So Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes tonight and told Charlie Rose that Amazon wants to deliver packages by drone. Little octocopters, five pounds max, thirty minutes door to door. He called it Prime Air. Half my Twitter feed lost its mind within the hour, and I get why, it's a genuinely wild visual, a little robot helicopter dropping a box of diapers on your porch. But I want to be the annoying guy at the party for a second, because something about the timing here bugs me.
It's December 1st. Tomorrow is Cyber Monday. Amazon just spent the entire week getting buried under headlines about record Black Friday online sales, and about how Target and Walmart and everybody else were matching their prices hour by hour. And then, the night before the single biggest online shopping day of the year, Bezos sits down for a prime time interview and drops a story so shiny that basically no outlet is running a "here's how to get the best deals tomorrow" piece anymore, they're all running octocopter GIFs instead.
I'm not saying the tech doesn't exist. There's video, there are prototypes, it's real hardware sitting in an Amazon lab somewhere in Seattle. But Bezos himself said on camera that this is four or five years out, pending FAA approval that doesn't currently allow this kind of thing at all. The FAA hasn't even finished the rules for commercial drone use in general airspace, let alone worked out what happens when ten thousand delivery drones share the sky with actual airplanes over actual neighborhoods. Five years in tech-announcement time usually means "we have no idea," which is a fine thing to say, it's just not usually said the night before Cyber Monday unless somebody in PR did the math on purpose.
And look, I don't even blame them. It worked. Every local news station in the country ran a clip of a little white drone lowering a package by string. My mother texted me about it, and my mother does not text me about the FAA. That's an absurd amount of free advertising for a company that, as of that Black Friday weekend, is apparently going to need every ounce of goodwill it can get, since half of Twitter that same week was also full of people complaining about Amazon warehouse conditions going into the holiday crunch. Nothing makes people forget about warehouse labor stories faster than a robot that flies.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a small one. I ordered a space heater from Amazon on Wednesday because my apartment's radiator has decided December is a suggestion, and the tracking page currently says it's sitting in a facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with no estimated delivery date at all. Not "arriving in 3 days." Just nothing. So forgive me if I'm not holding my breath for thirty minute drone delivery when the two day option can't currently tell me if my heater is coming this week or next. I'd take a guy in a brown truck who actually shows up over a hypothetical flying robot from 2018 any day.
None of this means the demo wasn't cool, because it was, and I watched the clip twice. Little quadcopters (octocopters, technically, eight rotors) doing controlled hover-and-drop maneuvers is genuinely neat engineering even as a lab toy. I just think there's a difference between "here is a product we are shipping" and "here is a thing that exists in a video, that we are telling you about at the exact moment it benefits us most to change the subject." Everybody covering this tonight is treating it like the first one. It's the second one. Ask me again in five years, which conveniently is also about how long it usually takes Comcast to bring gigabit to my block, so we'll call it even.
Anyway. Go find your Cyber Monday deals tomorrow, the drones are not coming for your Christmas presents this year or possibly ever, and somebody please tell my heater to hurry up.