Amazon exec downplays new Fire Phone rumors: “No clear path that makes sense”
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They've been powerful ENOUGH for a few years now. I think we can focus on bringing back features sacrificed in the name of cramming in more silicon at this point.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
For once I agree with an Amazon exec.
Once I wean off Echos for smarthome control I won’t be using any Amazon products due to their shitty dark patterns and ramming advertising into everything. My Show 8 lives face down because of them. Alas open voice control is not there yet.
Once I wean off Echos for smarthome control I won’t be using any Amazon products due to their shitty dark patterns and ramming advertising into everything. My Show 8 lives face down because of them. Alas open voice control is not there yet.
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Resistance
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
The smartphone market seems really challenging to break into. Facebook, Microsoft, Razer, Asus, all tried and failed, and once you're in, it's hard to stay in, LG and Sony come to mind.
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Which could have been brilliant, but was so riddled with bugs and slow load times it was unusable.
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I admit to being a little confused. Is this news story just "Amazon isn't making a smartphone" and Panay wants to turn a profit?
I feel like I must be missing something.
I feel like I must be missing something.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Praefectus
Presumably this strategy is the result of using his entire allocation of tokens this month to prep for this interview.
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I never got past a phone interview at Amazon, but I really respected what the people I knew who worked there told me about their process for proposing new products and features. I really wanted in on that. But increasingly it sounds like that's turned into closed loop smoke-blowing. Which, to be fair, is a problem across all of tech. We've picked all the low-hanging fruit left over from past investment in serious R&D and the current generation of management has no idea how to do that, or even understands it's what needs to be done. Even if AI was all they claim, the best use case most of them can think of for it is "We can do the same things but without people!"
And now:
And now:
"We can do the same things but with appliances!" Certainly everyone will flock to ditch the general computing devices they use to do commerce with your services company and use your compromised devices instead because it's foretold by the second step in the Underpants Gnomes business plan. The worst thing is they've been failing to make this happen for over a decade already but this time it will be different.
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What you need is a phone that uses the incredible power of artificial intelligence automagically orders random FLORPISS-brand plastic garbage based on your browsing history. You do not need a phone that can install the gmail app.
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You would think they would have learned the hard lesson with the failure of the "Project-B and D" phones. lol.
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I'm not sure that Amazon is making a mistake, they might be right to not release a phone.
That said, the market isn't remotely what it used to be. Phones are more standardized and commoditized than ever, so while breaking into the market remains a huge pain, the base reasons are very different.
Before you needed engineering and features.
Now you just need money.
And if Amazon has one thing, it's the money required to release and support a me-too Android phone with a crappy skin. The open question is whether it's worth the cost to do so. I'd speculate "yes", but I don't have much insight into Amazon's current goals.
I know that I'd buy a bunch of "ad-supported" Fire-OS phones for children and family member first/backup phones. They're sure to break before they go obsolete.
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Microsoft tried and failed for 30 years to make PDA phones and they all sucked. Then Android and Apple came in with devices that in comparison "just worked" (they were really buggy early on...but WindowsCE was primitive and far worse). By the time they made the Windows Phone, it was too late.
Razer just has a terrible reputation as a company even among their intended target audience. Also, they're an enthusiast company, not a Normal person device company. Except what enthusiasts value, and what Normals value are often at odds. MKBHD did a video about this.
Asus tried to be an "enthusiast" phone brand. Also. Until they didn't--then their execs saw the writing on the wall that the iron was no longer hot, and other verticals were more profitable.
Sony...has never tried to sell their phones outside of Japan. You never see them in the wild, because they never advertise them.
LG collapsed after solder-gate with the G3...oh and the G4...and the G5 if memory serves--actually all of their phones of that era LOL. And their users fled. Their subsequent phones they barely treid to sell outside of Korea. My LG v20 had a launch event in Korea--and it was quitely put on sale in the USA many months later
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It makes even less sense now then in 2014 to release a new phone, especially if you're Amazon and have been moving away from their own android OS.
