Still Waiting on My Chromecast

So it's been over a week now and I still don't have a Chromecast. I'm mildly obsessed with this at this point, which is embarrassing to admit for a $35 stick of plastic.

For anyone who missed it, Google announced this thing back on July 24th at their little event alongside the new Nexus 7. It's a dongle about the size of a USB stick that plugs straight into an HDMI port on your TV, hooks up to your WiFi, and lets you "cast" stuff from your phone, tablet, or Chrome browser tab — Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies, whatever. Thirty-five bucks. No remote, no separate box, no menus to fumble through with a clunky little clicker. You just tap a cast icon in the app and it shows up on the big screen. I watched the demo video maybe four times before deciding I needed one immediately, which in hindsight should've been my first warning sign.

Except so did everyone else, apparently. It sold out on Amazon and at Best Buy within about a day. Google had this promo going where if you bought one in the first weeks you'd get three months of Netflix free, which is like a $24 value stacked on top of a $35 device, so obviously the whole internet lost its mind over it. They actually pulled that Netflix offer early because demand blew past whatever they'd budgeted for. I don't blame them. I'd have done the same thing in their position, though it did nothing for my mood when I found out I was a few days too late to catch it.

I've checked the Best Buy site probably twice a day since. Sold out, sold out, sold out. There's a "notify me" option I signed up for that has notified me of exactly nothing. My local Target didn't even have it listed online as a product yet, and when I called (yes, I called a Target, I know how that sounds) the guy on electronics had genuinely never heard of it.

The part that gets me is the eBay and Amazon third-party listings. People are flipping these things for $60, $70, once I saw one at almost $90 with shipping. For a device that costs the same as a decent dinner out. I get supply and demand, I'm not naive about how this works, but there's something about watching scalpers do this to a thirty-five dollar gadget that feels different from watching it happen with a PS4 preorder or whatever. It's such a small, cheap thing to be predatory about.

In the meantime I've just been doing what I always do, which is running an HDMI cable across my living room floor from the laptop to the TV whenever I want to watch something on the big screen. My cat has, on three separate occasions, decided that cable is a toy specifically placed there for her, which has resulted in one closed laptop lid slamming shut mid-episode and a fair amount of yelling on my part. So yeah, I have real, immediate motivation here that goes beyond just wanting a new toy.

I did try the Chrome tab-casting feature on a friend's unit this past weekend (his shipped early, lucky guy) and it's rougher than the app-based casting. It's in beta, so fair enough, but there's a noticeable lag between what's happening on the laptop screen and what shows up on the TV, maybe a second or so, enough that video with any fast motion gets a little smeary. Netflix through the actual Netflix app cast, on the other hand, looked completely clean, no different from a fancier streaming box costing five times as much.

Anyway. If any of you reading this actually managed to snag one in that first wave, I want to hear about it, mostly so I can be a little jealous. And if Best Buy's website is reading this somehow: I am ready. My credit card is ready. Just let me buy the thing.

Word count check aside, I've got a backlog of actual work-related posts I keep meaning to write about some build tooling stuff I've been messing with, but that's for another day. Today's post is just me complaining about a dongle.