Amazon's Cheap Microwaves and Alexa Gadgets Have Hidden Costs

Buy today a smart plug on Amazon and you'll notice that the most popular options work with Amazon Alexa, Google Home and, in some cases, with Apple's HomeKit. In other words, connecting your bedside lamp or coffee maker to the Internet is not an obligation to swear allegiance to the voice assistant of a single company.

Amazon is looking to change that with its own smart plug, as well as all other Alexa-compatible products announced by the company in September. Amazon's new microwaves, stereo amplifiers, smart home concentrators and cordless digital video recorders all have one thing in common: they equalize or sell comparable products at the same price, and they do not work. with competing voice assistants. The compromise for Amazon's low prices is being locked in the Alexa ecosystem.

Technology giants who discourage consumers from making connections with someone else's platform are not new. Apple, for example, uses services such as iMessage and accessories such as AirPods to discourage iPhone users from considering Android. Amazon retains its Prime Video apps from Google's Chromecast devices and does not sell certain Nest products. Google fought back by extracting its YouTube apps from the Fire and Echo Show TVs.

But smart home appliances have been an exception, as most of them are not made by the technology giants themselves. Products such as Philips Hue light bulbs, TP-Link smart plugs and Ecobee thermostats are trying to support as many platforms as possible to serve the widest possible audience. As a result, consumers have a certain degree of freedom to choose between different voice assistants. If you want to replace your Amazon Echos with Google Homes or use Siri to control your home from an iPhone, you may not have to replace all the smart home hardware you have already purchased .

This is the kind of flexibility that Amazon is now trying to discourage with its own plugs, microwaves, etc. By creating the devices themselves, selling them cheaply and giving them the highest rating on their website, Amazon is setting the stage for Alexa-only homes.

Amazon started to move in this direction last year with the Echo Plus, an Alexa speaker worth $ 150 which also serves as a hub for devices using the ZigBee connection protocol and that Amazon has just updated. level with a new design and better sound quality. The use of an Echo Plus eliminates the need for a concentrator or a separate bridge to control certain light bulbs, switches and sensors, the trade-off being that these devices will only work when they are in use. with Alexa. You do not benefit from the flexibility offered by other hubs such as Samsung SmartThings (which supports Alexa and Google Home) or specific bridges to products such as the Philips Hue Bridge (which supports Alexa, Google Home and HomeKit of Apple).

Amazon has also avoided other voice assistants when it comes to home security. Amazon Cloud Cam, announced last year, requires an Alexa or Fire TV device to view video streams by voice. And a few months after Amazon acquired Ring earlier this year, the smart doorbell manufacturer has indefinitely delayed the integration of HomeKit announced in 2016. (Ring says it's still "looking forward to" 39, introduce the HomeKit feature, but modified the new versions to ensure experience with our products. ")

The next logical step is to sell even more Alexa powered appliances and ask them to move them. $ 25 Amazon Smart Plug costs $ 10 less than Belkin's WeMo plug and at the same price as a TP-Link Smart Plug. The $ 60 AmazonBasics Microwave is one of the cheapest microwaves you can find. The echo-amp Echo Link powers the high-end speakers for $ 300, half the price of the new Sonos speaker amp. The Echo wall clock is only a little more expensive than the cheapest analog clocks at $ 30. The $ 230 revamp of Fire TV is less advantageous than other digital video recorders such as TiVo's Roamio OTA and Nuvyyo's Tablo when you take into account its lack of subscription fees.

In addition to publishing its own first Alexa report, Amazon encourages other vendors to follow the same path. In addition to the new consumer products, Amazon also announced the implementation of the Alexa Connect kit, which allows companies to build smart home appliances without having to write their own security and network firmware or to permanent cloud computing. Although Amazon claims that Connect Kit devices can work with voice assistants other than Alexa, it's hard to know how many companies will care when the purpose of this kit is to minimize effort and effort. development costs. (Qualcomm and Intel offer similar kits that support multiple voice assistants, but without Amazon's flat cloud computing pricing.)

Over time, these efforts will result in the creation of cheap smart home appliances that work only with Alexa, whether they are made by Amazon or not. If you like Alexa and you still want to standardize your purchases, this is not a problem. But if you want to buy products with more flexibility, it is likely that you will pay more for this privilege.

Some companies are working on interoperability standards, which would connect any smart home device, regardless of their provider, but Amazon does not support these efforts, neither Apple nor Google. And why would they do it? The alternative – creating as many smart homes that only they can control – seems much more appealing.