HomeTech.fm - Episode 227 - Stupid Microwaves

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

On this week’s episode of HomeTech: Join as we discuss a busy week in home tech headlines including: Leaked images of the new Google Home Hub Hulu bolsters their live TV lineup Plex shuts down its cloud service tvOS12 brings Dolby Atmos and more to Apple TV Apple’s HomePod gets voice calling features And Amazon flexes their muscles with a massive new product release event

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by listeners like you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, September 21st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from not Denver, Colorado, from Long Island, New York, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Long Island. Long Island. It's all one word.

That's it. That's it. Yes, sir. Travel. Yeah. Yeah. I am out here for a couple of weeks, actually. So my wife's family is from out here. So we're visiting family for the high holidays. My wife is Jewish. And so we're out here, I guess celebrating is the right word. I'm not sure if celebrating is the right word. Yom Kippur. I don't think you celebrate it. Yeah, it's a day of atonement. So it's not really a celebration per se. And for anybody who has participated in Yom Kippur, you can relate.

It's basically a day that you just don't eat or drink water for 24 hours. So there's that. So the lemonade and the yingling that you have. Yeah. Well, you know, it's over. It's over. And actually, we are, Seth, it was a blessing in disguise for us that I was observing my day of atonement yesterday

because had we recorded yesterday, which we normally do, we're recording tonight is Thursday and we typically record on Wednesday, we would have missed the Amazon event this week and it would have been a whole week until we had a chance to talk about that. And we're certainly going to dive in and talk about that quite a bit tonight. Amazon came out swinging today. They released a ton of new products at a surprise event and look forward to diving into that with you.

So we have Yom Kippur to thank for that, Seth. Thank you, Yom Kippur. That's it. Very, very much appreciated. That's it. Well, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Leaked images have surfaced regarding a new Google project

called the Google Home home hub what little is known so far makes it clear that the device is a competitor to the echo show the product shown on these images looks like a seven inch touch screen with a speaker at its base the shape and color scheme match that of other google products a leaked spec sheet shows 802.11 b g and n wi-fi as well as bluetooth support farfield and farfield voice recognition curiously enough however no camera is included so we'll have to wait and see uh what materializes here but some interesting uh a peek behind the curtain at google's new device yeah yeah i saw the saw the FCC approvals had gone through today. Dave Zatz is all over that stuff.

That's right. We'll have to see what happens next month, I guess. Hulu is adding five extra Discovery networks to its live TV lineup, along with thousands of on-demand shows. Viewers can look forward to watching the Discovery Channel, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Motor Trend, which is the rebranded Velocity Channel, Yep. So Hulu beefing up its lineup there. And we are Hulu subscribers. And I can tell you my kids will probably be excited about Animal Planet.

They're into that sort of stuff. So good news for Hulu subscribers. Media streaming service Plex is shutting down its cloud service at the end of November. The company is making the move because of technical issues and cost concerns. Once support ends, you'll have to stream media from your own server, computer, or network-attached storage device instead of your favorite cloud storage service. Quote, we've made the difficult decision to shut down Plex cloud service on November 30th, 2018, Plex said on its support page. I know this one made me think of you, Seth, because we did

that Plex special not too long ago, and I think you said you had been playing around with this service, if I recall correctly. No, I never actually had to work with this. This is where you kind of upload all your videos somewhere else. And I remember looking at this and saying, well, I've got a hard drive here. Why would I bother doing that? I've got fast internet. And it's only if you leave the house and that kind of thing. So all my stuff is local. It's going to stay local. But I saw this and I just didn't, I never, it didn't seem like a good business model to me. So I'm glad they shut it down and I'm glad it doesn't have to cost them money to run anymore. So good for Plex. Bad for losing the future, but good for Plex because I want to keep them in business. Yep, indeed.

