Three days out from Amazon's hardware event and I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about a company selling me a ring for my finger, glasses for my face, and a speaker the size of a bowling ball, all in the same 90 minutes.
If you missed it: Amazon held its annual device event on Wednesday (the 25th) and just fired out product after product like it was clearing inventory. New spherical Echo, $99.99. Smaller Echo Dot with a clock built in, $59.99. Echo Show 8 at $129.99. And then the stuff that actually got people talking: Echo Buds at $129.99, which are wireless earbuds with noise reduction tech licensed from Bose, and then two genuinely weird ones tucked under the "Day 1 Editions" label: Echo Frames, smart glasses that don't have a screen and just pipe Alexa into your ears through the arms, and Echo Loop, a ring with a tiny speaker and mic built into it. Both are invite-only for now, both are priced somewhere around $180 and $130 respectively, and both feel like they got shipped a year before Amazon was actually ready to talk about them.
I preordered the Echo Buds. I'll cop to that. I've got three Echo Dots scattered around this house already (kitchen, bedroom, the one in the office that mostly just tells me the weather when I'm too lazy to check my phone), so I'm clearly not immune to the ecosystem pull. $129.99 for earbuds with real noise reduction and Alexa baked in seemed like a fair trade, especially with AirPods Pro not even announced yet at that price point. We'll see how they hold up.
But the ring and the glasses are where I start losing patience with the whole thing. Not because the ideas are bad exactly. A ring that lets you whisper a command without pulling your phone out is a genuinely interesting bit of interaction design. It's that Amazon keeps doing this thing where it ships thirty products at once and half of them are clearly beta hardware wearing a retail price tag. Invite-only. No stated ship date beyond "later this year." A form you fill out and then wait to see if you get picked, like you're applying to be part of a focus group instead of buying a gadget. If it's not ready to sell to everyone, don't put a price on it and call it a product launch. Call it what it is.
And I say that as someone who generally likes what Amazon does with the Echo line. The core Alexa speakers keep getting quietly better and cheaper every year, and that new spherical design at ninety-nine bucks is a genuinely good value if you just want a decent-sounding smart speaker without spending Sonos money. The Echo Studio at $199.99 is clearly aimed at people who want actual sound quality out of a smart speaker (it supports Dolby Atmos and 3D audio processing, which is more than I can say for the shoebox-sized speaker I already had), and I get why that exists as a step up. It's the fringe stuff, the glasses, the ring, whatever else got a five-minute demo slot on stage, that makes me wonder if Amazon is throwing spaghetti at a wall on our dime.
There's also just a lot of it. I counted somewhere around fifteen new devices announced in one event, which is frankly exhausting to even read about, let alone evaluate. I don't need my microwave, my oven, my glasses, my ring, and my earbuds all independently deciding they're the primary way I talk to Alexa. Pick a lane. My working theory is Amazon doesn't actually care which device wins, it just wants Alexa touching every part of your day so badly that it's willing to lose money on a dozen different form factors until one of them sticks. Which, fine, that's a strategy, but it's not one that makes me want to go buy the ring.
Separately, and only tangentially related: I saw the Google quantum computing story going around this week too, the "quantum supremacy" paper that apparently leaked before anyone meant it to. I don't have anything smart to say about quantum computing, I barely passed the one physics class that touched on it, but it's a funny contrast against the Amazon event — one company solving a problem nobody outside a physics department can explain, the other trying to sell you a smart ring. Same week, wildly different definitions of "the future."
Anyway. Buds are on order. I'll write up how they actually sound once they show up, assuming Amazon's shipping estimates hold, which given the last few Prime Day deliveries around here is not exactly a given.