Amazon’s most profitable business may be the cloud infrastructure services it sells to other companies. But over the years of CEO Jeff Bezos’ tenure, Amazon has built up a huge hardware business too. These products have ranged from the truly disruptive to the totally bizarre.
With the news that Bezos is stepping down from his role as CEO later this year, WIRED’s Gear team decided to take a look back at some of the most influential Amazon gadgets from the past 15 years. Amazon rarely shares how many devices it has sold, but the numbers are big. There are also more than a 100 million Alexa-equipped gadgets out there. Here are some highlights from the flood of Bezos-era products.
The first Kindle launched November 2007. It cost $400 and was a big, bulky thing with strange slanted keys and bezels you could see from space. It sold out in less than six hours.
Back then, Amazon had its work cut out for it. The ebook market was a mess, without any good way of getting the media onto the fledgling ereaders of the day. As it has a tendency to do, Amazon’s strong-arm strategy made the process seamless. It sold both the hardware and the content; all it had to do was sync them up.
The Kindle caused much consternation in the publishing industry. Amazon vowed to sell most of its best-seller titles for $9.99, a price that was seen as severely undercutting standard hardcover prices. So much so that when Apple launched the first iPad, it made an effort to woo publishers to its platform exclusively, with the promise of charging more for its books. That resulted in the landmark United States v. Apple Inc. case that found Apple guilty of price fixing. Apple may have lost that case, but it still wound up giving publishers more control over book prices.
Kindles have come a long way since those tumultuous early days. The devices have evolved into an array of sleek, lightweight slabs. There are competitors, like Kobo, or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, but Kindle still reigns supreme. Print books do still dominate the market, with ebooks making up about a fifth of all book sales. But nearly all of those ebooks are sold through Amazon. But that dominance is not unquestioned. In January of this year, Amazon and five big publishers now face a class-action lawsuit for a price fixing scandal of their own (filed by the same law firm as the Apple case, no less).
The first Amazon Kindle Fire tablet arrived in November of 2011. It was meant to compete with the still-new iPad. And the Kindle Fire could deliver on that level. The seven-inch tablet could play movies and shows and music (downloaded from Amazon, natch) and it had a rudimentary, not-terrible web browser for reading the tech blogs of the day.
As a piece of hardware, the original $200 Fire lived “at the bottom of the tablet food chain” as WIRED reviewer Jon Phillips put it. It was cheap, and it felt like it. It also ran on Amazon’s own custom version of Android called Fire OS, which lagged behind iOS (and even Android). But over the years, the hardware kept improving, the software grew less buggy, and the broader tablet product category matured, leading Amazon to drop the “Kindle” from the name.
Today, Fire tablets are the best low-cost alternatives to the iPad on the market—provided you don’t mind buying all your content and downloading all your apps through Amazon. The Fire lineup is especially popular with families who have small kids, thanks to the low prices, all the kid content on Prime, Amazon’s parental controls, and a robust, kid-proof build.
You may be sensing a theme here: Amazon likes building products that make it easier for you to buy things on Amazon. Thus, the Dash wand, which first showed up in 2014. This pen-shaped device with a built-in barcode scanner let you zap the UPC code of any product in your home and add it to your Amazon cart. It also had a mic, so you could use your voice as well.
A year later came the Dash button, a wireless widget about the size of a plastic lighter sporting a big button with a brand’s logo printed on the face. The brands featured on the first Dash buttons were things you used around your home: “Tide” or “Cascade” or “Charmin.” The little nubs turned internet shopping into the simplest physical act: When you were almost out of toilet paper, you just pressed the toilet paper button to order more toilet paper from Amazon.
The company learned that hardware hackers were having a field day by flashing the firmware on Dash buttons, so Amazon cheekily built a programmable version that could be hacked to switch on internet-connected lights, send a tweet, or order delivery from the Thai restaurant around the corner. Today, Dash buttons are dead—Amazon now encourages you just to ask Alexa to order more toilet paper—but the idea of “interface-free shopping” lives on in products like the Dash Smart Shelf that restocks itself once it senses supplies running low.
Yes, Amazon made its own Android phone. It was a disaster. But we have to mention it here because it’s a prime example of the fact that Amazon’s hardware folks are not afraid to aim high or fail big. The company wrote off a $170 million loss and instead focused on … talking speakers.
Hardcore cord-cutters love their “over the top” boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Ultra. But the best-selling category for internet television hardware is the humble streaming stick, the thumb-shaped dongle that plugs directly into the back of the television. They’re cheap, and they work just fine for most people. Amazon recognized this and got into the streaming stick game in the fall of 2014 with the $40 Fire TV Stick. The company now makes a whole range of devices to connect your television to a selection of streaming apps—and to Amazon Prime Video, the one-stop shop for nearly every streaming movie, show, or channel—but the Stick remains a best-seller. It’s cheaper now too: Only $30.
This isn’t hardware, per se, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest moves in the consumer product space. And the now-ubiquitous voice assistant debuted inside the first Echo speaker. It came along a full five years after Siri, but on arrival Alexa was markedly more useful and fun than Apple’s own voice assistant because it could reach much further into the internet’s knowledge banks.
The first Echo speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversational computing to the masses. Ask a question, get a response? It seemed novel at the time, but it also clearly pointed to the future. And it became the future quite rapidly after Amazon began pumping out dozens of Echo variants and licensing the voice tech in ways that allowed other hardware manufacturers to put Alexa into their own speakers … and alarm clocks, light bulbs, shower heads, microwaves, headphones, and smart watches. Sure, Alexa’s limitations as a conversation partner make it feel gimmicky even today, but the types of computing interactions Alexa popularized now seem completely normal. We just talk to our computers these days! No biggie.
