Signal: Falling Into Hardware 📧
Hardware is back in the air this fall. Beyond yesterday's Amazon event (more on that below), later today Google will host their Home event. And Apple may or may not have more to say after their remaining hardware for the year has seemingly all leaked (more on that below). While the first two are now all about using hardware to leverage their AI capabilities, Apple is seemingly just doubling down on doing the best hardware, period – until their AI is ready to roll. If it's ever ready to roll...
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
Take One...
🗣️ Amazon's 2025 Hardware Event – The event itself seemed fine – still strange that Amazon doesn't livestream these, instead we need to rely on live-blogs (like the early 2000s!) or third-row shaky cams? – if a bit all over the place with devices for their Ring, Blink (remind me why are there two smartcamera lines?), Fire TV, Kindle, and Echo lines. Clearly, the intent is to shift to higher-end products after years of getting dragged for a hardware strategy that was more akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall. I generally think it's good that they're doing their own chips and OS (finally fully moving off of Android, which, in my own experience buying a Fire TV set, has mean an awful, slow experience). But the key to all of this remains how well Alexa+ performs, and right now... she's clearly struggling to acclimate to the modern LLM world. It is a good sign that the new Echo devices will ship with "her" out of the box – including on the devices without screens. But it also feels like a continued slow-roll of the roll-out which was announced with much fanfare months ago. I'm far more interested in whatever they're cooking up next. And I don't mean "Omnisense" – "our new custom sensor fusion platform which is designed specifically for AI." Okay. [Verge]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• Apple's Leaky Product Pipelines
• Apple Testing a ChatGPT-Like App
• The Free TV with Always-On Ads
• YouTube Pays Off President Trump
• and more...