There is a video I watched this week that I want to tell you about sideways, because the thing it’s ostensibly about is the least interesting thing in it. On the surface: an Australian maker wanted a good bedside clock and baby monitor, refused to buy a cloud-tethered one with a subscription and an app that phones home, and instead bought two secondhand Amazon Echo Show 5s off eBay for about a hundred dollars, stripped Amazon’s software off them, installed a free open-source operating system, and 3D-printed a little enclosure so the screen would sit at the right angle next to his bed. The clock is lovely. Go build one. But the clock is not the story.
The story is what the Echo Show was before he touched it, and what that says about nearly every device you own.
An Echo Show is a small, capable computer. It has a screen, speakers, microphones, a processor, wireless radios — the raw material to be almost anything. Amazon takes that general-purpose machine and does something specific to it: they narrow it. They install an operating system you can’t change, point it at their cloud, wire it to their store and their assistant, and ship it to you as a single-purpose appliance whose main product, if we’re honest, is the data it gathers about the person it sits across from. You didn’t buy a computer. You bought a computer wearing a costume, sworn to one job.
Jailbreaking it — the thing this maker did in about an hour, following guides written by strangers who’d figured it out and given the method away — does not add anything. It removes something. Off comes Amazon’s Fire OS; on goes LineageOS, a community-built version of Android that keeps devices alive long after their makers walk away. And underneath the costume is exactly what was always there: a general-purpose machine that will now do whatever you ask. He didn’t upgrade the hardware. He un-narrowed it. He gave it back its generality, which the manufacturer had been renting back to him one feature at a time.
Here is the reframe I keep turning over. We talk about devices “dying,” and it makes the ending sound like a physical fact — a worn-out part, an exhausted battery, the honest end of a working life. But that is almost never what happens. The Echo Show he rescued wasn’t broken. It wasn’t slow. Nothing about the silicon had failed. What had ended was Amazon’s interest in it — the updates would stop, the model would be discontinued, the cloud service it depended on would someday be switched off, and on that day a perfectly functional computer would become a paperweight. Not because it died. Because someone decided its life was over.
Devices are rarely dead. They are orphaned — abandoned by the vendor while the hardware is still completely fine. And once you see the distinction you can’t unsee it, because it’s everywhere. A phone drops off the update list at three years and is declared obsolete while its processor could run for a decade. A “smart” gadget bricks itself the week the startup behind it folds. A tablet gets too slow for the app it was sold to run, then runs beautifully the moment you put a leaner OS on it. The end was never the machine giving out. It was a calendar entry in someone else’s business plan.
What moves me about the bedside-clock guy is that he’s part of something larger than a hobby, and mostly it has no name. The same week I watched him strip an Echo Show, I read about someone reverse-engineering a Fairphone’s camera onto mainline Linux so the phone outlives its vendor support, and about Framework shipping desktops you’re meant to open and repair. LineageOS keeps millions of “obsolete” phones running. Home Assistant exists so your smart home answers to a box on your shelf instead of a server in someone’s data center. None of these people know each other. They are all doing the same thing: refusing to let the manufacturer be the one who decides when their hardware dies.
It is, quietly, an act of preservation — and of care, in the specific sense that it makes no economic sense at all. He spent hours of skilled work, plus a custom CAD enclosure and cork feet cut on a laser, to save maybe a hundred dollars. Nobody does that for the money. You do it the way you’d repair a good chair instead of binning it — because the thing still has life in it, and throwing away something that still works is a small violence you’d rather not commit. The world made about 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, less than a quarter of it formally recycled, most of it not remotely dead. Every rescued Echo Show is one machine that doesn’t join that pile, kept alive by someone who decided the vendor didn’t get the last word.
But here is the part that turned the whole thing warm for me, the detail I’d have missed if I’d only cared about the clock. Consider what an Echo Show is for, in Amazon’s design: it is a device built to sit in your home and watch you — to listen, to learn your habits, to gather data about, as this maker joked, “his subjects.” It is surveillance wearing the face of convenience.
And what did he turn it into, once it was his? A monitor over his sleeping child. The same microphones that were meant to harvest him now listen for a baby’s cry and, entirely on his own hardware with nothing leaving the house, tell him when she wakes. He took a machine engineered to watch him for someone else’s benefit and rebuilt it into a machine that watches over his family for no one’s benefit but theirs. The generality he restored, he aimed at the most tender, domestic, un-monetizable use there is: a small glowing clock beside a bed, keeping watch in the dark.
That’s the whole thing, really. Nearly nothing we own is as dead as we’re told. Underneath the appliance is a general machine; underneath the vendor’s ending is a device with years of life left; and underneath the surveillance gadget, if you’re willing to take it back, is something that can be turned toward love instead of extraction. What survives is simply what someone decides to keep — and, sometimes, to keep close.
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