Thinking About Amazon’s Smart Home Ecosystem (Premium)

Every September, Amazon announces a tsunami of new smart home products. But this year was a little different, at least from my perspective. And in addition to the terrific new product updates were some even more meaningful rewards for those who have embraced Amazon’s smart home ecosystem.

I assume it’s obvious to most why ecosystems matter, and that Amazon is today not just a leader in the smart home, but the single most important player. That’s impressive when you consider that its chief competitors---Apple and Google, and, to a lesser degree, Samsung---aren’t what anyone would call lightweights. But Amazon continues to out-innovate them all and, more impressively, outpace them in broadening its ecosystem. (I’ve previously expressed my surprise and frustration with Google’s performance in this regard, given its core strengths in AI and how central this market is to its business model. But facts are facts.)

Wednesday’s Amazon devices and services event didn’t disappoint in a traditional sense. The new Kindle Scribe expands Amazon’s ebook reader product line past consumption and into content creation for the first time. There were new Echo smart speakers, including a new version of the Echo Studio I’ve considered for our Mexico City apartment and a new Echo Auto for those who wish to use Alexa for music, phone calls, and roadside assistance in the car. There were several new Fire devices, including a new Fire TV Cube and new higher-end Fire TV Omni QLED series smart TVs. And a new Halo Rise device will monitor your sleep without using creepy cameras or microphones.

But I was in some ways more impressed by the announcements that didn’t require Amazon’s customers to Click Once and buy an expensive new product: it was impressive how many of the announcements were enhancements to existing products you may already own.

Let me start with the one I found the most compelling: the newest generation Echo Dot smart speaker---this is the cute little ball-shaped speaker---and the previous-generation Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Dot with Clock all include built-in Eero capabilities that allow them to extend an existing Wi-Fi mesh network up to an additional 1000 square feet. And this will work with any existing mesh network based on Eero Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6E technology.

Obviously, a $50 smart speaker can’t provide the same capabilities as a more expensive Eero node: they’re limited to 100 Mbps download speeds, for example, and can only support 10 simultaneous connected devices. But for those “last mile” issues that seem to dog those with big homes, like mine, this is a real solution to a real problem. 100 Mbps is good enough to stream 4K video, so it could solve my Sonos issues in the sunroom (assuming I adopt Eero, that is).

And that wasn’t the only Eero-related news at the event: Amazon also announced new eero PoE 6 and eero PoE Gateway power-over-ethernet (PoE) devices for connected homes and a ...