Amazon Prime (not the leader of the Autobots nor an incredible simulation)

OK, a couple of days in and the Echo is pretty maddening. It's like they've designed this really strong technology based on a good idea and did everything they could to impair its functionality. Sometimes I understand why, even if it's no less frustrating. Like how I mentioned you can only play music stored in Amazon Music (limited to 250 songs for free, an annual fee of $25 for 250K) as opposed to whatever you might have in Amazon Cloud (whether you're paying or not); they want to drive people to use Amazon Music, which is lame but I get it. Other stuff is stupid or vindictive, like how it uses Bing to search and not Google and doesn't let you change it. Along those lines, the only way to expand its functionality is to jerry-rig it with IFTTT, which is erratic and limited at best. And then there's total head-scratcher decisions, like the inability to create and use multiple shopping lists or to-do lists, or the way I can be listening to the news and then my kids can just walk in and say "Alexa, play shitty music" or "Alexa, tell me a joke."

What I really want, and what I assume everyone wants, is an always-on device just like this but not hampered by corporate rival bullshit (or shitty tech like the Echo app itself). I want to be able to walk into my house and say "Dipshit, play my Brian Eno mix" or "Bubba, add Cheerios to my shopping list" or "add pick up kids at school to my wife's to-do list." Right now it can't do this. Or I guess what's frustrating is that it undoubtedly *can* do this, but for now they don't want it to, or want to make it too hard for me to do.

Google has their own version of this coming out soon. Rumor has it it will be even simpler, but I have a hunch it will be more useful, and quickly overtake Echo.

I use my Echo Dot as an alarm clock, and have a speaker in my bathroom I turn on to listen to the news or music in the shower. I just yell "alexa, news!!" at it as I turn the corner and then turn the speaker on, works pretty well

Yeah, that kind of stuff seems to be the best use of its constrained tech. It's an OK speaker, so I think it will mostly be used to listen to NPR in the morning, and I like its pretty sensitive always-on status.

But, like, more annoyingness: It can give you traffic info, but only if you manually add in various destinations, which is stupid, because using a map app like Google's is so much faster and simpler than that. Also, it lacks SMS functionality, so I can't use it to text by voice. Why not? And so on.

It's not... a phone? Phones do SMS, what are you looking for here

Phones can also do most of what Echo can do, too. And then some. But If I'm cooking dinner and my hands are messy, I can't use my phone to text my wife with voice; I have to turn on the phone first. I use my (Android) phone to play music off my server, but that requires using my hands, too; Echo can play music hands-free, but not from where I want it to. My phone can give me traffic and directions, but again, only once I activate it, even using Google Now; Echo can't give me either of those things accurately, unless I program it in. Right now the Echo app is no substitute for various apps (like calendars, or lists) it replaces, but does not allow you to choose alternative apps that either work better or work better for me. Again, it won't even let me add a second, separate shopping list within the Echo app itself, which is crazy. And so on.

I really like the idea of an always-on interface, but this one is hampered. In an ideal world it would be a hands-free smart home hub, and I suppose that is coming, but this is clearly not it.

idk, I can turn my lights on and off with it and set temperature, etc

all of the solutions for that are pretty piecemeal right now but as a single-location hub, it works pretty well

It probably helps that I only paid $99 for my Echo, since early prime members where given the chance to buy it first at a reduced price, so I think it's been well worth that. But really only after I started linking all the home automation stuff into it.

Like I have a routine for bedtime for my kid, I just say "Alexa, turn on Bedtime for Ivy" and it turns the lamp in her room to 10%, turns off the office Lamp, lowers the lights in the living room, and turns on her white noise machine. All of that I would have had to do manually before, and even then I couldn't do the dimming. Of course the echo is just the trigger here and I have to have other equipment to do this, so it's not actually doing that much, but it does work well in this use case.

I have a similar routine for wake up time. Actually two different ones, one for Wake up Kid and another for Wake up Wife.

the dot is still way the hell backordered. was going to get one for my dad but they're not shipping until late july.

I think all that stuff is great, Jeff, but like you said, it requires third party investment (sort of the way using Amazon Music the way I'd want would require an annual fee). The hands-free function is great, better than I expected, but to do anything beyond smart clock-radio stuff requires lots of outside help, whether IFTTT or some specific lightbulbs or whatever. I love Apple but have resisted its vertical integration mode for similar reasonsl, because it's so controlled it prevents me (or slows me) from doing what I want to do with ease. Speaking of IFTTT, if Echo doing what I want it do to means that I need to invest in several outside or supplementary products or services, then ... it's not doing what I want it to do. It's doing what Amazon wants it/me to do.

Again, this will all work itself out soon enough, I hope, but for now it is a truly maddening epidemic to see solutions on the horizon through a reinforced window that keeps you trapped inside.

like refugees trapped in greece

Exactly like that.

then my kids can just walk in and say "Alexa, play shitty music"

now what kind of language is this to be using

Finally giving this a go, as there was a good deal in the Prime Day event that I wanted to get. Not sure whether I'll keep it beyond the one month trial, though it is tempting given my ordering history of the last few years.

what did you get

i considered getting a dustbuster but did not

It was a photography purchase... a fast 128GB Lexar SD Card for just £26. One can never have enough memory cards when it comes to shooting weddings!