TVOS 12 for Apple TV, the fourth gen, and the Apple TV 4K is officially out of beta and available for all users. The annual software update for the Apple TV brings support for Dolby Atmos audio for movies on iTunes and other apps. Screensaver details like the location information and new

screensavers, which are freaking awesome, and a new zero sign-on feature for Spectrum TV and internet customers with more providers coming in the future. Also, Jason, when this thing installs, there was a couple of us putting things in the hub. Right there on the main screen it has a little uh picture of uh you know remotes and says you can use remotes from control 4 crestron and savant ah very cool well yeah we we don't know anything about but you know it was it was there uh launched at least on the one the screenshots that i saw from the u.s they was on that so uh hopefully

we'll know something in the future on that. It'd be kind of cool to have Siri built into Control 4, Crestron, or Savant Remote. Yeah. It sure would be neat. Absolutely. No, I think this is an exciting update for consumers as well as professional installers because of those features. You see Apple paying attention to companies like control 4 and

crestron and making that easier to integrate as well as the dolby atmos i know that's becoming more and more popular in in mid to high end home theaters and even even at the lower end of the market so having support for dolby atmos is uh is a big deal so excited to see that speaking of apple they have announced that the HomePod will soon be able to make and receive phone calls as well as search music by lyrics. These are both features that rival speakers like Google Home have been able to do for some time, but that is definitely good news for HomePod users. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, after today, I don't know. I think they should just hide that news story and bury it. Yeah, bad timing.

Bad timing, yeah. Yeah. No, I think it came out with the last, like the Apple Watch event, and they tacked on the end that we're going to be able to do these extra features, and there was a HomePod update coming. So glad to see that they're starting to catch up, but they still have a seriously long way to go before they catch up with Amazon and Google. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of work to do there, no doubt. And I think they're still very much a niche product for really the hardcore Apple enthusiasts. And I don't know, even sound quality, as we're going to talk about here as part of our Amazon updates and what they did today, that's even becoming a tougher battle for them, right?

I mean, that's really what Apple staked their claim on when they put HomePod out, and it was all about sound quality. And you see Amazon making some big moves here on their announcements, moving more into that space. Shifting gears from our quick headlines, we're going to jump into this Amazon event. And they announced a ton of new products today. This is a really, really impressive launch. And I have to say, as somebody who now works, you know, I didn't get this perspective necessarily when I worked at integration companies, which I did for many, many years. But working now at a professional services or vendor type of company, I know how much work goes into launching a new product or service. And I am very, very impressed

by what Amazon did today. So we're going to jump in and, and, uh, pick that apart. Look forward to, to chatting about some of these things with you. Yeah. One product and service is enough, but how about 70? Yeah. That's insane, right? Yeah. And a lot of them weren't, well, many of them are hardware, but a lot of them were not, were kind of like on the development side or on the services side. I saw that they had released like a chip that had the Echo services built into it

where you could basically embed that chip into your product and have an Alexa. Oh, I said it. I said it. You buzzed yourself. I love it. I buzzed myself. You can have a device that works with Alexa. Gosh, man, I don't know how I'm going to say it. You've got to work on your timing there. Oh, man. Alexa. Gosh, man, I don't know how I'm going to say it. You got to work on your timing there. Oh, man.

Alexa. Sorry, Jason. Alexa. All right, I'll stop. We'll edit all those out. No, we won't. That's for you, Richard. All right, well, let's jump in.

I mean, gosh, they announced so much stuff that I hardly know where to start, but I know we put together a list here. Great story from Engadget, I believe, is where we found the most comprehensive list that I saw, and we will certainly link to that in our show notes at hometech.fm. I'm just going to start at the top here um there's a whole bunch of these that we're going to talk about but revamped echo dot uh to start out with they've got a new look you know sort of rounded edges um looks like a 1.6 inch

driver uh delivering they're they're claiming 70 percent louder audio than the previous model i don't care about louder like how about better better come on marketing people had to have something to go on yeah yeah i suppose i mean it is the little tiny puck little hockey puck thing right so you don't buy this thing for audio quality no no no you buy it for the price point the The Google one I have sitting in front of me sounds 70% better. So if they match what Google can do, then I'd say, okay, this is great. But we have one of those things sitting in the bedroom on the nightstand to play Thunderstowns at night. And it's like, just turn it off.

Just please turn it off. Yeah, just stop. Pre-order, I noticed, for $50. So that's an increase from the, unless I'm mistaken, wasn't the previous Echo Dot only like $30 or $35? I think it's been on sale for a long time around that price point.

