Of all Amazon’s new hardware, my favorite’s a $20 remote — that Google should copy, yesterday

Amazon unveiled its fall 2025 hardware lineup today, complete with new additions to the Kindle, Fire TV, Echo, Blink, and Ring families. Tie all that together with the AI processing power of Alexa Plus, and you’re looking at a pretty solid collection, capable of pulling off some seriously impressive technological feats. And my favorite thing there might have been a dinky little $20 light switch.

Obviously, you can turn your lights on and off, and it has controls for dimming, but if that’s all you’re using this for, you’re doing yourself a disservice. With the help of Alexa, you can instead map pretty much any smart home control onto one of the remote’s four buttons.

These don’t have to be simple, single-device commands, either, and you can dedicate one button to performing an entire routine: lowering the shades, turning on some colored lighting, and getting your music playing, all in one smooth action.

Sure, there’s nothing stopping you from setting off that routine with the help of an Echo Show screen, or with an Alexa voice command, but there’s something just so elegant about a smart home that’s ready to respond in complicated ways to a simple press of a button.

Mostly, though, I’m just jealous that Amazon did it, because this hardware is very much tied into the company’s ecosystem, and I would absolutely love to see Google release a Home remote. Could you always cobble something together using a generic smart button and Matter? Sure, I’ve found some similar projects across Reddit, but they’re pretty hacky, and everyone involved seems to universally wish Google had its own solution.