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Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
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Amazon’s first TV sets, which you can talk to and control without a remote, go on sale this week. I’ve been testing the $830 Amazon Fire TV Omni Series for a few days. It’s a good TV for the money, and Alexa can be useful, but the software interface doesn’t look as sharp as it should on a 4K TV.  

Amazon has traditionally sold Fire TV Sticks and Fire TV Cubes that plug into existing sets, or partnered with other device makers who integrate its Fire TV software. Usually, there are buttons on the remotes that let you use Alexa to control the TV. With the Omni Series, however, Amazon brings its Alexa assistant right into the TV.

Amazon’s Jason Parrish, who led the product management of the Omni series TVs, told me the goal of the TV is to make living rooms smarter through what he calls ambient computing, with Alexa at the center of how we watch TV, listen to music and interact with our smart homes. The higher-end Omni Series has generated about two-thirds of all of Amazon’s pre-orders for TVs, Parrish said, showing it’s more popular than the more affordable 4-Series so far and that, seemingly, Amazon fans like the idea of talking to their televisions.

Amazon makes most of its money from its AWS cloud business and is better known as an online retailer. But its hardware, which ranges from tablets to e-readers and smart speakers, helps bring people right to its storefront and its ecosystem of ads and services.

I tested the 65-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni Series television, but there’s also a lower-end cheaper TV known as the 4 Series, which starts at $370.

What’s good

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Amazon

The Omni Series has a high-end physical design with an edge-to-edge 4K screen that’s sharp and, with the right adjustments, colorful. I like the slim metal bezel on the bottom, and the fact that I can just ask it to do what I want.

A remote is included, but even without touching it I could ask Alexa to play TV shows or movies, to tell me the weather (which pops up in a small bar at the bottom of the screen) or to tune to a specific channel on YouTube TV. It works even if I’m standing across the room. 

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

This is different from Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, which also had Alexa but required the TV screen to be switched on before it could respond.

Parrish said Amazon found when customers walk into the room and say “‘turn on the lights,’ they don’t want their TV to turn on and just stay on.”

“Or if you say ‘what time is it?’ you don’t need a 65-inch screen to tell you that. So that was the type of thing that we wanted to rethink,” he added. Parrish explained customers interact and engage with content more when they use voice instead of a remote.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

There are four microphones along the top of the TV that are always listening for “Hey Alexa.” Parrish said the microphones are as far away from the speakers as possible so that they can still hear you if you’re playing music or watching TV.

“The goal there is to be able to make a request while you’re watching TV and not just kind of halt everything that you’re doing. You should be able to do it while you have that show going on and we also want to make sure that we’re not impacting your TV watching when it comes to responses,” Parrish said.

I liked that I could say “Alexa, pause” instead of trying to find the remote when I wanted to get up off the couch. It’s also useful to give commands like “Alexa, mute” or “Alexa, turn up the volume,” and I started to get used to not using the remote as often.

As with Amazon’s Echos, there’s an easy toggle to switch off the microphones. It’s right under the TV screen.

The microphone switch on the bottom.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Alexa can do all sorts of other things, too, like switch inputs to your Xbox or cable box (which it can also control with an included cable), help you shop for things (“Alexa, shop for soap,”) or show you the current stock price of a company even while a show is playing. It’s useful. There’s a smart home dashboard, too, so you can see all of your cameras and lights.

Alexa will pop up some responses at the bottom of the screen, which is useful.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

The Omni TV, unlike the 4-Series, supports webcams through a USB port in case you want to video chat with other folks who own the same TV or who have other products with Alexa installed, like phones, Amazon tablets or Amazon’s Echo Show smart screens. It worked with a Logitech webcam Amazon sent me to test. Likewise, you can check in on cameras around your home by giving commands like “show the nursery camera,” for example. And a small video feed will pop up over the show you’re watching if someone rings the doorbell.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Movies and TV shows looked really good on the LED display, considering the TV’s sub-$1,000 price. The 65-inch model I tested and the larger 75-inch version support the clearest standards, like Dolby Vision, HDR 10, HLG, and Dolby Digital Plus, for good balance in bright scenes and better color and contrast than cheaper sets. I liked the image best after I turned up the color saturation a little bit from the presets. Also, the blacks aren’t as pure black and inky as you might find on much more expensive TVs with nicer miniLED or OLED screens.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

The built-in speakers are better than most TV speakers and get nice and loud, but I still prefer a soundbar for deeper bass and richer sound.

