have them at work for re-ordering key supplies, instead of having to hunt down the boss to reorder coffee and toilet paper.
I accidentally ordered a roll of garbage bags one day, but that's the biggest failure I've had with them.
Amazon "Buy Again" is not most optimal (Score:3)
I never used Amazon Dash but if it's anything like "Buy Again", you learn pretty quickly not to blindly do that, as the price of re-order seems to go up, but if you simply sign into Amazon, you can find the same item at a lower price. I guess it's convenience, pay extra for not having to use your phone or computer.
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They are (so to be were) awesome. I have 4 I use all the time and have tracked the pricing. It does fluctuate slightly on Amazon but was always less than or equal to our local grocery store. The one I have are mainly for 'bigger' items that weigh down a grocery bag; Bulk pack of garbage bags, largest tide pods, largest dishwasher pods, and esspresso blend (I can't easily get it local). Once they disable the dash buttons, my wife will start buying from the grocery store (she is tech illiterate).
They were
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Same goes for Subscribe and Save items. You could say it's just following supply and demand trends, but I suspect unscrupulous sellers jack up the price after the first order. I've had far too many things go WAY up in price after the first order.
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Amazon sends alerts if the price goes up more than by I think 15% in a month. Sellers can certainly boil the frog, but it doesn't happen in one month.
Mac 'n Cheese (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude. Do. Not. Ever. Let. Her. Go.
I never got a Dash Button. I check prices. (Score:3)
Really. I know I'm probably saving only a quarter here and there for the Dash-enabled products, but I don't like the idea of blindly buying anything without knowing the price. I might consider it if it guaranteed the lowest price available for Prime shipping and not to go over $X.xx/unit pricing, but it never did.
What took so long? (Score:1)
These were everything that is wrong with our society - bits of plastic crap that enable you to order more plastic crap.
Try as I could, I never saw any viable reason that these abominations should exist.
When I first saw them it was a WTF moment - clearly this idea was cooked up in the diseased minds of incompetent marketing dweebs after a heavy night on marching powder.
I have no other words.