But I think it started off around $49. So I think right now, it'll probably be that. And then probably, I bet you anything during, you know, from Black Friday on, it'll be $30 through the holiday. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. I can tell you that actually where I'm staying here, my in-laws, they have an Echo Dot in the kitchen. and I'm with you. The sound quality on it is terrible, and I'm not a big hi-fi guy. I'm not super picky about that, but even compared to just my normal Echo at home, it's not good. So I will be curious to hear this new one, and it is interesting that they advertise 70% louder, but they don't necessarily specifically address quality when they say that.

Yep. Well, if you need more quality and if bass is your quality, there's a new Echo Sub, Jason, a 100-watt down-firing 6-inch woofer that can be paired with a single Echo or you can create a 2.1 stereo system out of it so if you need sound uh amazon is stepping it up and going head to head with uh with sonos right yeah that's what it looks like yeah yeah no it's really interesting and i mentioned earlier you know uh apple really staked their their initial coming out of the gate with HomePod was really very largely based on audio quality.

And so, you know, I think this really has to be a concern, in my opinion, to the team at Apple. At least if I was working there, I would certainly see this and it wouldn't be good news necessarily. But I do agree with you. I think the bigger sort of shot across the bow here is to Sonos and the fact that Echo is really beefing up their lineup and some of the other products that we're going to talk about here momentarily, like the Link Amp and the Echo Link, they're really rounding out their lineup with this subwoofer

and taking a shot directly at Sonos. And I think this goes back to a conversation we were having just on last week's show where we talked about the sort of tough road ahead for Sonos, right? They had a lot of white space opportunity when they first came out and they were really the pioneer in that space, but they've got infinitely, and they were really the pioneer in that space. But they've got infinitely more competition now than they used to, and this Echo Sub is just one example of that. So it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. Yeah, and my points last week were their competition is not, you know, Onkyo or Denon.

Their competition are Apple, Amazon, and Google. That is why Sonos has an uphill battle ahead of them, because these are billion-dollar companies. These are not a subsidiary company inside of another company that makes a few hundred million a year. These are billion-dollar companies that the Ford face of most of what, if you think of technology and Amazon, you think of the Echo. So it's, geez, I mean, you look at Sonos' stock today, it went down. They're not having a good time after their bad quarter. And now, today, after this announcement, it went down some more. But, you know, it does, I doubt, I doubt, highly doubt that two Echos and an Echo Sub are going to sound as good as a two Play 3s and a Sonos Sub. But at the same time, you're paying $ out for this 2.1 system than it is for a Sonos system that may sound marginally better.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So moving on from there, they did update the Echo Plus as well. This is a revamped speaker. It does have a feature called local voice control, which I think is one of the more interesting and probably under-reported aspects of this event, which lets you adjust your various smart home devices, even if your internet connection is down. And I think that's a big, big step in, I would say, the right direction for both Amazon and users of the A word. I stopped myself there, Seth. Echo? I'll say Echo.

I'm ready. I'm ready. In any event, that ability to do local voice control and do some processing without being 100% reliant on the cloud is, you know, I think the significance of that could easily be lost on the cloud is, uh, you know, I think the significance of that could easily be lost on the average consumer who's keeping an eye on this event. But for anybody who's kind of thinking through those what ifs and trying to figure out their control platform of choice for their home and evaluating Alexa for whatever sort of use, that's going to be very effective, by the way. It's like the Pavlov. Shock training.

That's right. Anyways, that's a significant story. And I think it was good to point that out. I noticed you highlighted that in red here on our show notes. Yeah. I mean, that's why I love using my HomeKit stuff so much. When it works locally, it is as fast as using any Control 4 gear that I have, right? Right. So I say, turn on the lights, the lights turn on. And I say, good morning, good night, whatever. Siri takes care of it. And it works super fast. And quite frankly, it's been super reliable lately. i i don't know if they've been updating or beefing up siri servers again but uh or i just happen to be sitting

on the good one and not the bad one that hasn't got the updates uh yeah but like it's they've definitely done some work from what i can tell they've done some work to beef it up but this this has potential to be that right so you can if you can do the local voice control, the internet goes down, you can yell at the echo to turn off your lights or do something in the kitchen or set a timer and potentially has the ability to do some of those limited tasks without having to call out to the internet and do some processing. That's great. Also has a built-in temperature sensor and, again, pre-order. So a lot of these devices, we're seeing a pattern here. Pre-order, pre-order, pre-order. $150 starts shipping in October is what they're stating with this one.