What’s bad

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Alexa understood most of my commands just fine, especially general ones that you’d typically give to an Echo.

However, there are some things that it just doesn’t support on a TV, and I had to learn those limitations by trial and error. For instance, you can adjust the TV color modes, like presets for movies or sports, but you cannot adjust the brightness with Alexa. 

Likewise, it works well if you say “Alexa, play the movie ‘Hackers,'” but didn’t correctly understand “Alexa, play the latest episode of ‘Succession'” — instead, it began playing the very first episode of the show. Amazon explained those inconsistent results can come down to how some apps — in this case, HBO Max — catalog their shows.

Parrish explained how Alexa tries to understand the user’s intent when a voice request is made. Amazon optimized the TV to understand that you probably want to view something instead of listening to it.

“‘Hamilton’ is obviously now on Disney as a movie, but it’s a very popular soundtrack as well,” Parrish said. “So a Fire TV, when you ask to play ‘Hamilton,’ it will get you to Disney Plus. It will bias towards video. Whereas on an Echo it will send you to Prime Music or Spotify or whatever your preferred music player is.”

Alexa is good, but it’s still learning.

I’m not a fan of the ads, like the “Jet-Puffed” food ad on the main screen, or the 1080p UI.
Todd Haselton | CNBC

My biggest gripe with the Omni Series TV is that the home screen and user interface still render in 1080p, a quarter of the 4K resolution. This isn’t a big deal if you sit about nine feet away from the TV, but I sit closer. The icons were blurry when I sat about four to five feet from the screen. You may never notice this unless you walk up close, but I look at nice screens for a living and it bothered me.

Amazon said the software is kept at a lower resolution to make sure the user interface is smooth and optimized. In fact, the TV felt sluggish and temporarily froze when I was moving through menus at first. Amazon advised me to do a factory reset and that fixed my problems. Still, it’s concerning that the experience wasn’t perfect out of the box.

You can avoid the lower resolution user interface by ignoring the Fire TV home screen altogether and using something else, like an Xbox Series X, a PlayStation 5 or an Apple TV through one of the HDMI inputs. An Apple TV 4K user interface looks nice and crisp as expected. But that sort of defeats the main purpose of buying an Amazon TV. 

Then, there were the ads. I don’t mind sponsored ads on Fire TVs and other cheap gadgets that plug into TVs, like the Google Chromecast and Roku devices. But I don’t like when an $820 TV displays ads for sponsored TV shows and movies, and subscription apps and channels I might want to buy. There was even a big ad on the home screen for an Amazon TV Fire stick — something you wouldn’t need if you bought this TV. Most TVs with a smart interface do this, too, and it’s how Amazon makes money, but it’s not a great experience.

“Having content promoted in our UI is kind of core to our experience,” Parrish told me. “We’ll probably have a lot of customers that are familiar with Fire TV and we’ll probably have some that aren’t. We look forward to hearing what they have to say.”

Should you buy it?

Amazon Fire TV Omni Series
Amazon

The Amazon Fire TV Omni Series is a nice TV set for $830. TV shows and movies look great once you adjust the picture to your liking. It’s easy to do in settings.

Alexa is convenient to have and it grows on you once you get used to doing some things by voice and others with the remote. It’s fun to just walk into a room and say “Alexa, tune to CNBC” without knowing where the remote is.

You’ll get the most out of Alexa on the Omni Series if you have lots of Amazon Echos and a smart home that’s tied in with Amazon’s ecosystem. It works well once you get the hang of what it can and can’t do.

I’m just bummed about the lower resolution home screen UI, even though movies and TV shows look good in 4K. I understand most folks may still end up watching full HD content anyway, since so much live TV isn’t even 4K, but the software should still look sharp even up close.

