
You may be ordering one for Black Friday. But why is it shaped like that?
With Black Friday virtually upon us, you will no doubt realize a batch of deals on a commodity that’s grown to be synonymous with Amazon itself: the Echo voice assistant speaker. Designed internally by Amazon’s reticent Lab1 26 equipment squad, the first Echo launched in 2014 as a hard, pitch-black cylinder. Over the years, it’s spawned various iterations, including the smaller Echo Dot hockey pucks and screen-wielding Echo Shows, and every time, Amazon has expanded its cornerstone. In 2019, the company announced it had sold 100 million Resonates to date.