'Michael Clayton' in the Age of Netflix

Finally, the Fire TV Cube can do almost everything the Echo can do, including adjust smart home devices and run the many skills that are available; when possible, it’ll do so with visuals. Asking for your weather forecast shows a nice graphic on the TV, and daily briefings can be accompanied by video (just as they are on the Echo Show). Messaging and voice calls aren’t supported, as the company wanted to focus on entertainment first; that’s similar to the Alexa implementation in the Sonos One. But for most people, the Cube will do just about everything that an Echo can do.

We’ll have to try the Fire TV Cube out in person before we can pass judgement on how useful an always-listening set-top box is, but at $119.99, the price is low enough that it should provide a worthwhile upgrade over the existing $69.99 Fire TV, especially if you don’t have an Echo already. Amazon has proven that Alexa is capable enough to drive plenty of Echo sales, and there’s little reason to think it won’t do the same with the Cube. It’ll ship on June 21st, and Prime customers can pre-order today and tomorrow and get the Cube for $89.99.

Beyond AirPlay, Sonos’ software layer just makes the basics easier from other music streaming services. If you play music from another streaming service and then leave the house, it… still plays. If somebody else starts a song with Tidal, you can still open the Sonos app and hit pause yourself instead of tracking them down and asking them to do it.

Sonos’ marketing term for this is “continuity of control.” The company’s challenge is trying to make dozens of music services, two different phone platforms, TV set-top boxes, Alexa, AirPlay 2, and the Google Assistant all talk to each other. “We are trying to give people a choice, and being open at the same time. We need to keep it simple,” Kusano says.

There are a million risks associated with that approach. A partner might get huffy and pull support for a music service or a digital assistant. A customer might blame Sonos for any number of failures that aren’t Sonos’ fault. Sonos itself might end up introducing feature creep, biting off way more than it can chew when it comes to software.

There’s a tidy exchange from “Ocean’s Eleven” that sums up our current age of compromise. A dashing thief ambushes his ex-wife in a Las Vegas restaurant, and — cards on the table — asks her a very pointed question about her new boyfriend, slimy casino mogul Terry Benedict:

Danny Ocean: “Does he make you laugh?”

Tess Ocean: “He doesn’t make me cry.”

Danny might still be the same reckless gambler who screwed things up the first time around, but Tess has started to play the odds. Faced with a choice between potential love and certain stability, she’s put all her chips on the safest bet. And it’s hard to blame her for that, or for that haymaker of a comeback — Danny might have a movie star twinkle in his eye, but he also has a real penchant for winding up in prison. At a certain point, when the stakes get high enough, most people would rather cash out than risk it all on a game that’s rigged against them. But when a Hollywood assembles a cast that includes Cate Blanchett and Rihanna, and then hands them over to someone like Gary Ross, it’s like they’re counting cards on a low-stakes table in the hopes of not getting caught.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership has never attempted to put a number on LeBron’s true value to the community, but Roman says confidently that it’s in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”