Amazon Echo Show 5 review: Amazon's best smart display yet with compact design, bright screen, convenient alarm functions, but no support for Google services
The right size, features, and price make the Echo Show 5 tough to beat — It wasn't that long ago that the idea …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Echo Show 5 is the third act in a rapid price collapse for Amazon's smart displays: the original Echo Show launched at $230 in 2017, the 2018 refresh kept a large screen, and the $89.99 Echo Show 5 announced in May shrinks the category to bedside-table scale while shipping that July. The Verge's verdict — right size, features, and price — confirms the small format works.
What the review flags is what every subsequent Show review repeats: no Google services here, and later models like the Echo Show 10 and Echo Show 8 stay heavily reliant on Amazon's own photo, video, and voice-first software. The hardware got cheaper and better; the walled garden did not open.
First-order effects
- Buyers get a genuinely good $89.99 smart display sized for nightstands, with Alexa's new voice-delete commands addressing the always-on-microphone objection at exactly the moment the device enters bedrooms.
- Google's absence means YouTube and Google services are effectively locked out of the cheapest screen in Amazon's lineup, pushing Show owners toward Amazon's own video and music defaults.
Second-order effects
- At $89.99 versus the original $230, Amazon converts the smart display from an early-adopter purchase into an impulse buy, forcing rivals like Google's Nest Hub line to compete on price rather than features alone.
- Every dollar of hardware margin Amazon gives up is recouped through service lock-in — the same playbook visible years later when Amazon raised Echo, Fire TV, Kindle, and eero prices to offset memory and storage costs, showing the entry price was never the business model.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the Show line — cheap screens, Amazon-only services, periodic price adjustments — smart displays consolidate into a two-platform market where the assistant controls which content and commerce the screen can reach, and hardware is priced as a subscriber-acquisition cost.
The trend: Smart displays are collapsing from premium gadgets to commodity bedside hardware, with each successive Show review confirming that the real product is Amazon's service ecosystem, not the screen.