This is a story about the old vs the new. In my case, it was about an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 vs an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Let me explain…

I’ve been going around and cleaning out old items around my home, especially unmarked boxes that for whatever reason got stuffed into various corners, where they remained for many a year. When I say many, I’m talking about going back to when I was still fully employed. One day while going through one of those mystery boxes I found an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 unopened in its box. I have no idea when I purchased it, although it had to be after October 2016 when this model was released. I do have an idea how it was placed into the box I found it in. Back then I was traveling a bit and and was very busy in my job, so we reached out to a cleaning company to get someone into our house to help my wife keep the place clean. One of the cleaning people had a bad habit of “temporarily” placing items into boxes in order to clear an area to clean. That cleaning person had a very bad habit of not telling us she’d done that, and it was but one reason she was eventually sent on her way. I thought I’d found everything she’d stashed away, but I was wrong with this particular item in that box.

We already have a number of Alexa/Amazon items in the house, although we barely use them except to play the occasional tune or to verbally ask Alexa to turn off the lights in one room of our house. We have three advanced models that can display the time, so I have those scattered around as heavily over-engineered digital clocks (and we’ll occasionally set a wakeup alarm with them). I decided to plug in this old/new stock Echo Dot and get it integrated our home network. That’s when my problems stated.

I have the latest Alexa app installed on my iPhone, and have had it on all my iPhones going back at least to Christmas 2016, which is when I believe I purchased this one. I use the Alexa app to bring these Echo devices up and integrated into our home network. Usually when I get a new Echo Dot it gets almost immediately powered on and set up, but apparently not this time. Now I was faced with using the latest iPhone with the latest Alexa app trying to integrate an Echo Dot from late 2016, nearly nine long years ago. A lot of technical advancement happens in a nine year period. And that might have been my problem.

With Alexa up and running on my iPhone and this Echo Dot up and waiting for integration, I found I couldn’t add it to my Alexa network using my iPhone 16, no matter how many times I tried. The iPhone with Alexa would not detect this Echo Dot. I wasted a week of evenings trying one solution after another, discovering yet again during this process that the Internet is full of useless advice. I gave up with the iPhone and was seriously considering tearing the Echo Dot open just to see if I could repurpose the electronics.

And then I reached into my collection of old Pixel Android phones and pulled out a Pixel 4a. I purchased a Pixel 2, a Pixel 3x, and two Pixel 4as back in 2020 for a project because they’d been heavily discounted by Amazon of all places. I’m talking half price or less. I picked the 4a because I like its small compact design. It was running Android 13, which is where Google stopped updating the device (which I can thank my luck stars). I could still install from Google Play so I installed the same version of Alexa on the Pixel 4a as I had on my iPhone 16. I then sat down and tried to bring the Echo Dot up using that Pixel 4a. Low and behold it worked the first time. That Echo Dot is now fully integrated in with the rest of my Amazon Echo devices.

So here’s the question. How is that that an “obsolete” Pixel 4a running Android 13 but the same version of Alexa that my latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max, running the latest and greatest iOS version, and with the same version of Alexa as found on Google Play, can properly communicate with the Echo Dot generation 2 when my iPhone 16 can’t?

I have never regretted an Apple device purchase until now. I still wish I had my old iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I would still have it except the 11’s mobile radio was beginning to fail with dropped calls and an inability to be cleared unless the handset was power cycled. I couldn’t have that. The 16’s mobile radio is reliable (so far), so I should be thankful for that. But there have been enough aggravating quirks while operating the 16 that I wish I could trade it in for something completely different. But then I read the horror stories of Android handset problems, especially after an Android software update, and I just have to shake my head. I think it’s all been enshitified now. I need to start looking for much older Pixel handsets, such as perhaps the Pixel 5, or maybe the Pixel 6. Something old but reliable, like the 4as.

Today’s handsets and mobile operating systems are a classic Hobson’s choice.