Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

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When I saw this, I actually had the opposite reaction.

I remember when I first saw an iPod Nano with the color screen and the scroll wheel that magically scrolled up and down by just moving your finger around it without actually turning a wheel. It seemed like magic. Same thing when I first saw the iPhone/iPod Touch. Apple's products were very carefully designed and only released when they were perfect, and very rarely failed to wow you.

Amazon on the other hand, always seems to rush things to market and then see what sticks. I understand that this is largely their ethos, but when it comes to Amazon hardware, I've found myself pretty cynical towards it because they've released so much poorly-executed crap over the years. Even with Alexa, I like many others, find that it's pretty much useless for anything beyond playing music or setting a timer.

Having an Echo, I saw this and my first thought was "meh." I have a feeling that if Apple released a similar product category, that wouldn't be the case.

My latest gen Apple TV wants to disagree with you. As does my wife's first gen Apple Watch ... both are magical turds IMHO.

I don't own an Apple Watch, but I know lots of people who do and love them.

But in any case, I think the last ten years of iPhone and iPad releases do somewhat agree with me.

So if we only look at Apple's successful products, we can agree that Apple's only makes "very carefully designed" things..

Right. Cube, Ping, etc

I think that holds for pretty much all of their products, successful or not.

But if you want to argue that Amazon is a better product company than Apple, then have at it.

It's amazing that the Apple TV is considered a turd. They seemingly did everything right. Support for third party apps, an awesome remote, decent power. Aside from missing 4k, what makes it such a turd?

The Apple TV is fine for what little I use it for. My main complaint is that I apparently can't use Siri for my own music collection. And that's basically the only music I play through the Apple TV. (It drives my stereo from my iTunes library.)

This comment really adds nothing to the discussion. Why is it being upvoted?

I absolutely LOVE my Apple TV. Best device in the house.

I agree Apple does release a far higher quality product which is why I'm a fan. Your point about the iPod Nano and iPhone/iPod Touch is a great one. Apple does have a track record of holding back and releasing a much more relevant and well thought out product in the end. I guess I question if this is even a product category they want to get into or if they feel that from a utility standpoint the ability to just say "Hey Siri..." from any apple device already fits the bill for most use cases.

But Amazon's products are cheap. Echo first gets out, it is merely 99 dollars, and at the time, a vanilla bluetooth speaker worth that much. It is about accessibility.

Amazon Echo was $199 when it was first introduced, which was still fairly competitively priced against premium bluetooth speakers.

Also the Fire Phone, which as I remember was priced at about $650.

It was $99 for Prime members.

If you preordered when it was first announced, it was $99. Once it was released, the price returned to full $199.

Prime subscribers were offered it for $99 when it was first announced. I think you had to get put on a waiting list but that's how I ended up with mine.

My mistake. I haven't been a prime subsciber for many years, and didn't realize that they got such a great deal on the Echo at first.

The deal didn't last very long and I don't think many people were familiar with the idea of a home personal assistant device at the time. Siri was around but I think by that point (late 2014) the hype had faded for that quite a bit. There were a few Kickstarters[0] that were trying to tackle the idea but none of them took off, and Amazon came along and made them obsolete.

The Echo was very, very bare bones in terms of functionality at the start. There were like half a dozen basic commands and that was it, so my guess is people who saw the Prime invitations for it didn't think it was even worth the $99. I just scrolled through my inbox to find the oldest "What's new with Alexa" message I was sent from January 30, 2015, and it mentions adding Pandora/Spotify support as well as making the companion phone apps available, so those didn't even exist for the first few months Echo was for sale.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/607691307/ubi-the-ubiqu...

I see what you did there.

"Apple's products were very carefully designed..."

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