This Echo Dot Max deal knocks 33% off Amazon’s mid-range Alexa speaker

Amazon drops the Echo Dot Max to $79.99, giving the Alexa speaker a solid price cut with fuller sound than older Dots. This Echo Dot Max deal knocks 33% off Amazon’s mid-range Alexa speaker. This newer Dot model is built for people who want Alexa features with stronger, fuller sound than older Echo Dot speakers.

Amazon has cut the smart speaker from its $119.99 recommended retail price to $79.99, which saves you $40. It’s also the lowest price since summer Prime Day, so this is a good time to grab one if you’ve been waiting for a better offer. It keeps the usual Alexa tools people use every day, including smart-home control, Wi-Fi setup through the Alexa app, Voice ID, notifications, and troubleshooting features.

Amazon also offers multiple privacy controls, such as a physical microphone-off button, which is useful in shared spaces like kitchens, living rooms, or bedrooms.

Have a first-gen Echo Spot. Alexa who? This jailbroken Echo Spot runs a custom Android skin and reports to a PC.

The entire process was reportedly handled by Claude Code, which instructed the user through the entire process. The custom UI runs on top of LineageOS and works along with a small AI agent running on their PC.

The Echo Spot is a smart speaker with Alexa, and Amazon once sold it as “the alarm clock, reinvented.” Its smarts are not just limited to telling you the current time or weather, and the nearly spherical smart speaker also lets you make video calls and play videos from Amazon Prime. The first generation is nearly a decade old and does not make it to the list of devices slated to support Alexa Plus.

Don’t expect it to do anything more than that; you might as well flex your hacking muscle and turn it into something more useful, as this one person did. An ingenious user turned their Echo Spot, thrifted for just $4, into a more customized control panel that does much more than what Amazon intended.