sakamura

I am one of the early adopters of Sonos. I understand they wanted to bring the new Sonos infrastructure technology to aging limited microcontrollers. However, at that time, they decided to pull the plug on our devices. So I'm either left with really great sounding "S1" bricks, or I cannot ever upgrade anything.

We got the option to purchase new devices with a steep discount. Still, having 8 devices in my home, that meant purchasing more than 2k$ worth of new devices.

I've had one broken driver so far, I repaired it (thank you Solen). Otherwise, it's been smooth sailing for me, except the very aged S1 app is borked for many things. I don't have Apple Music playlist names (they are all blanks), things are slowly degrading with the streaming service reliability with tracks failing to play here and there.

But at that point, I cannot purchase a new Sonos device even if I wanted to, I can only purchase an used one to add it to my aged S1 ecosystem. So I'm left with three choices: keeping the devices for as long as I could, upgrading all the devices to new Sonos devices ($$$), or migrating to something else.

Still, on the topic of the App, I have chances to use their app outside my own home, and they did a big FCP->FCPX Aperture->Photos move, but without having the core to absorb the very violent repercussions on their ecosystem. It's for the best, and the UI is much better, and I'm sure the code is way cleaner. But for a customer, it's unacceptable.

I would say honestly their long term customers are fed up with their antics. Newcomers in their world might be happy, but they are losing long-time devoted users through successive walls of mandatory migration that first cost them lots of money to upgrade their system, and then a wall of mandatory software update that broke their devices and made them unusable for a portion of their best power users.

I am wondering if they will be able to get that trust back, sincerely. Because the metric is loose enough, I'm sure the execs will all get their bonuses laughing to their company's grave.

And that's if anyone should actually still use Sonos. There's a market, but IMHO, it's constantly shrinking.

There are now really great sounding inexpensive bluetooth devices that can be connected to a computer or phone, HomePods. Great audiophile-grade wired devices can also be purchased for less than $100. So the attractiveness of Sonos is slowly migrating away as the years go by. Same than their Sonos Controller used to be a great idea, but everyone having phones meant having no reason to have a separate controller. Even them taking so long to put a simple bluetooth receiver for phone streaming means the cheap Anker mini loudspeaker can do something a pro Sonos device cannot in a home. So they haven't moved with the times. Yes, they got new devices, but it's harsh. Audiophiles all moved away to Bluesound, new ways of playing audio is now mostly through apps on phones, or computers, and once in a blue moon through wires, since the new Music / Spotify / D/Q/name it are actually awesome. And Youtube is a major provider of music too. Meaning the direct connection in Bluetooth or for the hardcore ones a wired device makes it good. The accounts are shared on every device, it's easy to set up a party room with a computer and connecting it Bluetooth. Synchronization of devices "party mode" is not that useful. Their 5.1 setup is very glitchy and has some lag (or no glitches are a lot of lag). I tried DJing with Sonos and it's worse than in huge arenas. Anyhow, TL;DR this paragraph: there's other better suited ecosystem of devices for modern usage.

Yeah, the Apple Watch limitation is the reason why the kids here didn't get an Apple Watch for such a long time. We are fully in the ecosystem, but they prefer playing games on the tablet, and have no reasons to get a phone so far. They use Whatsapp, Snapchat, whatever, and play games such as Roblox, Minecraft ... but don't care at all about getting the smaller cell phone.

However, the Apple Watch without cell (and worse for base models - again, they don't care about most health items the newer devices propose) couldn't be paired without an iPhone.

It's stupid. We have Mac, MacBook, they got individual iPads, but they couldn't pair an Apple Watch. For us adults, it's ok. But for kids without reasons to have cell plans, it's an artificial limitation that makes it easy for them to be tempted outside the ecosystem.

Same thing for the entire Pencil debacle. It's so stupid there's 3 different models of pencils that can only bind to very particular models. One cannot just say "hey a new model that supports this or that, let's purchase it", no it needs to be made for your own iPad.

Soooo... let me get that straight... We got a record label who just got the final tally on how many views happened on two major services. This number is actually relevant, as they are getting paid for each view, since they are the provider of the actual music and music videos. The artist gets paid by how successful this act is, and the final paycheck is equivalent to that number in there.

So, that record label gets the tally, and omgwtfbbqit ponies dieing, there's more views on Apple iTMS than Spotify! They announce this, saying they got more from Apple than Spotify.

Then, Spotify miraculously finds more than 90% additional views, days after, and Spotify (not the record label) flaunts that number saying omg we are much better!

We wouldn't presume Spotify would actually downball these numbers in order to pay less of the share to the record label, and, by extension, to the artist, aren't we? Like any artist would get approximately 50% of what they are supposed to actually get? Naaaahhh that must be unintentional!