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I'd go back to a tin can and string before I ever used an Amazon phone, much less one powered by Amazon's AI. Retreating to a cave in the desert sounds more and more appealing by the day.
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My reading is that Panay is saying that his team is working on a smartphone-like device but not a smartphone as we know it. So something along the lines of an agentic AI-focused semi-wearable that relies on voice and visual input to connect to web services instead of client-side touchscreen-reliant apps.
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It's not worth the cost of trying to break into the smartphone market unless they have a disruptive product (incredibly unlikely) or a clear path to making back the losses in the services space (also highly unlikely).
In today's smartphone market, the vast majority of hardware profit is made by Apple and Samsung (and primarily the former). That's been true for at least a decade, which is why one-time participants like LG have chosen to exit the market. Apple and Google make almost all of the profit related to services.
If you come to the market with a me-too Android product, you're not going to take customers from Apple and you'll take few from Samsung unless you're willing to eat large losses on the hardware. Everybody uses the same component suppliers and manufacturing companies, and without some secret chip breakthrough they're not going to beat Apple on device performance.
Consequently, reentering the smartphone market is a project that would require billions of dollars to go up against well-established incumbents with little chance of paying off even after a decade. Without a profoundly disruptive product -- i.e. on the scale of iPhone/Android vs. BlackBerry/WinCE, there is no chance of success.
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It's market dynamics.
Smartphones started off as a "new thing". Before then, cell phones started off as a "new thing". ALL of those markets matured, and the former mostly displaced the latter because the products were more refined and had more desirable features.
Today, it's a pretty mature market, with very incremental improvements and tweaks that mostly impact the bottom line (like removing the external storage options, and even the head phone jack). So no new offering is going to be "unique" enough to create a huge demand - probably mostly due to increased pricing. Like the folding shit. Most of THAT is to introduce fatigue that the standard candy bar smartphones never experience, and will make it wear out (generating more sales) FAR faster.
People will buy unique, but not in enough numbers to keep it going once the flaws inherent to the unique are better known. This is why it took decades to evolve the cellphone to what we generally think of today.
And it's also why entering the market is so difficult. You have to overcome brand loyalty with a superior product, and that's really hard to do when your product doesn't do anything better enough to justify trusting the company making it.
Also, it's fucking Amazon which is two strikes and a million foul balls away from any chance of hitting a home run with a new smartphone offering. Remember, Mighty Casey at the Bat STRUCK OUT. And an Amazon branded smartphone will be too niche to ever recover the costs of development and manufacturing.
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Amazon has made their brand synonymous with low-end junk. Other than the Kindle, I can't think of any other Amazon hardware that has been good. The tablets are awful, the sticks are awful, the Echo is an ad-infested nightmare on top of being awful. It's difficult to dig the brand out of that hole. They could try, but I have a hard time seeing anyone paying iPhone 17 or Galaxy 26 prices for an Amazon phone. That leaves more low-end junk and there's already plenty of competition in that market.
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Amazon wants to get people to buy stuff from their store. If there was a way to do that with a phone, someone would have found it by now. But no one has, and it’s unlikely that anyone ever will. Therefore, no Amazon phone.
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Resistance
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
WindowsCE was released in 1996
The first cell phone with a microsoft os was released in 2002
Microsoft exited the market in 2017
Also, what makes you think sony never tried to sell their phones outside Japan? There's plenty of English language ads for their phones,
As for the rest of your comment, you're reinforcing my point, making cell phones is challenging.
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I figured they wouldn't explain what they assume "consumers need", but thought I should check anyway.
Wonder why they have such trouble with their winning strategies of ignoring what the customer wants, and extracting as much revenue as possible (rather than offering lots of value).
Wonder why they have such trouble with their winning strategies of ignoring what the customer wants, and extracting as much revenue as possible (rather than offering lots of value).
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