Category: Amazon

Pushing Tahoe’s Finder Icon Even Further

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John Gruber, responding to my article celebrating Tahoe Beta 2’s new Finder icon:

I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.

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In Case You Somehow Missed Every Other Website Listing Amazon Prime Deals Today, Here I Am, Doing It Too

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For real though, Amazon has some good tech deals going:

  • I use a handful of these 2.5-inch Samsung SSDs (in 4 TB and 8 TB variants) for my local backups.
  • All Kindles are on sale, including the Paperwhite and over-priced-but-I-like-to-have-buttons Oasis. (And yes, I do use a Kindle in the tub just like the store images show for the Oasis.)
  • I’ve graduated to the Stream Deck XL, but the 15-key version is 23% off.
  • My beloved Apple Watch Ultra is not on Prime Day, but the Series 8 is.
  • Speaking of Apple gear, Amazon has the base-level M1 MacBook Air for just $749, which is the cheapest I’ve seen it. I linked to this the other day, and have some follow-up: two of these have been purchased in my extended families to replace 2013-era Intel MacBook Airs.
  • This isn’t quite the model we have, but any self-emptying Roomba feels like a modern miracle of engineering.

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Alexa, Where Did My $10 Billion Go? ⇢

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Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-com merce giant. That’s according to a report from Business Insider, which details “the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon’s larger hardware division.”

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Alexa in Spaaaaace ⇢

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Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge:

Earlier this summer, on the day Artemis I was originally scheduled to launch, I spent an hour testing out the capabilities of this new deep space voice assistant down on the ground at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While this was a demo model (they wouldn’t let me in the spacecraft — I asked), as far as I could tell, it was an exact replica of the one on Orion, even down to the lack of an internet connection.

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Living with Astro ⇢

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Carolina Milanesi spent some time with Amazon’s new robot:

At the end of the two-week trial, I was left with mixed feelings about Astro. I was impressed with the autonomous navigation skills it displayed. I was enamored with its WALL-E like cuteness. I was convinced there could be a role for Astro to play in home monitoring and to help care for loved ones using Amazon’s new Alexa Together service. And the $1,000 price is reasonable given how much technology it packs, though Amazon might eventually sell it for less if the robot exits its current invite-only status and becomes a mainstream product.

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New Kindle Paperwhite Announced ⇢

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Amazon has updated its Paperwhite reader. The new version comes with a larger screen that includes more even, warmer light and USB-C for charging, which is something I wish my Kindle Oasis1 had. The ad-supported version is $139, a $10 increase over the last model. There is a $189 version as well with 32 GB of storage, wireless charging and an auto-dimming screen. If you’re in the market for a Kindle, this looks like a great option.

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