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Hi everybody, Matt Day here. Amazon is launching a new $1,500 home robot, but first...

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Amazon.com Inc. this week unveiled one of its worst-kept secrets: It's going to start selling a home robot.

The project has been public knowledge since my colleagues broke the news back in 2018. But the details were closely guarded until Tuesday, when Amazon Astro officially rolled onto the scene during a webcast for reporters and analysts.

Astro is squat, at just shy of a foot and a half high, and looks a little like a tablet on wheels. By default, its screen displays a pair of circles meant to evoke eyes. The reason: 95 of humanity's 100 most beloved fictional robots had eyes, explained an Amazon designer with machine-like precision.

But even after Tuesday's detailed presentation of Astro's capabilities and personality, there's still one lingering, unanswered question about the robot: What's it for?

Amazon devices czar Dave Limp, who has had one of these bots booping around his home for almost a year, said the most useful features for him are the eyes and ears on different areas of the home. "It's surprisingly delightful to be away from your house on a holiday and have this thing go to waypoints throughout your house, and you kind of get a dog's eye view of the world of your home," he said.

For the security-minded, Astro can also patrol autonomously. A camera built into the device is perched on a periscope that can extend upward another couple of feet for recon from a higher vantage point.

Limp said communicating with and checking in on elders was in Astro's wheelhouse, too. The robot can host video chats, and comes equipped with the same speech recognition chops that power Alexa.

And if all else fails, Astro comes with two cupholders.

Of course, a home security bot may seem creepy to some. Not everyone wants to sneak up on Grandma with a rolling iPad. It's expensive, too. The price will start at $1,000 for people invited to buy under Amazon's beta testing program, and will hit $1,500 for those who buy after the device's as-yet-unspecified launch date. If you're not sold on the surveillance features, that would be an expensive beer koozie.

"I don't think at these prices points it'll be for everybody," Limp conceded, but he added that neither is a tricked out iPhone 13. "I think this is a pretty good version-one product."

In our chat, Limp elaborated on the reasoning behind Astro. Part of the impetus to build it was that home robot tech has been getting cheaper and better. "The nice thing about my job and the team's job is we do get to see the future a little bit." The team paid attention to things like the price of range-finding sensors, and the increasing horsepower of small processors. Watching the tech advance, "You can start piecing together, 'Well, these are the things you might be able to do,'" he said. "And then it's finding use cases."

One thing about the Astro is clear: It's early. Speed matters in business, the Amazon maxim goes. Sometimes, the utility follows. For example, Amazon's cloud computing division was built in paranoid secrecy before it became a massive profit generator. And the Echo began as "a tall tube with some microphones in it," Limp told me this week, before it kicked off Big Tech's smart speaker craze.

Using all its technologists' powers of forecasting, Amazon built a robot because it could. The company will soon find out whether its vision of the future was the right one. —Matt Day

Mike Mayo, who is a famous financial analyst insofar as such a thing is possible, believes that big job cuts are on the way as technology overtakes the industry. "Developers are the new bankers," Mayo and other Wells Fargo analysts said in a 110-page report.