In April 2017, Amazon revealed what was perhaps its most bizarre gadget at that time: the Echo Look, a phallic smart camera with a four-microphone array that would snap hands-free photos of your outfits and tell you what to wear. This is not a joke. The camera was available only by invitation, though one of WIRED’s writers managed to buy one off eBay and review it for another publication at the time.
Ultimately, the Echo Look gave us a glimpse at our computer-vision futures. It used machine learning to make recommendations, like so many consumer products do these days, but it also got a lot of those “personalized” suggestions wrong and alarmed privacy advocates. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would discontinue the Echo Look and the camera would no longer function starting July 2020.
Here we break from our regular chronology. On a sunny Seattle morning in late September 2017, the tech press gathered at Amazon’s headquarters for … well, we didn’t know what to expect. Amazon, it turns out, had decided to join its tech brethren in hosting an official hardware launch. That day, and again in subsequent years, Amazon vomited up an uncountable number of new products (both hardware and software).
We’ve attempted to list a few key products here: Echo Plus; a shorter, fatter Echo; Echo Spot; Echo Buttons; Echo Connect; a Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa (again, this is not a joke); Echo Auto; Echo Sub; Echo Wall Clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more on Amazon’s kitchen appliances below); Echo Link; Fire TV Recast; Ring Stick-Up Cam; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam, and Car Connect; a spherical Echo; and a cloud gaming service called Luna. Did we forget anything? Just kidding. We definitely did.
One of the products that arrived on that September day in 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was a “smart display,” essentially a small tablet-like screen with speakers for playing music, a microphone for capturing your Alexa commands, and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform, which let people send audio, video, and texts to anyone with an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phones.
That chat service didn’t really take off, and all the camera did was skeeze people out. The Echo Show did succeed in showing how much more useful Alexa could be when it was built into a dedicated touchscreen. Smart displays became a hit. Google made its own version that worked with its Google Assistant, and both companies licensed the tech to other hardware makers who helped these countertop devices proliferate. Thankfully, there are plenty of options out there today that come with camera shutoff switches.
Ring came from humble beginnings: Just a white guy with a dream, getting rejected on Shark Tank. A few years later, in 2018, Amazon spent $1 billion to acquire the company. The cameras have since grown into the dominant security camera on the market and a sort of staple of suburban life.
Of course, giving people the ability to record anyone who walks past their house can conjure up concerns about privacy. Ring cameras have been condemned by activists and privacy advocates. Amazon has defended its cozy relationship with law enforcement agencies, pitching it as a mutually beneficial relationship in the name of public safety. Cities have even offered Ring cameras as a reward to citizens who shared information with the police. Amazon has also toyed with incorporating its facial recognition technology into the hardware, despite all the ethical problems that come with that. Still, the Ringification rolls on, as evidenced by Amazon’s recently announced (and not at all ridiculous) Ring flying drone cam.
At this point, streaming “sticks” that plugged directly into your TV and allowed you to access thousands of internet video services were nearly eclipsing their more expensive streaming box brethren. But Amazon decided to launch another odd duck: The Fire TV Cube, a shiny, square media-streaming box that borrowed some features from Echo speakers (you could shout at Alexa to call up a TV show or tell you a joke) and some from the Echo Show. In fact, Amazon used the Echo Show, the voice-controlled countertop display, to create the Cube’s user interface. You didn’t control the Echo Show with a TV remote, the thinking went, so maybe you didn’t need a remote to control your large-screen TV, either?
False. The Fire TV Cube was frustrating to use, and it felt like Amazon was flicking at a remote-free future far too soon. That didn’t stop Amazon from releasing a second generation of the product, which you can still buy online for around $100; but we’ll take our simple streaming sticks back now, please.
Amazon’s forays into the kitchen have been … less than successful. Its smart oven combines a number of cooking styles, without being competent at any of them. It’s also a casualty of Amazon’s efforts to stick Alexa in everything. Here, the voice assistant is next to useless. It suggests complicated recipes and demands to know the weight and/or volume of the foodstuffs you ask it to cook up. The interior is too small to properly use the baking or air-frying capabilities, while the whole unit itself is bafflingly big. Our food tech reviewer gave it a 3/10. It doesn’t even have a popcorn button. Just buy a regular microwave.
A few years ago, Wi-Fi routers got pretty. Soft-edged little pucks like Eero are meant to be spread throughout the house, and had to look good enough to blend with the rest of the decor. Eero was one of the first companies to popularize mesh networks, a style of home-network design that relies on a hub and multiple access points instead of a central router to extend your signal into every corner of your home.
Amazon bought Eero in 2019. In response to (valid) privacy concerns, it promised not to gather user data gleaned from Eero connections. It may seem like scan comfort, but honestly, Amazon probably has enough of your data already. Over time, Eero’s products have evolved. They’ve gotten an attractive redesign, prices have tumbled, and the devices have grown to be extra useful by incorporating features like the ability to find a lost smartphone.
Rather than collecting the usual ho-hum steps taken, heart rate, or even hours slept, Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker monitors the tone of your voice as you speak to help you improve your interpersonal relationships. There’s so much potential for this to go terribly wrong, but it’s not entirely without precedent; longtime relationship therapists use similar tools. It’s ambitious! It’s different! It actually worked (with help)! As problematic as it is, the Halo stands out from the dozens of fitness trackers that WIRED tests every year.
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