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Well, they sure as fuck didn't go to the hobbyist market, we've been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.

putting prototypes straight into production is the "tech startup" way!

Surely the drive motors use far more energy than the computer, and the computer doesn't need to be fully powered on all the time.

It's a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.

Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They're not the best thing for those use cases, but they're far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).

When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.

I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it's a win win for the police.

and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.

This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like "oh yeah... yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period".

My city still has them. They get picked up every night and put at whatever corners or lots they gather them to.

Honestly in my experience anyone that's complained about them has no idea at all what they do or how they work, so anyone "fed up finding them everywhere" is simply ignorant 99% of the time. They're supposed to be everywhere lol that's the entire point.

In my European city they're still popular but imho it's a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It's an application that's too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.

Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?

I can't say anything about US cities, but they are all over the place in Canadian cities(or at least they are where I live)

My city still has them. They're pretty widely used, but I think we're a good scenario for them. Our sidewalks aren't cramped, we're a very spread out city, and our public transit isn't stellar.

Denver still has a ton of them. They’re still a huge logistics problem, but the city seems to be putting “protected” lanes in to help with scooters and bikes. Time will tell.

Remember the Cant!

Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.

I swear they probably followed an instructables to found the startup…