spliff monkey

sirlance99 said:

lkrupp said:

spice-boy said:

How bout making Siri work properly. 

Last night in my home office. “Alexa, turn off the porch light.” (Echo lights flickering, ten seconds go by) “I’m sorry, the porch light is not responding.” “Hey Siri, turn off the porch light.” Light goes out. “Okay.” So you can keep your false narrative about Echo being the be-all end-all perfect digital assistant and how Siri sucks.

Far more evidence everywhere that Siri is behind and lacking than Alexa or Google Assistant. Practically everyone including Apple lovers say Siri isn’t as good. 

Thats not what the consensus is AT ALL. The consensus seems to be that each assistant is good at certain things, but not others. Siri seems to be the best assistant with the most commands specific to scheduling, making notes and other office-y stuff, but fails on more whimsical searches and non specific tasks. Ok Google obviously works well with google searches and music commands, but it’s a terrible assistant. Alexa is a terrible assistant, but fantastic if you want to buy amazon products. 

I recently had the privilege of received a challenge from my friends who each swore their assistant was the better. I happily joined in the demonstration and had a great laugh as each one had to repeat commands or fail completely to execute. The conclusion? They all have weaknesses and each is optimized for the service it’s attached to. 

Ya’ll need to stop complaining about AI assistants which more than 5 years ago basically didn’t exist in the consumer market and stop acting like it’s something we are dependent on. We don’t. They are all a gimmick except for a few specific use cases. Sometime in the future another 5- 10 years down the line maybe they’ll be as good as we all hope. 

MmmDee said:

Awaiting the first anti-trust/monopoly lawsuit that Apple has yet to experience. Once Apple owns all the hardware and all the software running on their products, continuing their closed "ecosystem", the legal woes and end-of-product nightmare will begin. What a bad idea... I'm definitely not going down this path of self-destruction, been there, done that. Pity some businesses don't learn from history and are therefore doomed to repeat mistakes. More temporary profit for Apple, less choices for consumers.

That’s laughable. 

I doubt they are entirely giving up on AVP, but if they would just focus on games and entertainment (They should be doing many more exclusive concerts and sports with AVP) then they can bide time while the corporate world finds their uses AND Apple can start working on a more affordable option.

Open core simplified and made it possible to extend the lifetime of our old Macs long enough that plenty of new, more practical and less expensive options have become part of the Apple product lineup.

OpenCore kept my MP's going for nearly 12 years. We'll never see that again. It was perfectly long enough for apple to get their act together and the technology to mature to make a decent replacement. Apple saw where the puck was going and maybe jumped the shark, but here we are a decade later and tiny fan-less computers have matured, the devices tat support them and software have also.

I can't be more grateful to the OpenCore team, but new features demand new hardware eventually and frankly it just doesn't make any sense keeping older systems working. The only person I might feel bad for is someone who spent a bunch of money on an intel MP in 2022/ 23. 

lkrupp said:

frankie said:

NO thanks had several LaCie drives go bad on me over a couple years and their customer support is pathetitc.  I will never buy a drive from them again.

Your anecdote is meaningless. If it were as bad as you claim LaCie wouldn’t be in business, but they are and are considered one of the premier drive producers for Macs. Do you want to claim only stupid people buy LaCie products like the trolls claim about people who buy Apple products? Axe grinders are always trashing some established company like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, Apple, Samsung, Sony, you name it. One of the many reasons I no longer pay any attention to online consumer reviews or anecdotes on tech forums. Commenters like to trash Western Digital as well as LaCie but I have never had one of either brands fail on me. And if one did I’d understand that shit happens sometimes.

Lacie lost me many years ago because of similar issues. The big drives are the worst because if the bridge goes bad you'll never be able to recover the data though the hard drives themselves are technically fine. I lost probably 10 lacie big disks over a two year period. All with the same problem. Fortunately they were always mirrored. 

It isn't entirely anecdotal either. It was a big problem for years and maybe still lurks in the shadows if they use the same BS bridge technology to use two smaller drives to make one big drive. Even if they aren't using the same bridging technology I think of lacie like my ex wife. Too much broken to ever go back. 

Like I said, any drive that requires a proprietary bridge that prevents you from recovering the media should it fail... is a fail in and of itself. So you disagree and I agree with the OP. Yay. The world didn't blow up because we have different opinions. You don't have to label anyone whose thoughts don't fit your paradigm a "troll" or an axe grinder. Is one supposed to blindly follow brands despite their failings. No, absolutely not. 

on on another note... cool to see drives attached to a "dock" but this doesn't really have enough ports to be called a dock. I'd rather have a dock with "lots" of ports and a couple of SATA slots for 2.5" drives so I can just mount SSD's as I please. Why would anyone want 17TB on one disk aside from video/ 3D projects is beyond me. To much to lose when they fail. 

digitalclips said:

loquitur said:

Hopefully, the next iMac with TB3 can allow Target Display Mode again.

