 Welcome my friends to the first installment of a new series called why the f- 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 heckin 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? 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 $40. 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 7 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 techno-phile 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. Bleh. 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 internetting 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 cheap but surprisingly rugged tablet for the kids or the... cat? The Fire 7 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 can even buy several of them for some much needed peace and quiet on a long car ride. Oh, god. Shut up. Both of this is unbearable, dude. Hey, what's this? Though, we do still have some gripes. First, you need to be prepared to shell out some extra cashola for a decent microSD card, because 8 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's strong point. It performs exactly like you'd expect from something with one quarter 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, they probably should have included a peeler in the box for them, because quality-wise, it's a total potato show. I mean,.3 megapixels? What is.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-Google-ified 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 7s 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 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 7 tablets? It's not amazing. Our first unit was actually inexplicably missing the A assistant for some reason, with Amazon's response being, oh, 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 HD 8, it really is a good value. 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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 going to make like a tablet. But yeah, it's gonna be fire. They were like, oh, wow. Fire tablet.