welcome my friends to the first installment of a new series called why
the advertiser friendly content are you buying this
where we look at the number one best-selling tech product in a given
category and try to figure out what the heck and fuss is about let's start with
the top selling tablet on amazon.com the
fire 7 is priced at a wait
really only 40 dollars good god
okay well that's probably at least part of the answer but cheap does not equal
good value so let's see just why those
at least 32 000 people are so freaking pleased with
this thing
that's quite big looking for an affordable and reliable
vpn service private internet access encrypts your internet traffic and uses
a safe protected ip subscribe today at
the link below so let's take a moment to
appreciate how ludicrous it is that amazon sells these for a mere forty
dollars regardless of the exact spec this is a
complex device that no one person could
hope to make in the one to four hours
that it would take to earn one it is a truly amazing time to be alive there is
a reason that it's cheap though spec wise the seventh generation fire seven
from 2017 is pretty comparable to a
nexus 7 tablet from 2012
but that doesn't mean that it lacks modern features outright for starters
it's got amazon's alexa assistant built
in which makes it a portable touch and voice remote for your smart home and
that's actually about it so why the best seller spot
well the main appeal of any tablet is the size and while this one screen is
only a little over an inch bigger than
some flagship phones these days it still makes a big difference
based on the reviews most people are buying one of these for casual web
browsing ebook reading and movie watching
and if you view the bargain price tag as
a key feature frankly it is what i would describe as
suitably adequate for those use cases
now if you're a seasoned technophile like me with strong opinions about
electronic specs you'll probably hate it
at least on first glance i mean you'll be watching videos in
standard definition rather than even 720p hd
the speaker is probably worse than your phone and it is singular speaker not
stereo and even reading on the thing gets fatiguing after a while because it has
the same number of pixels as an iphone 4s
but those pixels are spread over twice the area which makes for some blurry
letters however let's say that you want an interneting
machine on your next trip but you don't want to bring along one of your more
premium devices or let's say that you want a you know cheap
but surprisingly rugged tablet for the kids
or the cat the fire seven is great for that and you
can even order a kid proof case to go with it it's even cheap enough to give
as a gift to relatives who still have cabinets full of vhs tapes or i mean
heck you could even buy several of them for some much-needed peace and quiet on
a long car ride
shut up both of this is unbearable dude
hey okay no we do still have some gripes
first you need to be prepared to shell out some extra cashola for a decent
microsd card because eight gigs or even
the 16 gig version will fill up pretty darn quickly from apps alone never mind
movies second speed
isn't exactly the fire 7 strong point it performs
exactly like you'd expect from something with one quarter of the RAM of most
modern phones and a processor that was designed primarily for wearables
third while it does have both rear and front
mounted cameras um they probably should have included a
peeler in the box for them because quality wise
it's a total potato show i mean 0.3 megapixels
what is 0.3 megapixels should we even be measuring that in megapixels or
kilopixels now available with 300 kilopixels
even this bottom of the barrel hardware though doesn't fully explain why this
thing is so cheap for that we need to look at the software
unlike apple amazon isn't a hardware
company at its core so everything about this device including the
non-googlified version of Android that it's running is about driving customers
back to other amazon services that's why
your fire 7 is loaded with apps like prime video prime photos and prime music
that's why you get notifications related to your amazon orders and that's why by
default anyway you are forced to download any additional apps from the
amazon app store instead of the google
play store giving amazon the 30
commission on app sales instead of google
that is how they can afford to sell this thing for so cheap
not only are they using objectively cheap internals i mean there are a lot
of reviews complaining about fire sevens that stopped charging or
broke altogether shortly after the warranty expired but this ecosystem
control is such a powerful motivator that amazon actually subsidizes every
tablet they sell then pushes the price down another 15
dollars with the with special offers version that puts
ads on your lock screen so
should you become one of the tens maybe
even hundreds of thousands of people who own one or several fire seven tablets
it's not amazing our first unit was actually inexplicably
missing the a assistant for
some reason with amazon's response being well i don't know i guess trade it in
for another one but if you want a basic no frills or like
you know utility tablet for the coffee table
and you don't have an extra 20 spot burning a hole in your pocket for the
larger higher capacity fire hd8
it really is a good value freshbooks is the small business
accounting software that's built for how you want to work it's a simple way to be
more productive more organized and to get paid faster so if you're a small
business owner or you're a freelancer it lets you create and send professional
looking invoices in less than 30 seconds it lets you set up online payments with
just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can see when a
client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games once and for
all and they've got fully featured apps for iOS and Android so you can take
expense tracking and hour management with you on the go everywhere you go so
go check it out they offer a 30 day free trial over at freshbooks.com
tech tips just enter Linus tech tips in the how you've heard about us section
we're going to have all that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you
disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum which you should totally join
i wonder how they named this thing do you think the product group just got
together and they were like yeah you know we're gonna make like a
tablet like yeah it's gonna be fire then we're like oh wow
fire tablet