applefan84

rogifan_new said:

...I know Siri gets better through software but how many people are going to buy hardware with the promise of better software in the future?

Me. I bought one to see how good it sounds. If it's better than my current iPod Hi-Fi setup, I'll pick up a few more. Also, this might be just me, but I don't anticipate using Siri on the device at all. I already have more ways to summon Siri than I need: iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and the one I use most frequently, the Apple TV Remote. When I sit down to watch something, I tell Siri to set my TV scene through the Apple TV Remote. I also control the temperature that way sometimes. 

To me Siri has it where it counts, which is HomeKit integration. Turning on the lights by speaking to your watch is useful. Asking what sound a whale makes and getting and audio response is just a gimmick. All my friends who have Alexa always complain how crap Siri is because it can't play sounds of different animals. Who the hell cares? Even my 5-year old doesn't.

So yeah, in terms of software, it is already pretty good. Certainly more than sufficient for my needs, that's why amazing sound quality is the most important thing to me.

A bit disappointing to hear. It was on my list too, but I'm not too upset.

When this was announced I picked up 3 near perfect condition iPod HiFi units on eBay at less than $100 each. With a $30 bluetooth module plugged into the aux port, I can wirelessly stream music to any of them from any of my devices. In fact, because I have so many old iOS devices lying around, each iPod HiFi has a dedicated iOS device that streams to it. All of those are logged in to my Apple Music, so I am having a great experience.

I don't miss the Siri functionality since I can invoke Siri from my wrist, or AirPod or iPhone, or iPad, or Mac, or TV remote (I frequently use the Apple TV remote to turn off the lights in the living room). Having yet another way of talking to Siri is not that crucial for me. And did I mention, the HiFi units sound great? I doubt the HomePod will sound as good, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

I have been reading this site for more than a decade but I have been more appalled by a comments section. I did not read every single comment here but the majority of the ones I did are basically saying: "these Stanford students are idiots/entitled brats/elitists..., and it's not Apple's responsibility, etc..." I also read the pamphlet, and while I agree the title "Apple is holding us captive" is a little (or a lot) hyperbolic, the contents are actually very reasonable and well presented.

First of all, the students are not saying that they themselves have an addiction problem, they are saying that 50% of teens have an addiction problem, and that's backed up by research articles that they have cited. I'm sure we all agree with the findings of this research that phone addiction leads to stress, harm in relationships, and loss of productivity.

Now, the strategy that most of you are suggesting, "get some self control and put stop using your phone that much", and other variations of this, does not work for people who are already addicted. If it did, drug addicts would have simply been told to stop taking drugs and sent on their merry way.

I know everyone who commented here has self control and it's not a problem for them to say "These facebook notifications are getting annoying so let me just delete the app, and my facebook account while I'm at it (that's what I did many years ago)", but we are talking about children here, they don't have the same self control we do. They can't just put down the phone, or put it in airplane mode or something, they live in that world, so they don't want to put down the phone. I know the easiest thing to say to that is that it was the responsibility of the parents to make sure their kids don't get addicted, but guess what, many children don't have that kind of parent. Some parents are just bad parents, others are overworked, or simply don't know better. I am personally very involved in controlling how much screen time my children are getting, but I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. I have a job that allows me to spend enough time with my children so I am deeply involved in the process of raising them. Unfortunately not everyone is as fortunate as I am, and while some of you may be even more well-off than me, the majority of people are not, and we need to think about this from the perspective of the people who have the addiction problem. If you don't have the problem, then congratulations to you, but how about thinking of those who are not as fortunate as we are. That's what the Stanford students are doing.

Finally, what does all this have to do with Apple? Look around, every smartphone on the planet is either an iPhone or an iPhone clone, and when Apple does something, the others follow. Take end-to-end encryption for example, nobody was doing it until Apple started doing it. It wasn't even a thing before that. When Apple says: "we are serious about the privacy/security/etc... of our users", other companies start copying that, and even though they may not be doing as good a job as Apple is in that respect, at least these concerns are now in the conversation.

I imagine if Apple said "hey, this is what we are doing to protect our users agains addiction", other companies will start copying that. Long story short, the word "responsibility" has different meanings. You may be guilty of some crime, and you are responsible for fixing the damages. There is also social responsibility. This is the kind of responsibility that Apple has, which is that as a leader in the field, they have to do what is right and what is good for their users.

Going back to the privacy and security for a moment. Imagine if Apple's devices were not secure and they did not respect your privacy. Many people here will complain that Apple is not doing enough to protect our privacy when we use their device. Imagine at that point if someone told you "Grow up and get some self control. If you are worried about that piece of data going public, don't put it on your phone". The truth however is that we can't. Too much of our minds are now stored in the phone, so we couldn't possibly keep ALL sensitive information off the device. Thankfully Apple has done something to address this problem and we can be, at least to a certain degree, confident that our sensitive data will not be misused. Hopefully they will also do something about the phone addiction problem, which is clearly a problem for kids these days (not all kids, but a large percentage) and Apple doing something is their best shot.

My apologies for the long post. 

I'm curious if anyone else is experiencing this but my phone can never recognize me if I'm wearing sunglasses, which I do often, so what I find myself having to do is use my other hand to lift my sunglasses off my face, at which point it recognizes me. If my other hand is unavailable, I just let it fail and ask for the passcode. I also type in the passcode way more often than I did when I had TouchID.