Facebook's Portal makes a lot of sense during a quarantine: it is great for video chatting and staying in touch, especially with kids and the elderly
The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. Tweets: @mattk , @jgreendc , @susan_hennessey , @ayshardzn , @sarafischer , @mattnavarra , and @kevinbankston Tweets: Matt / @mattk : Sorry. Sometimes the security/privacy implications outweigh the benefit. There are other solutions that give you 80% of this in software. https://twitter.com/... Justin Green / @jgreendc : those facebook portal ads we all used to make fun of look pretty attractive right now eh Susan Hennessey / @susan_hennessey : This article perfectly sums up our lives right now. I've refused to even have an Alexa in the past but my sister sent us all Facebook Portals last week and we love them and talk to each other constantly. Embracing the 3rd party doctrine sparks joy! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @ayshardzn : and that I did. My daughter now knows how to call her grandmothers on it https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Sara Fischer / @sarafischer : Very strong social headline game here cc @nrothschild3 @noa_yadidi @JGreenDC https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : I bought a portal+ last week. 👌 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Kevin Bankston / @kevinbankston : Probably not exactly the headline the Portal team was hoping for, but it'll do :-) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Portal arrived in October 2018 as what BuzzFeed itself called a tone-deaf debut from a company with an 'unquenchable desire for personal info,' and the first reviews agreed on a split verdict: excellent for Messenger video calls, weak as a general-purpose smart display against the competition. Eighteen months later, BuzzFeed's tweet roundup captures the reversal — the device journalists 'used to make fun of' now looks attractive to people who cannot visit grandparents or grandchildren.
First-order effects
- Quarantine turns Portal's single best feature — Messenger video calling, praised in the original Portal and Portal+ reviews — into its whole value proposition, giving Facebook a demand window for hardware that had been a punchline.
- The privacy objection does not disappear with the pandemic: Matt's reply in the same BuzzFeed thread argues security implications outweigh the benefit because software already delivers '80% of this,' keeping the trust question attached to every sale.
Second-order effects
- Amazon quietly wins either way — Alexa support was baked into Portal from the start per the launch coverage, so quarantine-driven Portal sales extend Amazon's voice assistant into homes Facebook convinced, not Amazon.
- Facebook's account requirement and thin app selection become adoption bottlenecks precisely when buyers are non-technical elderly relatives, pushing the burden onto younger family members to set up Facebook or WhatsApp accounts they may not want.
Third-order effects
- The 2021 Portal Go review shows the pattern held: decent camera tracking and portability, but still too few apps and still gated by a Facebook or WhatsApp account — evidence that a crisis demand spike cannot fix a hardware platform's ecosystem deficit.
- If trusted-software substitutes keep closing the gap, dedicated video-chat hardware stays a niche bought for specific relationships (kids, grandparents) rather than a general smart-display category, with trust in the manufacturer as the binding constraint.
The trend: Mandatory distance briefly rescues purpose-built video-chat devices, but their staying power depends on app ecosystems and manufacturer trust rather than the crisis that revived them.