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Apple scores big victory with ‘F1,’ but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

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Apple scores big victory with 'F1,' but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen 

Mike Segar | Reuters

Apple had two major launches last month. They couldn’t have been more different.

First, Apple revealed some of the artificial intelligence advancements it had been working on in the past year when it released developer versions of its operating systems to muted applause at its annual developer’s conference, WWDC. Then, at the end of the month, Apple hit the red carpet as its first true blockbuster movie, “F1,” debuted to over $155 million — and glowing reviews — in its first weekend.

While “F1” was a victory lap for Apple, highlighting the strength of its long-term outlook, the growth of its services business and its ability to tap into culture, Wall Street’s reaction to the company’s AI announcements at WWDC suggest there’s some trouble underneath the hood.

“F1” showed Apple at its best — in particular, its ability to invest in new, long-term projects. When Apple TV+ launched in 2019, it had only a handful of original shows and one movie, a film festival darling called “Hala” that didn’t even share its box office revenue.

Despite Apple TV+ being written off as a costly side-project, Apple stuck with its plan over the years, expanding its staff and operation in Culver City, California. That allowed the company to build up Hollywood connections, especially for TV shows, and build an entertainment track record. Now, an Apple Original can lead the box office on a summer weekend, the prime season for blockbuster films.

The success of “F1” also highlights Apple’s significant marketing machine and ability to get big-name talent to appear with its leadership. Apple pulled out all the stops to market the movie, including using its Wallet app to send a push notification with a discount for tickets to the film. To promote “F1,” Cook appeared with movie star Brad Pitt at an Apple store in New York and posted a video with actual F1 racer Lewis Hamilton, who was one of the film’s producers.

(L-R) Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Tim Cook, and Damson Idris attend the World Premiere of “F1: The Movie” in Times Square on June 16, 2025 in New York City.

Jamie Mccarthy | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Although Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in a recent interview that Apple needs the its film business to be profitable to “continue to do great things,” “F1” isn’t just about the bottom line for the company.

Apple’s Hollywood productions are perhaps the most prominent face of the company’s services business, a profit engine that has been an investor favorite since the iPhone maker started highlighting the division in 2016.

Films will only ever be a small fraction of the services unit, which also includes payments, iCloud subscriptions, magazine bundles, Apple Music, game bundles, warranties, fees related to digital payments and ad sales. Plus, even the biggest box office smashes would be small on Apple’s scale — the company does over $1 billion in sales on average every day.

But movies are the only services component that can get celebrities like Pitt or George Clooney to appear next to an Apple logo — and the success of “F1” means that Apple could do more big popcorn films in the future.

“Nothing breeds success or inspires future investment like a current success,” said Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

But if “F1” is a sign that Apple’s services business is in full throttle, the company’s AI struggles are a “check engine” light that won’t turn off.

Replacing Siri’s engine

At WWDC last month, Wall Street was eager to hear about the company’s plans for Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI features that it first revealed in 2024. Apple Intelligence, which is a key tenet of the company’s hardware products, had a rollout marred by delays and underwhelming features.

Apple spent most of WWDC going over smaller machine learning features, but did not reveal what investors and consumers increasingly want: A sophisticated Siri that can converse fluidly and get stuff done, like making a restaurant reservation. In the age of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the expectation of AI assistants among consumers is growing beyond “Siri, how’s the weather?”

The company had previewed a significantly improved Siri in the summer of 2024, but earlier this year, those features were delayed to sometime in 2026. At WWDC, Apple didn’t offer any updates about the improved Siri beyond that the company was “continuing its work to deliver” the features in the “coming year.” Some observers reduced their expectations for Apple’s AI after the conference.

“Current expectations for Apple Intelligence to kickstart a super upgrade cycle are too high, in our view,” wrote Jefferies analysts this week.

Siri should be an example of how Apple’s ability to improve products and projects over the long-term makes it tough to compete with.

It beat nearly every other voice assistant to market when it first debuted on iPhones in 2011. Fourteen years later, Siri remains essentially the same one-off, rigid, question-and-answer system that struggles with open-ended questions and dates, even after the invention in recent years of sophisticated voice bots based on generative AI technology that can hold a conversation.