The next device that they announced was a new Chromecast-like audio dongle called Echo Input. It has Bluetooth, a microphone, and a 3.5-millimeter jack. This basically is just like the Chromecast. It doesn't have a speaker connected to it, so you can connect it to your existing audio setup and yell at Alexa, Jesus, I did it again. So this is basically so you can add smart speakers into a dumb stereo system,

just like you would with Chromecast. You order now for $35, and it ships later in the year. I'm assuming that later in the year means it will be here by holiday time, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that language definitely leaves it open to interpretation, but there's not a whole lot of time left in the year here. We're down to less than, you know, what do we got, three months, a little over three months, I guess. So not a whole lot of time left in the year.

So that language later in the year definitely feels further off than it is. So if they're able to hold true to their word there, then we'll see a bunch of these because I'm scrolling through these notes right now. And, you know, I'm seeing October later this year, later this year. So they've got quite a few of these coming out very, very soon. Moving on, this is one of the most interesting ones to me as it relates to the world of... I don't want to pigeonhole this by saying professional, because this is very much applicable to really anybody who has their own sort of audio setup, simple stuff, receivers or speakers of their own.

This is not rocket science to do this stuff. This is very much a shot across the bow for Sonos, the Echo Link amp and echo link so this is uh the amp is a 60 watt two channel amplifier with uh digital and analog connectors uh three hundred dollars ships in 2000 looks like our show notes got cut off i'm going to assume that's probably 2019 we can double check that yeah 2018 story okay got it and then uh the echo link uh meanwhile connects to your audio setup and streams high fidelity music uh 200 and ships later this year so the echo link is uh basically

a high fidelity device without the amplifier built in So they can save a little bit of cost there if you've got your own amplification and just want that more high-fidelity sound. You know, $200, you can plug that into your setup. But that Echolink amp is really a, I would say, a direct competitor to the Sonos amp, which I know they just released right before Cedia and were really making a lot of press with. Yeah, and I'm laughing at it because it looks like a little square box. which I know they just released right before Cedia and we're really making a lot of press with. Yeah, and I'm laughing at it because it looks like a little square box. And I wonder if there are going to be all these other companies out there connecting this to making wall mounts for it and that kind of thing.

I don't know. Oh, there certainly will. Yeah. Amazon also updated the Echo Show, which is their 10-inch display, like the smart speaker with the display. It has built-in smart speaker and microphones. It has web browsers this go-around, so Firefox and Amazon Silk. And it'll also support Skype video chat.

So maybe, Jason, we'll be able to do, you know, Skype calls over the Amazon Echo Show. Yeah. $230 price tag. I don't know. I'll have to see if that's worth it. I do have to say that this Echo Show looks infinitely better from a design perspective than the previous one, which looked kind of like a miniature. Remember rear projection TVs? Yep, yep, absolutely. Like the shape of those. That's kind of what the old one looked like.

Very sort of clunky. DLP TV. Yeah, that's right. And a lot of people, you know, sort of had that complaint about the first Echo Show. It very much felt like a kind of a minimum viable product, like they just needed to get something done and get it shipped. And you know, I respect Amazon for that. They're a company that is willing to experiment and get new products out there. I have to say the new Echo Show, just based on the pictures that I'm seeing

online, definitely looks like a big step in the right direction from a design perspective. And as we've talked about on the show before, I do think these sort of smart display devices with voice control built in are an interesting category. And, you know, I'm curious when I think five years out from now, you know, how commonplace are these in people's kitchens? And, you know, I think we'll see more of these. So we'll be keeping an eye on that category for sure. But moving on here, one that I am definitely interested in is the Fire TV Recast. So this is basically a Fire TV plus a DVR built for cord cutters. So this works with over-the-air networks using an antenna so you got to buy an

