So Google dropped a surprise yesterday afternoon: a little HDMI dongle called Chromecast, thirty-five bucks, plugs straight into the back of your TV and lets you beam Netflix, YouTube, and Google Play Movies from your phone or laptop instead of messing with a remote. They even threw in three months of Netflix free if you ordered fast enough. I read about it over lunch, got mildly obsessed, and by the time I actually sat down at my computer around 9pm to buy one, the Google Play Store listing already said "Sold Out." Amazon still had it listed, so I ordered one there instead, and this morning the confirmation email quietly informed me it wouldn't ship for three to four weeks. Great.
I dont think Ive wanted a piece of hardware this badly since the first Kindle, and thats saying something because I still have two Rokus and an Apple TV cluttering up the entertainment center that all do roughly the same job. The difference is price, obviously. Thirty-five dollars is an impulse buy. Its less than a month of cable. Its less than what I spent on drinks last Friday, not that Im proud of that. When something costs that little you stop doing the mental math about whether you actually need it and just click buy, which I think is exactly the point.
What gets me is how different this feels from the Nexus Q. Anybody remember that thing? Google showed it off at I/O last year, this weird glowing orb, made in the USA no less, and priced it at $299 for a device that did dramatically less than a $99 Apple TV. It got so much backlash that Google straight up canceled the release and just mailed free units to everyone who'd preordered. Total facepalm of a product. So watching them come back around barely a year later with something a tenth the price that actually works (from what people are saying online, since mine hasnt shipped) and that people are fighting each other to buy feels like a real lesson learned somewhere in Mountain View. Somebody in a meeting said "what if instead of $299 we tried $35" and got promoted, probably.
The complaint I keep seeing from people who already have one is that it doesnt do Hulu Plus yet, which is a little annoying since thats what a chunk of us actually watch after Netflix runs dry on new stuff. Supposedly the SDK is coming so other apps can add support later, but "supposedly" and "later" are doing a lot of work in that sentence. Ive been burned by "coming soon" from tech companies enough times that I try not to get my hopes up. Remember when Twitter promised an edit button was basically inevitable? Still waiting on that one too (yes I know thats unrelated, its just a pattern I notice).
Also, and this is a smaller thing but it bugged me: my main TV in the living room is from 2009 and only has two HDMI ports, both already taken by the cable box and the Roku. So even once this thing shows up in three or four weeks I need to either buy an HDMI switcher or unplug something every time I want to use it. Nobody writing the breathless "this changes everything" posts yesterday mentioned that a decent number of us are working with TVs that dont have five open ports lying around. Small gripe, but real.
Anyway. Its funny watching a whole segment of tech Twitter lose its mind over a device roughly the size of a USB stick. Makes sense though — everyone's been waiting for the thing that finally makes casting from a phone to a TV feel normal instead of janky, and depending who you ask this might actually be it. Ill know in a month, assuming Amazon doesnt push my ship date back again like they did with my last preorder. Until then Ill just be over here, refreshing my order status page like it's going to change anything.