j2fusion

itinj24 said:

Am I the only one that found the 1st gen Leviton dimmers and switches to be complete trash?  They look really nice but constant drops from HomeKit made them useless.  Seemingly worsened with every firmware update. The only devices that ever went “No Response” on me for no reason out of ~75 HomeKit devices.  Got tired of resetting them daily. Shame. They really are nice switches. 

Funny, I haven’t had a dropout in at least a year since I did the final update. You do need strong WiFi though. I have 3 Ubiquity access points in my house.  I did that because when I originally installed the switches, like you, I had frequent “no response” and learned how to reset the switch WiFi without resetting the entire switch but singe the update all’s well.

I hope they keep the ability to change the color of the switch with just changing the faceplate like the original. If you wanted to change the color of your room, all you needed was a $5 faceplate instead of changing the entire switch. After the latest firmware update, the original switches work great. I have one in my unheated garage that has gone down to 0F in the winter and 95+F in the summer with no problems. 

Or, it could be because of an upcoming patent dispute. I cannot see any other reason why they would want to remove it since it works so well.  

From the article:
“Apple wants to stop this level of sophisticated tracking. This kind of invasive business practice is exactly what Apple's privacy campaigns and iOS features are meant to protect users agains.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. A desktop/laptop is not a phone. One of the reasons the Mac never gained much traction was compatibility. People had to share documents with each other and, even though there have been enormous strides over the years, particularly in the office documents realm, there are still annoying differences. In the phone world it didn’t matter. The only document most people shared from a phone was a picture or video and that was already in a universal JPG or H.264 format so operating systems or processors didn’t matter.  It was the user experience that made all the different hence Apple, with its unparalleled user experience, completely changed the phone world. Desktops/laptops are much more dependent on interacting with each other and the annoying differences affect the user experience. When Apple changed to Intel, those differences were much less significant and were mitigated by the fact you had bootcamp and if you really needed to, you could run Windows. I’m in IT so people would ask me what kind of computer to buy and I would alway tell them to get a Mac because you and run Windows on a Mac but not MacOS on a PC. Now the world has changed since the introduction of Intel Macs but it will be interesting to see if the lack of ability to run Windows will affect sales. I do hope companies like VMware introduce an emulator.