I just bought a VTIN Royaler bluetooth speaker, need a new one after my JBL Flip broke. $45, normally $65-70. Not bad. Most of the things I've seen that I would be remotely interested in were at around 20% discount -- not bad, but also not the level of discount that would make me jump to buy something I don't immediately need.

I swear it's like I don't know how to use the internet anymore. I go to Amazon, go to the Prime Day splash page, see a bunch of crap I couldn't care less about, see no way to filter sale products into categories that might interest me, so I quit.

you can filter by category, although you still wind up having to wade through like 50 pages of stuff per category or more with no "view all." however there does seem to be a semi-functional prime-day-only search function.

Generally I find Amazon to be completely shit in terms of navigability and I hate shopping on it unless I know exactly what item/brand/model I want.

They have way too much crap for sale. Way too many products in every category, and everything is bumped by fake reviews. I prefer ordering from Costco where things are more curated, except that they sort of go to the other extreme and could use a bit more selection.

It should be more like Black Friday sales imo, confine the sale to very popular items and make the discounts deep.

So many of the prime deals are items and/or brands I have never heard of. I would have no way of even evaluating whether they were good deals other than trusting Amazon that it was more expensive yesterday.

I can see why an internet-based black Friday of that sort would be problematic though -- they probably couldn't do the volume on those items needed to satisfy people and the whole thing would be over in a server-crashing second.

(xp) right, and I won't even waste time clicking on item where the price is expressed as a range from 19.95 - 49.95

i have stuff enough

To find out a price history of an item on Amazon I've been pointed to this website: http://camelcamelcamel.com

I've ignored signing up and just put the URL of the item in the top search bar and it seems to work well.

It turns out that they actually offer same day shipping with Prime here in Glasgow. If you order before noon things arrive later that day and the range available seems quite extensive.

I haven't set it up yet, but it also seems I can share some of my Prime benefits with my girlfriend as part of a household. That's very neat too.

I can imagine I'm going to end up paying for the year in the end.

Did my first same-day delivery. It worked precisely as advertised and was very handy - ordered about 11:30am, arrived about 7pm. Hopefully it wasn't actually like this, but I did feel guilty imagining a delivery van driving the 50-ish miles from the warehouse to my flat that evening with my single item.

I signed up for Prime last month after years of putting it off because I never had the spare cash to drop on the cost all in one go. But now you can pay for it monthly (and it comes with Amazon video, which I've used a bit already).

Basically, the $10.99/mo pays for itself really quickly.

It also comes with the Amazon Music streaming service, and here's where I'd like some opinions. Is it good enough to forsake spending extra on Spotify and/or Apple Music?

nah

actually it doesn't have a streaming service like spotify yet, you can just stream your own music

I stand corrected, they have streaming now, but it sure hasn't done much for me

Selection is v poor vs Spotify - I sometimes use the playlists or radio function if I can't be bothered thinking.

It's a nice extra but not worth subscribing for. I don't even know if Prime Video is 100% worth the price but it's come a long way over the past few years, possible they'll improve Music as well.

Prime membership is such a weird hodgepodge of stuff. It's really hard to value the shipping plus entertainment media combo.

I like the Video offerings but I already have Netflix and order from Amazon maybe twice a year, so it's like juuuuust not quite worth it

Might get back on if they offer that huge discount again (and/or I get some more money coming in)

I'm on my annual free 30 days Prime trial again. God the stuff on there is pretty awful.

Have managed to finally watch Batman Dark Knight Rises thought, and Mad Max was pretty fun. Other than that? A whole lotta nothing.

That's nuts, there is so much good stuff.

Near random stuff in my watchlist:

City of God
Captain Fantastic
Moonlight
Salesman
Paterson
20th Century Women
Sweet Hereafter
Married to the Mob
Prom Night
History of Violence
The Handmaiden
Green Room
The Witch

And so on. I suppose some of these come and go from Prime, but I think most of these are current.

Plus whatever original programming is there now. They seem to be ramping up further.

Prime Video makes it hard to find the good stuff sometimes, even on my FireTV half the easy to find recommendations are cheap documentaries and straight to video garbage.

http://instantwatcher.com/a

There's a fourth season of Bosch coming, but no date yet.

I got invited by Amazon to complete a survey regarding changes to the Prime set up. I guess they'll be changing the price and what's included before too long. They had me laboriously choosing which I'd go for out of various combinations of the shipping/movies/music/photo storage/e-books/deals/etc features of prime at differing price points, trying to gauge which were most important and how much I'd pay for them. I'm very happy at £79 per year, but will baulk if they raise the price or drop any features I do actually use.

From the way they set the questions up it seems like they want to raise the price quite significantly for Prime that features both video streaming and one-day/same-day delivery and have cheaper options that drop either one or both of those aspects.

Doesn't sound surprising; with the explosion of streaming video they presumably have to recoup more costs now.

fuck amazon

they're bad but hey we got The Handmaiden out of it

I never really wanted Amazon Video to begin with so I can sign up for the delivery only

do we have a thread for Amazon's horrific labor practices

http://fortune.com/2017/11/24/amazon-black-friday-2017-strike-italy-germany/