So last Wednesday Google announced this little $35 dongle called Chromecast, and I've spent the better part of a week trying to actually get one, which has been way more annoying than it has any right to be for a thirty-five dollar piece of plastic.
Here's the deal if you missed it. Google had an event on the 24th, showed off the new Nexus 7 (the screen is noticeably nicer than last year's model, I got to poke one at a friend's place over the weekend), rolled out Android 4.3, and then almost as an afterthought pulled out this little HDMI stick that plugs into the back of your TV and lets you beam Netflix, YouTube, and Chrome tabs to the screen straight from your phone or laptop. Thirty-five bucks. No remote. No box other than the phone that's already in your pocket.
I wanted one immediately, and so did apparently everyone else on the internet, because Google also threw in three months of Netflix free with it, which on its own is worth about twenty-four dollars. Do the math and you're basically paying eleven bucks for the actual hardware. That's an absurd deal and I don't blame anyone for jumping on it.
Except within about a day, it was gone. Amazon: out of stock. Best Buy: out of stock, with that grayed-out button just sitting there mocking you. The Google Play Store listing, which is the one I actually wanted since I figured Google would ship it faster than a middleman, sold through too. And now the word going around is that Google's quietly pulling back the Netflix promo for new orders, because demand blew way past whatever they'd planned for. If you already redeemed a code you're fine, apparently, but if you're still waiting, I wouldn't count on that Netflix credit sticking around by the time stock comes back.
I don't even really care about the free Netflix, honestly (I've been a subscriber since college, back when the DVDs still showed up in the mail in that red envelope). What bugs me is the pattern of it. Every time a company underprices a genuinely good gadget, the story for the first two weeks becomes "it sold out" instead of "here's what it's actually like to use." Nobody outside a handful of reviewers and Google employees has had one running in their living room long enough to say whether it drops connection casting a big video file from Chrome, or whether the app crashes when you try to queue up three things in a row. That's not really Google's fault. Pricing something right and having it fly off shelves isn't a crime. It just means the reviews that actually matter are going to lag the hype by a couple of weeks minimum.
My plan, since I'm clearly not getting one this week, is to wait until the supply catches up sometime in August. I'm also mildly annoyed that this has already turned into eBay listings around sixty or seventy dollars a pop, which is exactly what happens every single time something sells out. There's always a guy reselling it for double before the original box has even shipped to the first batch of buyers. I know that's just how markets work, but it still gets under my skin a little.
One smaller complaint while I'm here: a chunk of the early coverage keeps describing Chromecast as killing Apple TV or Roku, and I think that's lazy writing. Apple TV is a hundred bucks and does a lot more than cast a browser tab. Roku has channels built right in without needing a phone at all. Chromecast is neat specifically because it's cheap and because casting a Chrome tab is legitimately useful for small things, like pulling up a recipe on the TV while you're cooking so you're not squinting at a laptop propped against the toaster. It's not a straight swap for a real set-top box, and treating every new streaming gadget as a death sentence for the last one is getting old.
If anyone reading this actually managed to snag one through the Play Store before it sold out, email me. I'd genuinely like to hear what casting local files or plain browser tabs looks like day to day before I sink my eleven effective dollars, and whatever's left of my patience, into ordering one once this thing is back in stock.