I noticed a funny thing while working in my home office today: There’s a lot of Amazon stuff around. Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Fire 7 tablet (5th generation). Amazon Fire TV Stick. And now, the Amazon echo dot, which was given to me as Christmas gift.
Woah! That’s a lot of Amazon tech for a self proclaimed Apple fan.
I didn’t get here by way of a conscious effort. The Amazon ecosystem crept into my life slowly over the course of 2016. First was my Prime membership with a trial in January and for real in February. Then, for our family vacation to the beach in Cape Cod, I purchased a “throw away” Amazon Fire 7 tablet. Then Amazon Prime Day rolled around in July, and I was looking for an easier way to watch Amazon’s Bosch on my TV rather than watching it on my 27-inch iMac. Two days later, an Amazon Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote arrived. And then there is the Amazon echo dot sitting at the corner of my desk that I received as a Christmas gift.
That’s a lot of Amazon stuff.
So, what now? I don’t use the Amazon ecosystem for buying ebooks, music, TV shows, or movies. For that, I solely rely on Apple and their various iTunes stores. While I don’t expect that to change in 2017, I think that there will be some chances for Amazon to “win” some of my personal time.
I think that the Fire 7 tablet is a lame duck. All of my ebook content from the iBook Store. The only Amazon ebooks that I have are a handful of $2.99 or less books I got for the beach.
I do really enjoy reading Connelly’s Bosh and Lincoln Lawyer books, so when the new season of Bosch is released, I plan on watching with the Fire TV Stick. I feel that Netflix and iTunes content will stay with my Apple TV.
Then there is the echo dot. The state of AI gadgets, in my opinion, is still very much a “hobby”. Yet, with an Amazon Prime membership, I find that I am buying more things from Amazon than I did in 2015. And that is the whole point of all of this stuff from Amazon. To get you to buy more things from them.
Damn you, Jeff Bezos, you got me!
With that in mind, I think I will start 2017 by playing with the echo dot to buy things. I think it will be an interesting experiment and a completely different use case than how I use Siri.
Having slipped into the Amazon ecosystem by someone who is such an Apple fan was a jarring realization. I think it happened because subconsciously I feel that Amazon, like Apple, provide a better experience than those of say the Microsoft or Alphabet Google ecosystem. (Disclaimer: I am a die hard Office 365 subscriber.)
I have been buying goods from Amazon for so long now (I started buying things from Amazon back when it was an online book store), that I have come to trust them with my information in a way that I never felt comfortable with Google’s services.
So, it will be an interesting year, 2017, as I dip my toes into the full Amazon ecosystem with the Alexia-powered echo dot and Fire TV. I’ll use the Fire tablet to configure and manage the two.