Sony Dash

~ the goodbye ~

Sony showed the Dash at CES in January 2010 and put it on sale that April for $199. It was a seven-inch touchscreen on a wedge-shaped stand, built to sit where a clock radio sat and do what a clock radio did, with the internet attached. You set an alarm on it. It woke you up with a weather report. The rest of the day it cycled through small applications, mostly news feeds and photo streams.

The software underneath was not Sony's. It was a modified build of the operating system from Chumby, a small San Diego company that had spent years on a beanbag-shaped internet appliance and the app catalog that ran on it. Sony licensed the platform and put it behind a better screen in a nicer enclosure, then pushed it out through Sony's retail channel, which is how a startup's app store ended up on a shelf at Best Buy. Two more models followed in September 2011, the HID-B7 and the HID-B70, the second with a battery so the alarm survived a power cut.

Then Chumby ran out of money and the Dash's reason for existing became somebody else's problem. On 14 March 2015 the streaming applications stopped. Netflix and Pandora both went dark, and service came back on 24 April, briefly. In April 2017 Sony wrote to owners to say it would no longer support Dash devices and that functionality would terminate in July.

~ the chronicle ~

~ 12 july 2017 ~

This was not a server quietly going away while nobody watched. On 12 July 2017 Sony pushed software version 1.7.1604 to every Dash still talking to it. The update was mandatory in a very literal sense: the dialog had one button on it, marked OK, and pressing it was the only way to carry on using the device at all. Owners pressed OK. The box downloaded the update and restarted, and what came back was a screen reading SONY with a light flashing underneath it. That was the whole remaining capability of the hardware.

People who had paid $199 for a networked alarm clock in 2010 owned a $199 block of plastic in 2017, and the step that carried them from one to the other was an update they had been required to accept.

~ grisafi v. sony ~

Richard Grisafi filed in the District of New Jersey, case number 18-cv-8494, arguing that Sony's marketing had been false and misleading about how long the device would keep working. Sony got some of the claims dismissed on the way through. What was left settled in 2021 against a fund of 1.6 million dollars: $11.25 if you could show you had bought a Dash, and $35 if you had registered it with Sony and it was powered on and connected to Sony's servers on the morning of 12 July 2017.

That second condition repays a slow read. The larger payment went to the owners whose devices were online at the exact moment the update landed, which means Sony paid the most to the customers it had reached most precisely.

~ chumby outlived it ~

I never had one. The Dash was a United States product sold into an American object category that barely existed where I was, the bedside internet screen that is not a phone. In Ankara in 2010 I had a phone with an alarm in it and no reason to buy a second display for the nightstand. What carried out of this story past the US market was the mechanism rather than the gadget: Sony needed no physical access to anything to end it, only a list of units that were still checking in.

On 6 August 2017, three and a half weeks after the Dash went dark, Chumby shipped a patch that let the hardware connect to Chumby's own servers instead. Chumby by then meant Blue Octy, a company run by Duane Maxwell, who had been Chumby's chief technology officer and had bought the assets when the original company failed, then kept the service alive on a three dollar monthly subscription. The platform Sony had licensed and then discarded was still online, run by one person out of the wreckage, and it would take your Dash back.

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