Apple’s strongest rivals, including Android parent Google, have done way more to integrate sophisticated AI assistants into their devices than Apple has. And Google doesn’t have the same reflex against collecting data and cloud processing as privacy-obsessed Apple.

Some analysts have said they believe Apple has a few years before the company’s lack of competitive AI features will start to show up in device sales, given the company’s large installed base and high customer loyalty. But Apple can’t get lapped before it re-enters the race, and its former design guru Jony Ive is now working on new hardware with OpenAI, ramping up the pressure in Cupertino.

“The three-year problem, which is within an investment time frame, is that Android is racing ahead,” Needham senior internet analyst Laura Martin said on CNBC this week.

Apple’s services success with projects like “F1” is an example of what the company can do when it sets clear goals in public and then executes them over extended time-frames.

Its AI strategy could use a similar long-term plan, as customers and investors wonder when Apple will fully embrace the technology that has captivated Silicon Valley.

Wall Street’s anxiety over Apple’s AI struggles was evident this week after Bloomberg reported that Apple was considering replacing Siri’s engine with Anthropic or OpenAI’s technology, as opposed to its own foundation models.

The move, if it were to happen, would contradict one of Apple’s most important strategies in the Cook era: Apple wants to own its core technologies, like the touchscreen, processor, modem and maps software, not buy them from suppliers.

Using external technology would be an admission that Apple Foundation Models aren’t good enough yet for what the company wants to do with Siri.

“They’ve fallen farther and farther behind, and they need to supercharge their generative AI efforts” Martin said. “They can’t do that internally.”

Apple might even pay billions for the use of Anthropic’s AI software, according to the Bloomberg report. If Apple were to pay for AI, it would be a reversal from current services deals, like the search deal with Alphabet where the Cupertino company gets paid $20 billion per year to push iPhone traffic to Google Search.

The company didn’t confirm the report and declined comment, but Wall Street welcomed the report and Apple shares rose.

In the world of AI in Silicon Valley, signing bonuses for the kinds of engineers that can develop new models can range up to $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I can’t see Apple doing that,” Martin said.

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo bragging about hiring 11 AI experts from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind. That came after Zuckerberg hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AI division as part of a $14.3 billion deal.

Meta’s not the only company to spend hundreds of millions on AI celebrities to get them in the building. Google spent big to hire away the founders of Character.AI, Microsoft got its AI leader by striking a deal with Inflection and Amazon hired the executive team of Adept to bulk up its AI roster.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t announced any big AI hires in recent years. While Cook rubs shoulders with Pitt, the actual race may be passing Apple by.

WATCH: Jefferies upgrades Apple to ‘Hold’

Jefferies upgrades Apple to 'Hold'

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Musk backs Sen. Paul’s criticism of Trump’s megabill in first comment since it passed

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Musk backs Sen. Paul's criticism of Trump's megabill in first comment since it passed

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bombarded President Donald Trump‘s signature spending bill for weeks, on Friday made his first comments since the legislation passed.

Musk backed a post on X by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said the bill’s budget “explodes the deficit” and continues a pattern of “short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.”

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday, sending it to Trump to sign into law.

Paul and Musk have been vocal opponents of Trump’s tax and spending bill, and repeatedly called out the potential for the spending package to increase the national debt.

On Monday, Musk called it the “DEBT SLAVERY bill.”

The independent Congressional Budget Office has said the bill could add $3.4 trillion to the $36.2 trillion of U.S. debt over the next decade. The White House has labeled the agency as “partisan” and continuously refuted the CBO’s estimates.

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The bill includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, increased spending for immigration enforcement and large cuts to funding for Medicaid and other programs.

It also cuts tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, a particularly sore spot for Musk, who has several companies that benefit from the programs.

“I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post in early June as the pair traded insults and threats.

Shares of Tesla plummeted as the feud intensified, with the company losing $152 billion in market cap on June 5 and putting the company below $1 trillion in value. The stock has largely rebounded since, but is still below where it was trading before the ruckus with Trump.

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Tesla one-month stock chart.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger and Erin Doherty contributed to this article.

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.

Ben Kriemann | Getty Images

Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.

Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.

There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.

Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.

In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.

Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.

CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.

WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

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