external antenna and hook it up to it but it'll send live tv or recorded shows to fire tablets fire tv echo show or mobile devices of course you can use alexa to control it um damn it that's a good one though seth thank you for adding that to a repertoire uh $230 version has a pair of tuners so you can record two shows at the same time and 500 gigs of storage they also have a $280 model which doubles the number of tuners which which is pretty impressive. So up to four tuners, simultaneous show recordings and storage space. Again, pre-order looks like these are set to ship in November. So pretty good deal. And, you know, I go, I think a lot about Tableau when I read this one, like I've got a Tableau at home that I've been using now for a few months and really, really like it. But

for new consumers in the market, I think this represents definitely a big problem for Tableau, I guess, from marketing and sort of just market share perspective, given the fact now that they're basically going straight up against Amazon. And certainly there are some things that Tableau can do differently. But this is definitely very much a, I would say, a pretty direct competitor to a product like a Tableau. Yeah, this reminds me of, do you remember a couple of years ago? I see it's a couple of years ago. It may have been a couple of months ago. I can't keep up right now. But when Amazon released their like their camera offerings, like they had smart cameras that they were they were putting out there and we're like oh you know this is going to kind of go up against ring or this

this but i think one of the the smart camera they have is made to like look at what you're wearing and suggest that you wear thinner looking jeans or something like that yeah yeah you shouldn't wear those jeans don't do that no i wonder if it actually tells you that. I don't know. I'm not, I'm never going to get one. Um, but I have to imagine that Amazon, I mean, if you go to Tableau's website, like one of the major places to buy Tableau TV is, is on Amazon. Like, so Amazon literally knows Tableau sales numbers, right? Uh, and so like they can, they can kind of just do a search and figure out what devices cameras are popular uh you know voice assistants are definitely popular like they can look across their entire marketplace and figure out what's selling and just kind of go after it and they have a fire tv

and now they're you we actually covered this a couple weeks back where they're adding the dvr in but like yeah this goes directly up against devices like Tableau and TiVo and all that they're using over the air with an antenna to record to a hard drive built into the device. But also, if you think about it, this is getting you everything that the Amazon Fire TV can do already. So you can watch Hulu on it. You can watch Prime Video on it and all that good stuff.

So I don't know. It's kind of like, is it shady? I don't know. Is it good business sense? Probably. But Amazon is definitely like undercutting some of their people that are selling in their marketplace by releasing these products directly. Yeah.

Well, that's what you can do when you're amazon yeah exactly uh the next thing they they release this is not really for the home but uh for the auto and we heard rumors about this going in uh this is for your car you can get a dongle uh dongle life forever and plug it into your audio system in your car and, uh, get Alexa out of it. Jesus. I mean,

why would they name it the same thing as, uh, whatever. Uh, so you can get like basically the same things that you're normally do with, uh, Alexa. I guess you can ask for directions.

This is a new thing. Uh, this thing isn't ready, but it'll cost $50 when it does come out. Interesting play for them, right? This is not something that goes into your house, but it gets the technology kind of pushed out into your car. So maybe you can yell at this thing and say, you know, turn the lights on.

And so when you get home, the lights are all on and the temperature's right and all that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, there's, there's a lot of, of crossover just in those simple use cases. Like you're coming home, driving home from work in the winter and it's, you know, 20 degrees out and you want to make sure the lights are on, because it snowed, and you want to make sure the house is warm and stuff like that. I don't know, point being, like, there is a lot of crossover between the home and auto, and I suspect we're only going to see more of that, you know, companies like Amazon and Google and Apple already has their car play. Getting into the auto market and trying to make those lines blur.

Eventually, this all gets to a point where the platform just goes everywhere with you. That's the whole idea here. Interesting to see that. Next one, moving on, was definitely not a huge surprise. But again, like you said, Seth, it's sort of Amazon-like seeing perhaps what's going on. And I guess it doesn't take having a whole lot of intelligence and analytics to understand that smart plugs are a thing now. And so this is a logical move. Alexa-powered smart plugs are a thing now. And so this is a logical move. Alexa powered smart plugs. You can link these to an Echo or the A Word app.

