“Moose out front shoulda told ya.”
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Wow. The Fire Phone boondoggle only cost them a couple hundred million.
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Fire Phone overlapped so much with the Fire Tablet, a big seller for them, that it was a relatively small bet.
It will be interesting to see what Amazon does here. Abandoning the platform would leave millions of customers stranded with a bricked smart assistant. Increasing the prices of new units will do little to fill the giant hole they’ve dug and right now is a bad time to become less competitive now that Matter is going to allow cross-platform functionality.
Another billionaire setting money on fire because he knows best.
They have so many devices (echo, echo dot, echo show, echo hairdryer, echo bidet) when the dot has always been the best form factor/ bang for your buck.
A lot of unnecessary R&D on products that seem at best to be maybe a promising start to something.
Imagine how many penis rockets they could have built.
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A broad range of devices makes a little sense as these were meant to be gateway drugs to get people hooked on using them to order shit from Amazon. The failure was not realizing that people weren’t going to do that. They could’ve found that out by selling a single device and seeing what people did with it.
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Somewhat bizarrely, Amazon used to have Dash buttons, which may have had even less friction for ordering products: you literally just pushed the button. Amazon killed them in favor of, at least in part, ordering via Alexa. Oops.
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Alexa is at my house, and I use her primarily for music, grocery lists, and kitchen timers. She gets pushy about time to order stuff, but I ignore her. I never buy anything with her.
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This weekend, I made all the lights in my kitchen / breakfast room smart. The new Lutron Smart Diva switches are excellent and, IMHO, worth the premium. Unlike the previous versions, they look like normal rocker switches, with the dimmers having a slide (instead of the 4-button mess of the original dimmer).
Now that I have added a few of these, the installation - and “hot-wiring” of the second switch in 3-way set-up - is much easier. Overall, the smarter I make my home, the more utility I get from it. It is still good advice to go room-by-room but, as you convert more rooms, the increase in convenience is exponential.
The set-up gets easier too. When you add new smart switches to the Home app, it suggests scenes to which you might want to add them so, with just a couple of taps, they’re easily included in appropriate scenes.
“Smart divas”…“3-way”…“scenes”…“couple of taps”…this should be easy, but I got nothing.
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You missed “hot-wiring”.
I have now added indoor cameras to my living room and kitchen/breakfast room. I plumped for Aqara G3 cameras because they work natively with Apple Home, including secure iCloud video storage, and are a hub in their own right for other Aqara accessories. The picture is great and the set-up is a breeze - you boot them up into the Aqara app, update the firmware, and tap to “bind” them to Apple Home.
The camera can pan 360° as well as tilt, and it can be set to track movement of people and/or pets. The unit has the usual mic and speaker for two-way communication, and has a loud siren if you use it as a security hub (it’s local-only, not monitored). You can control when it streams and records based on numerous criteria, and it has a privacy mode where the camera rolls up inside the case.
The cameras and motion detectors show up immediately in the Home app and can be used in automations and scenes. It also has an IR blaster, but that is not exposed to Home so you have to use Siri Shortcuts as a workaround, but this is easy and works well.
For example, my kitchen TV (Insignia) can’t be controlled by the Apple TV remote, so I have been turning it on/off by hand. Using the Aqara app, I created a scene that sends the on/off IR signal to the TV and there is an option right there in the app to turn this into a Siri Shortcut. With that done, I can then add whatever additional actions to the shortcut - like waking or sleeping the Apple TV and/or controlling lights etc. - and activate it by a Siri voice command.
Now that I have plumped for Aqara as a hub, I can add lots of their little gizmos for additional automation. I have added an air quality sensor to the bathroom to turn the extractor fan on/off based on the humidity, and I’m going to put a motion sensor covering the stairs to turn the light on/off whenever a human comes in range; handy if you have your hands full or the cats are trying to kill you.
I saw a pretty even handed account of what this really means.
I’ll try to hunt it down.
ETA:
Here it is.
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I did this, and I’m a little embarrassed to say that it might be my most favorite thing so far.
We’ve got some dumb motion lights in a hallway and they are great.
My interpretation of the explanation:
There’s a feature called rich notifications that sends images/video to your phone if an event is triggered (like someone walking in a room).
There’s a facial recognition feature so it won’t alert you for friendlies in a given room.
Notifications require talking to the outside world, and if you want “rich” notifications that means images/video have to go outside as well.
It sounds like Eufy did a poor job of explaining this to customers.
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I am almost done with installing the bulk of my smart home infrastructure. Little things like adding motion and door sensors to activate automations is going to be a lot of fun.
Counterpoint.
That is the most charitable explanation possible. I could even excuse them temporarily storing the images on the cloud. The unforgivable sin here is that they stored the images on the cloud unencrypted, unauthenticated, and exposed to the world. Whether they were being malicious or lazy, that is a gigantic fuck up.
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