Amazon Dash teardown...

Amazon Dash teardown...  We signed up for the Amazon Dash button a while back, but we haven't received any of them yet.  If you're not familiar with this widget, it's just a little button that you can click – and when you do, the product associated with the button is automatically ordered for you.  A day or two after you click it, your UPS delivery person will drop it at your door.  The general notion is that for products you order repeatedly (for us, coffee, tea, dog food, cat food, etc.) the process gets tremendously simplified.  I don't actually find this hugely compelling – ordering something on the Amazon website isn't exactly difficult – but it is kind of interesting to a geek to see how Amazon managed to reduce the whole process to a single click.

This fellow went one step further.  He actually received his Dash button, and promptly took it apart to see how it works.  Sometimes I just love the Internet :)

What he discovered is much as I'd expect: no magical innovations, just an exploitation of Amazon's scale to reduce the cost and size of a fairly complex gadget (really a small WiFi-equipped computer) to the point where giving it away is actually feasible...