But seriously, if they can "find" these so easily, that raises a huge question on how they actually tally these numbers, and as an artist, that would put a definite strain on that warm happy feeling of knowing you're in good hands. That's probably enough for asking an independent inquiry on grounds of potential breach of contract.

My dad already uses his AirPods Pro 1 as makeshift hearing aids after a suggestion from his doctor. It still helps him have a better hearing and better conversations with people when he occasionally wears them.

My wife is on the limit of moderate loss. She did the same, but so far she still prefers her smaller hearing aids. They tend to be nearly invisible and will stay locked in no matter the movements, where it's possible to lose the very visible AirPods Pro with a good head shake. Due to size and sealed tips, AirPods Pro also tend to keep moisture trapped, and that can cause issues if worn constantly. Finally, the battery is a few days, vs a few hours, and you need to have your phone nearby.

On the other side of the coin, the audio quality of AirPods Pro is much better and natural (but nearing their abilities limit), have an actual microphone for calls (Hearing aids are unidirectional), they are also 3x cheaper than the official hearing aids.

We cannot wait to see what'll be improved for the update.

Agreed, Rob53. It eventually becomes a law of diminishing returns. As long as the devices are not powerful enough, there is a great reason to improve their performance. But now, we’re entering a realm where the phone cameras are competing with premium dedicated offerings for photography and videography. The screens are full HDR, high luminance, dark black beasts with enough resolution our eyes don’t see the pixels anymore, all that at 1-120Hz.  Likewise, the GPUs and CPUs are now on par with a good quality gaming computer. And finally, we are even getting NPUs that would’ve decimated the coin world would they had existed 20 years ago, and dozens of dedicated coprocessors, not only the old FPU or Neon SIMD of lore. Not even counting 5G+mm/buzzword, WiFi999+++extreme, Bluetooth/99.99, we can connect the phones to an USB-C hub providing device support such as HDMI 4k, Ethernet, Audio in/out for 8 channels at ridiculous rates, external storage. We can even connect a keyboard and mouse. All that to a phone.

For pro usage, yes, of course. Pushing the envelope, as usual. For development. Or for specialized worlds like gaming. But for every day use? iPhone 13 & up are still very potent.

Now, we have the A-series, and then, the M-series, M-Pro, M-Max, M-Ultra. Not counting Watch’s S, Vision’s R, and other « hidden » processors in the range. And cross-pollination between iPad with M-series as well as A-series.

At this point, it makes sense to repurpose the A-series closer to the S-series, and keep on improving the performance/watt instead of pure performance. That would also help devices such as the MacBook Air, that’s starting to get eerily hot on the later models. I wouldn’t mind a highly efficient A19 into a MBA, differentiating it from the performance-oriented M-based MBP.

This is sincerely the same than PCs, where IMHO the technology started getting into the asymptotic part of the diminishing returns curve 10 years ago. There are still reasons to improve computers outside of performance, or specialized parts. integrated GPUs are great examples. I am hoping for great improvement with Intel’s discrete GPUs, where it’ll eventually bring higher quality in the integrated GPU world. We’re already seeing this, where some workloads are executed faster on integrated GPUs than intermediate discrete GPUs. But if we look solely at CPUs, the gigahertz war is roughly over, the number of cores are tapered with efficiency in mind, not only performance. For a regular user, it’s typically not necessary to upgrade. Yes if you do 4K streaming with 2 inputs and interface compositing, as well as playing a game on the same computer, with audio and video processing and compression to Twitch and YT. But we’re getting in the crazy realm now, let’s agree on that! Most users won’t need that. There’s reasons why most people are still buying four core computers even today.

These alarms issues are really annoying.

I have problems with my phone notifying me of VERY important things. One of them, I am responsible to go fetch my awesome, very young girl for lunch and end of day at her school. At her age, not being there is absolutely not an option even if it’s walking distance.

I missed it thrice, once with my girl arriving home alone. Nothing bad happened, but these are the kinds of things where you simply want to throw your phone, watch, and entire ecosystem out of the window as hard as you can and move on to see what’s so great about Android, get a PC, and go buy a vintage Rolex with a two alarm complication.

For ref, I got calendar events that didn’t want to play alarms even if they are set with two different reminders, I changed all the settings to be as obnoxious as possible, and made the banners persistent, my modes don’t disable that, it vibrates even if no sound, everything I could think of, I added it. No matter, the banners weren’t even on the screens or on my watch.

I also added up alarms. And, well, you see what happens there.

Now, I resorted to use my work’s PC to give an extra event through Google, and it saved me more than once. And I also now start a timer. Because FML it would happen again.