You can turn devices on or off and set timers. These will start at $25 each. Again, pre-orders are open and they will ship in October. It's a great price point for a smart plug. And I think they'll have good success with this. So, I mean, it's like you said earlier, they're rounding out their product lines. And this is one way they're doing it. So this is definitely an all-in for home automation for the Amazon ecosystem.

And Jason, here's where we get weird. It's about to get weird. Yeah, yeah. This is the kitchen sink that they threw in, right? So the big news that was going around was this Amazon basics microwave that of course has Alexa built in and you can use it. I guess you can yell at it to, or yell into the room for it to cook food quickly. So maybe like cook a minute or something like that. I really, I really don't know.

It's a $60 microwave. I don't understand that. Yeah. Like, like at what point just just stop and think about the last time that you used a microwave and consider how useful voice would have been versus just pushing the all the microwaves now have that like express button where you just push like number one and it cooks for one minute or two minutes or three minutes like why would i use voice to control my microwave i'm not seeing this one i don't know you sound like a luddite when you say it that way though like i gotta like a savage yeah well i mean like

yeah because i mean we use the like we're already lazy enough where we're like pushing like one one one or two two two instead of two minutes you know like we're already lazy enough to do it that way like i guess i guess this is just the next iteration of that process right this is this is where we're gonna go from pressing one one one and hitting start to just saying you you know, start the microwave for a minute. No, but it literally takes me more time to say, Alexa, cook my potato for one minute versus I literally push the number one and start. Yeah, I guess. And of course, there may be that. Well,

maybe not. There is a delay now, but maybe with the local control, it'll work faster. I don't know. But like the oven, the oven, I could see. Yeah. Preheat to whatever and let it do its thing. Yeah. Yeah. But like the microwave is like you're always at the microwave. I don't know. I think, Jason, I think people are lazy when it comes to cooking. And if they make the microwave even lazier, I think it'll be a winner. It's a $60 microwave. This thing can't be that great anyway.

It's going to take a while to cook your food. Yeah, that's what I actually googled that because i spent so long since i bought a microwave like that i had no idea where that stood in the spectrum of microwave pricing uh so i went online and yeah that's a fairly low end i mean there are certainly microwaves you can buy for cheaper uh 35 40 but they go up from there. So definitely not a high-end microwave. And I think, I don't know, I'm not seeing the use case, but I got to tell you, I think this was a brilliant PR move from Amazon. Yeah. Because it got everybody talking, including us. Yeah, everybody's talking about this stupid microwave.

This stupid voice control microwave. It's probably the worst microwave that you could this would work well like it must maybe in a dorm like a 60 microwave that's what i had my dorm like uh it's probably got 30 watts for this thing and it takes five minutes to cook you know reheat some food but uh you know i i don't see myself ordering this at all but like you said this is great PR. Everybody's not even talking about the really cool products that they did come out with

and the fact that you can do local voice control. But they are talking about this stupid microwave. Right. Those stupid microwave. So anyway, we'll see.

Yeah. There you go. Last but not least, you know, there were, like you said, there were like 70 updates they claimed i think we got all the hardware ones on here or at least most of them so last but not least for our show the echo wall clock uh this is kind of neat i think this gives you a visual

display of any timers you have set and i know that we sort of joke about this um in the world of smart home like seth you've joked about this multiple times people talk about the echo and the platform and how useful it is and they say well it makes a great kitchen timer right i can ask my echo to set a kitchen timer and it does a really good job at that uh and it and it is i think all of us who own own those devices use that this will give you a visual display of any timers that you have set using led minute markers and a countdown for the last 60 seconds it does update to the correct time of year so when you're not using it as timers uh as a timer it does show you that you know the time of day and it'll do that automatically once again we'll ship later this year and the price tag on this is 30 so very

very affordable and i guess if you use a lot of timers in your kitchen you know 30 it's probably worth it yeah i mean it's not a very attractive looking clock, I guess, but it seems kind of nice. You know, one thing I thought of, and I'm curious if the microwave has it and then the smart oven that we need to have as well, is if the clock gets set on the stupid microwave. Like, is that something? I mean, that's something they could have thought of, right? Like, if they made a clock, like, why not build... That alone, I would buy a $60 microwave for a stupid clock that could stay set. I have a very expensive microwave

