So Amazon had one of their hardware dumps today. Not the usual "one new Echo and a shrug" release, this was a full-on firehose: something like fifteen new devices, maybe more, I honestly lost count around device number nine. New Echo Dot, redesigned as a little fabric-covered puck for $49.99. A second-gen Echo Plus at $149.99 with a temperature sensor built in, which, sure. An Echo Show that's finally not shaped like a kitchen tablet nobody asked for. A subwoofer called the Echo Sub for $129.99 if you want your Alexa to have actual bass. Echo Input, Echo Auto for your car, an Amazon-branded smart plug for $24.99, a wall clock that just shows countdown timers. It's a lot.
But none of that is what I want to talk about, because Amazon also announced a microwave.
An actual microwave. The AmazonBasics Microwave, $59.99, and its whole pitch is that it talks to your Echo so you can say "Alexa, add thirty seconds" instead of pressing the button that is right there, eleven inches from your face, that also adds thirty seconds. I keep rereading the press descriptions trying to find the part where this makes my life better and I keep coming up empty. The microwave doesn't even have Alexa built in — it's not a smart microwave on its own, it's a dumb microwave that phones home to an Echo sitting somewhere else in your kitchen, which then talks to a server in Virginia, which tells the microwave it's allowed to heat your soup now. That's the chain. That's four hops to reheat soup.
I want to be clear that I don't think this is some huge scandal or sign of civilizational decline, it's just really, really funny to me, and I think people are going to be making fun of this specific product for years. Ten years from now somebody's going to bring up "remember the Alexa microwave" the way people still bring up the Juicero. Actually the Juicero comparison might be a little unfair to Amazon here since this thing is fifty-nine bucks and not four hundred, but the spirit is the same: solving a problem that a $15 microwave from Target solved perfectly fine in 1998.
What actually interests me about the event, if I'm being honest, isn't the microwave, it's how obviously Amazon is trying to make Alexa the operating system for your entire house before Google gets there first with the Assistant. Every single one of today's products is a wedge. The wall clock is a wedge — now you don't need to unlock your phone to check a timer. The car adapter is a wedge: now Alexa rides with you to work. The smart plug is priced at basically cost, twenty-five bucks, because Amazon doesn't care if they make a dime on the plug itself, they care that once it's in your wall you start saying "Alexa, turn off the lamp" instead of reaching for a switch that was already right there. It's the same move they've made since the very first Echo back in 2014, just with way, way more surface area now.
I've had an original Echo Dot on my desk since I think 2016, the fabric-less plasticky one, and I mostly use it for exactly two things: kitchen timers and playing the same four Spotify playlists on repeat. That's genuinely it, after two-plus years. I bring this up because I think there's a real gap between "Amazon announces fifteen devices and a talking microwave" and "what a normal household actually ends up doing with any of this," and that gap doesn't get smaller just because the hardware lineup gets bigger. My Dot doesn't know my thermostat exists. It's never once ordered anything for me on purpose (once by accident, which is its own story for another post). Adding a subwoofer and a wall clock to the lineup doesn't close that gap, it just adds more boxes on the shelf at Best Buy.
Anyway. iPhone XS and XS Max ship to actual customers on Friday, which feels like it should be the bigger story of the week and instead I've spent forty minutes writing about a microwave. Priorities.