I've never owned an iMac only MBPs, MBAs, Mac minis and Mac Pros, so I didn't know iMacs didn't have Target mode, when did this happen? 

That was a prett short lived feature. Only a couple of revisions was that true. Not in the beginning or the last few versions. Never made sense to me not to have that feature but Apple seemed to loathe it. 

I own a pair of Bragi Dash's. I've come to really enjoy them and you'd have to pry them from my dead hands, but I'm an early adopter and I don't mind tweaking things a little for a glimpse of the true future. Even though I feel like the Dash's are a real glimpse into the future and I have to wonder if the things people complain about the them( range and reception issues) won't apply to beats or airpods?

Things that are hard to mitigate with any BT earbud. In the case of beats they are actually still wired together so you're probably going to have some fewer problems. That said, put the phone to deep in your pocket or your backpack and you may have some reception issues. Move your head a certain way. You'll drop the signal.

Again I would assume the wiring between the buds as with the beats would make a difference, but I'm asking because as much as I like my dash earbuds; wireless is NOT perfect for everyone. Unless Apple changed the rules of physics truly wireless buds aren't easy to do and I feel like allot of people aren't going to like wireless even if you make paring easier. Turn your head the wrong way. You'll lose
music for a second. St them to charge and go bakc
an hour later only to discover they weren't seated exactly right and now dead.  Etc. Apple is pushing this tech, but how happy is the end consumer? Will they end up returning their wireless buds en mass. 

In the dash's case it's complicated by the fact that it has to connect both as a pair of earbuds and a fitness tracker. I get Apple made pairing simpler  with "secret sauce" (ugh I hate that apology. There's nothing secret about thousand island) which is great and all, but let's talk about some of the features you're losing on airpods. 

Microphone you can reposition closer to your mouth if needed?. Not happening with wireless earbuds. Touch controls? Not on the airpods.  The beats in this article have buttons but they are still wired as far as I'm concerned. Bragi has some amazing touch controls built right into the buds. Bring up Siri, make calls, start and stop your workout, next/ previous track, volume etc. 

charges seem to be sufficient but then you'll HAVE to cary a charger around as well. They charge quickly but they also only last about 4 hours. 

I don't mind all of the trade offs. That said. I do notice the trade offs pretty often. I even keep a spare pair of wired buds around in case my wireless buds don't charge properly or some other issue. 

i just feel like Apple is pushing tech that's convenient to them and not exactly the end user. Gain fewer wires, lose functionality, while picking up a bunch of new problems. Also. The lack of touch controls, Siri activation etc directly from the airpods  make me think Apple wasn't all that innovative with their product. And then the one line they could have charged full price for truly "wireless" buds are still wired? And you have to mash buttons that sit behind your head? Seems a little light on carrying the tech all the way through. Obviously it's the future, but if you're going to introduce the user base to the future I think it ought to be a complete picture. 

Yes! bring on V2. I've been holding out for the past year on the IPP. It gets more and more difficult each day not to snag one, especillay when there were no rumors and even rumors of "no update this year". 

Cool to think the mini might not go away but does the mini really need to be a pro? I kind of looked at it as kindle competition, but I suppose if you want a gaming tablet that isn't an IP7 it makes more sense.  It sure about a keyboard though which is at least in part what makes an IPP and IPP. If not just the size. Hmmmm. I dunno. I liked the mini. And maybe with a larger IPP I might want a smaller tablet for books. But at the same time the "plus" phones are basically big enough to fil that gap too. 

I would like to see memory boosts and tru tone. 3D Touch ... Does 3D Touch make sense on an iPad? I guess so. Sure that would be great. If so. Then maybe we can "lose" the mechanical home button. 

Editing 5K footage? At what bit rate? We aren't talking about uncompressed video here, I can guarantee that. I can edit 5K on allot of edit suites too so long as it's not over 100 mb/s. An editor for an online magazine like HufPo is barely an editor IMO. He outputs to 1920 most likely and his whole workflow is light duty at best. 

So if we want to really talk about 5K editing processing raw (which is where you'll see all of the benefit of / where you'll have to go to master anyway, so why not cut it in 2K and save the storage space?) you'll need a TB3 box (+$500) and something like a red rocket to work with the raw footage ($1,000) and external drives and or another drive chassis to handle the TB's of footage you'll have ($500-$1,500). The super fast internal drive at 1TB will be more
or less useless for editing since your sysytem, formatting and apps will have already taken up 1/4 of the drive. Scratch disk space will take up another 1/4 to 1/2. That doesn't leave room for much room for actual footage especially at 5K. 

That begs the question of where where does the workstation fit in. 

I would definitely take this with a grain of salt. I'm sure the MBP is a decent rig but I hate it when "pro's" exaggerate or don't fill in all of the details of what they  actual workflow is like. It only demonstrates a misunderstanding about the profession in general. 

I would have prefered to hear "it does this well and this well, but I found short comings here and there" and then it might be more believable and it would have opened up an honest discussion about how future Mac updates could be better tuned to heavier duty needs.