that is a drawer microwave. I don't know if you've ever seen these. It's like, it fits in your cabinet under your counter, like where a drawer would go. No, I have not, to be honest with you. We don't have much space, so, like, there's ways you can save space, and we were going to build it into the cabinetry,

but we're like, we want the cabinets, right? So we found this drawer microwave, and we ordered it, and you press a button, and the thing rolls out. It's motorized and everything. But the one thing these stupid appliances don't do is keep the dang time. If the power goes out, it's blinking at me. It just woke up from the showroom like it's like come on uh that's right build something yeah something into this

you can get a sharper image clock that can keep up with the world time zone somehow my stupid microwave that's like an 1100 microwave because it's built to go into a cabinetry uh doesn't doesn't work correctly so that's my's my appliance rant for the day. There we go. But I do like the clock. If you have room in your kitchen for the clock, and the timers are a killer feature of the Echo. I use that when we're cooking.

I mean, I set up timers. I'm like, set a rice timer for 15 minutes. Set a chicken timer for seven minutes. There's different timers going I'm like, set a rice timer for 15 minutes, set a chicken timer for seven minutes. Like it is, it is, there's different timers going off at different times. And then plus we're, you know, we're in the middle of potting training. So there's a timer for that. Like there's timers everywhere. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Timer guru over here. I like it. Throwing timers like, like no tomorrow. All right. Well, that'll do it for our wrap-up of headlines as well as the big Amazon event today. All of the links, we'll have several of these links to the stories that we've talked about here,

and those can be found at hometech.fm slash 227. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which we send out every week and give you show reminders and occasionally give you some different updates on other things that are going on in the industry. So we'd appreciate having you. Again, head on over to hometech.fm slash 227. Yep. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live every, perhaps Wednesday. We're not recording on Wednesday today, today. If it's not Yom Kippur. Yeah, exactly.

It's not a holiday. Starting around 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time Zone, the one true time zone. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. And on Twitter, at Hometech Podcast, just look for the hashtag Hometech Live. Twitter thing. I don't know what that's called. Hashtag Home Tech Live. There you go.

Look for that. And I usually, you know, 15 minutes before the show, I'll tweet something out saying we're getting started. And you can come listen to awesome music and then listen to the show live on air. That's right. We would love to have you. We've got a few folks hanging out with us tonight. Doc, TJ, Symphony Hi-Fi, a few others.

We definitely appreciate that. Uh, speaking of TJ, we have got a gem of a picture of the week this week. Yeah. So thank you, TJ, uh, from, from our, our Slack channel, the hub, uh, he, he posted this earlier and man, I, I, I, this is like the column of shame, right? This is, this is, this is what should not be done in any home, but this is brutal. Nevertheless, it does get done. So, uh, here we are, uh, Jason, take a look at this and see if you can identify like the devices on, this is like a, a column that's in someone's house, like in their living room.

And there's like an A-phone intercom. This may be a condo or something, but there's an A-phone intercom. Looks like maybe a two-gang wall switch dimmer, and it's not even, yeah, it's a dimmer. Maybe a volume control and a switch. I'm not sure. A thermostat? Yeah, you got a thermostat there, and then you get down to the more questionable additions i'm not sure what

that one is carbon monoxide you've got some sort of a smoke or carbon monoxide detector and then you got a plug strip with several devices plugged into it and taken as a whole this looks absolutely atrocious i wouldn't want to come through the door and be face-to-face with the column of shame. But there it is. There it is. I mean, I know there are some guys out there who are, guys and gals, frankly, who are more sensitive to wall acne than others. I am sort of on the lower end of that spectrum. I understand the need to keep the number of devices down in a certain area and sort of spread it out and make

things symmetrical and all that. And this just, even to me as somebody who's not super sensitive to that, looks like somebody just sort of vomited devices all over this wall. And what makes it even worse is that it's not a wall. It's like a column in the middle of a room, which makes it just stand out even more. So this one is definitely a beauty. And we thank TJ for sharing this in the hub. This is a good one.

