Amazon Fire TV Cube (2022) review: fast, hands-free voice controls, nice design, and great live TV integration, but so many ads, slow ports, and mediocre remote
Chris Welch / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2022 Fire TV Cube is the third iteration of a line Amazon launched in 2018 as an Alexa-powered set-top box that could hear commands over playing video. The Verge's original 2018 Cube review already flagged a feature-light remote, and the 2017 Fire TV review dinged the remote for missing volume buttons — so the mediocre remote in this review is a complaint running through the whole product line, not a new stumble.
The ads complaint is equally recurring: The Verge's 2021 Fire TV Stick 4K Max review called the homescreen banner ads 'not subtle,' and the 2022 Cube repeats the criticism even as it praises the fastest hardware and live TV integration in the lineup. Amazon has been scaling Fire TV broadly since announcing over 20 Fire TV-branded devices in 2019 explicitly to compete with Roku, and the review reads as a scorecard on that strategy: hardware keeps improving, the ad-supported interface keeps getting heavier.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between Fire TV devices get a clear trade-off: the 2022 Cube is the fastest, most hands-free option with the best live TV integration, but they pay with an ad-dense homescreen, slow ports, and a remote that still trails rivals years after the same criticism first appeared.
- Amazon's own lineup cannibalization sharpens — the 4K Max Stick already delivered strong performance cheaper, so the Cube's differentiation now rests almost entirely on hands-free voice and live TV integration rather than raw speed.
Second-order effects
- Roku and other interface competitors can position directly against the ad load, making the homescreen — not specs — the battleground where Amazon's hardware reviews are won or lost.
- The persistent ad complaints push more of Amazon's Fire TV monetization into view: if the interface is the revenue surface, every hardware generation that improves speed also improves ad delivery, which reviewers will keep counting against the product.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Fire TV hardware settles into an ad-funded access layer: Amazon subsidizes capable, cheap devices because the homescreen is where the money is, structurally committing the platform to ads regardless of what reviewers or buyers prefer.
- The remote's multi-year stagnation suggests Amazon treats the voice-first Cube as the endgame input method, with the physical remote maintained as a fallback rather than an area of investment — a bet that hands-free control eventually makes remote quality moot.
The trend: Streaming hardware is converging on a model where the device gets faster and cheaper every generation while the ad-funded homescreen — the actual product — grows more commercial, with Amazon's Fire TV line as the clearest example.