Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
For a company best known for selling cheap books and home goods, Amazon’s year has looked surprisingly futuristic. Its 2016 has been filled with drones, tiny home assistants, automatic ordering, and a concept store packed with body-tracking cameras. It has been, on the surface, a spectacle to watch.
And some of it is even quite real. Amazon’s Alexa assistant has been a runaway success in 2016, all thanks to regular updates providing new integrations. The debut of the Echo Dot has put Alexa’s potential to even better use, making it far more affordable to have a digital assistant living throughout your house.
Drone delivery is starting to happen too, though only in a kind-of-sort-of way: in a trial with two rural customers in the UK. And while Amazon’s cashier-free convenience store remains merely a single-location concept, Amazon has continued to expand into physical bookstores, suggesting that it has some real ambitions in real spaces.