Yeah, absolutely. I cracked up when I saw this thing. I mean, I couldn't believe it. But at the same time, I guess I could. the hub this this is a good one yeah absolutely i i i cracked up when i saw this thing i i just i mean i couldn't believe it and then but at the same time i guess i could i could believe it so i thought it was pretty funny and tj's in the chat room saying to be fair you only see it from the master bedroom i don't think that makes it better tj i i if i you know you know what it's the last place i'd want to see it from yeah You know what would happen in my house if my wife walked out every morning and saw that, like that just would not, no, no.

Yeah, not good. So I've got another pick of the week slash mailbag thing. And Jason, I didn't put this in the, in the show and I'm having, having problems with the, the, the computer right now. So Slack's closed. But, um, this came from, uh, Kevin from Kevin Morgan. He emailed this over to me. He said, this is funny, it's timely, because he sent this to me back on September 11th, so last week. And it's a picture of an Amazon magazine, an Amazon Echo magazine, the complete guide. And it's got all of the products that existed a week ago, right?

It is a 147-page, $20 magazine that's in the electronics periodicals. And I'm going to try and send this picture over to you in Slack so you can take a look at it. But, man, I was kind of laughing when he sent that over, but now it's even funnier because they're going to have to go and update all this stuff. None of the products that they wrote on the 147-page guide on for $20 is going to exist in a couple of months.

Ouch. Yeah. It's over in Home Tech Live. There it is. Crazy. And this was written by, this was, Amazon put this out? No, this is independent. It says independent handbook for Amazon Echo users.

So it has nothing, no affiliation with Amazon. Their logos aren't on anything. Well, I guess they're on the products. But it's basically a guide, kind of like the dummies books, like set up your Echo, get the most out of Alexa. Yeah. Make your own skills. It's basically telling you how to run through the products A to Z.

But now, like... Oh, that's a good one. With 147 pages, I think they're going to need at least, you know, two or three hundred more pages to cover the sub and Echo for the car and all that good stuff. Have fun with that. All right. Well, those are good ones here. Moving on, if you do have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas, show topics, give us a shout.

We would love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that's feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback. We've got an online form that you can fill out there to get in touch with us. And we would, again, love to hear from you. Seth and I read all of those messages and always enjoy hearing from supporters of the show. So definitely, if you've got anything on your mind, don't hesitate to reach out. We do want to give a big thank you for everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support us through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech

for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 gets you a shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an instant, instant automatic invite automated from the robots. Automated. That's right. Exactly. It's, we're an automated show. We have automated robots that take care of this stuff for us now. High tech. Yep. To our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show gather every day for the inside

baseball conversations on all about home technology. And, you know, you get to see funny pictures, you know, like TJ posts before, before I hit the show here. And if you want to help us out, but you can't support the show financially, we definitely understand that and would absolutely appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating on the podcast app of your choice. We're out there for those five stars, right, Seth? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what, that's what the going rate is. I mean like you could kind of animal gives like a two-star rating.

If you've got a complaint or feedback, just let us know feedback and then give us a five-star rating. Yeah, that's right. So we would absolutely appreciate that, but we appreciate, uh, you know, everybody for spending some time with us here and tuning in this week. Seth had a great time chatting with you. Not sure what the plan is next week. We're a little bit iffy. I know I'm going to be in Boston spending some time with the One Vision team. So I am probably out of pocket. I'm not sure, you know, if you're going to try to get a show out, but definitely had fun, uh, recording this one with you and worst case scenario, we'll be, uh, we'll be back online here in a couple of weeks. Yep. Sounds good. Well, if I don't talk to you next week, Jason, I'm sure I'll talk to you in the future. Uh, but we'll, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll hopefully, hopefully we won't have like Google announcing 70 products, uh, next week. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think we've gotten through the, you know, Cedia madness and now Amazon dropping some, some crazy news. And so, yeah, maybe,

maybe we'll have a quiet week, but, but either way, definitely look forward to reconnecting with you soon. All right. Sounds good, man. All right. Take care, Seth.