Considering all the other crap they've come up with recently to shove Prime down our throats (Echo, Fire Phone, Fire TV) this one's actually half useful.
I'd honestly be surprised if it's an April Fool's joke. The technology is there (BT 4.0 LE, Zwave Plus, etc.) - a lot of smarthome window/door sensors have 6 or 12 month battery lives. And really, this addresses one of my barriers to using Prime - I have to remember to order stuff using it, which involves pulling out my phone, going into the app, finding it, blah blah blah. If I'm doing laundry & running low on detergent, it'd be awesome to simply push a button & have a refill show up 2 days later. Make it convenient & I will use it!
But that doesn't solve the problem of remembering whether or not you already pressed the button yesterday.
I'd honestly be surprised if it's an April Fool's joke. The technology is there (BT 4.0 LE, Zwave Plus, etc.) - a lot of smarthome window/door sensors have 6 or 12 month battery lives. And really, this addresses one of my barriers to using Prime - I have to remember to order stuff using it, which involves pulling out my phone, going into the app, finding it, blah blah blah. If I'm doing laundry & running low on detergent, it'd be awesome to simply push a button & have a refill show up 2 days later. Make it convenient & I will use it!
Well Amazon Dash has been around since last year anyway, with a "wand" where you scan a barcode to order, so it's not an April Fools overall, the button is the element which could be.
Also, like you say, the tech is already there, and for this specifically, battery like can be near-infinite. The only time the battery needs to use power is when you press the button to order. There is zero reason at all that the button would need to be even in standby.
The way I would think it would be set it up would be to have something that plugs in to the router, a main box, which then receives a signal from any buttons around the house, which send an instruction over BT or similar. That box then handles the sending of the request from however many buttons there are, as it keeps things simple and therefore keeps the incremental cost of any new buttons to a minimum, since the main box is the only complex bit.
Then your button just sends a BT signal when, and only when, activated by a press, which means the rest of the time it's using zero power. Near infinite battery life given how often you would be pressing the button for most things.
The only thing using power would be the main box connected to the router, which wouldn't be battery powered.
Celebrating 20 years as the messiest frontpage on the internet!
I recall an article a few years ago that claimed that Jeff Bezos maintains personal control of Amazon's frontpage, that it didn't matter what makes sense, Jeff gets what Jeff wants.They methodically test their UI changes. I guarantee you that their UI choices, however unpleasing to the customer's eye, maximizes whatever metrics they care about.
I recall an article a few years ago that claimed that Jeff Bezos maintains personal control of Amazon's frontpage, that it didn't matter what makes sense, Jeff gets what Jeff wants.
Here is the thread where the story is linked.I have a very hard time believing that.
The front page is too critical to their revenue and they have so much data to make really good decisions from. It would be absolutely asinine to not test the front page and I have to imagine that they have enough smart employees who would flip their shit if it wasn't being tested.