vmarks

Soli said:

vmarks said:

randomthot2 said:

I find Mike Lazardis' comment very revealing. If you can't figure out how Steve "squeezed a Mac" into a phone when everything is right there in front of you, how do you expect to understand what it is capable of and where the future is headed? 

They were convinced they'd be fine. They had all of US Congress on Blackberry, and a number of other government contracts besides. They believed it was a fad, because real keyboards made them what they were.

I seem to recall that the co-CEOs of Blackberry nee Research in Motion also didn't believe that Steve Jobs' January 2007 demo was authentic because they couldn't believe that the OS could be that responsive to mobile HW.

They were very vocal about their disbelief, and their confidence that they couldn't lose their lead.

They weren't alone. Ed Colligan said, those computer guys aren't going to walk in here and be able to do mobile.
Ballmer had a few good ones, on the price, and there's no chance that the iPhone is going to get significant market share, no chance.

Blackberry: 

They couldn't understand how Apple could do it - which led to the disbelief, the idea that the demo must have been faked. Honestly, it was a rickety demo, with the developers in the front row taking shots when it didn't crash–but it wasn't faked.

They couldn't understand how AT&T would let them do a real browser. They'd tried, and AT&T had told them they couldn't ship a real browser, so they were in disbelief, "it'll collapse the network!" Which it did at some points.

They couldn't believe Apple got a better deal, and that this would cause them to lose AT&T as a customer. 

They thought it wasn't secure, it had a worse keyboard than theirs, and it had terrible battery life. And it did have worse battery life compared to flip phones of the time, which could be expected to last a week on standby, or a few days with little talk time, rather than the iPhone's single day. It turned out, users didn't mind charging the phone every day.

I can't emphasize the disbelief enough: They publicly said that Apple's demo was rigged.

Also: at the time, it was an AT&T exclusive. AT&T had a 45 page book explaining all the ways to use the iPhone, and had the carefully crafted answers to questions about picture messaging (no one really cared about copy and paste at the time, unless you were coming from Palm/Treo or Windows Mobile). Sprint stores actively campaigned against it. 

Sprint employees were instructed to point out the price, the unfairness of AT&T having an exclusive contract, the fact that AT&T couldn’t perform repairs (that they had to be done directly through Apple), that AT&T’s insurance wouldn’t cover it, that it was untested, that there was no way the internet would work how they advertised, and that its battery wasn’t removable – and anything else they could think of. 

randomthot2 said:

I find Mike Lazardis' comment very revealing. If you can't figure out how Steve "squeezed a Mac" into a phone when everything is right there in front of you, how do you expect to understand what it is capable of and where the future is headed? 

They were convinced they'd be fine. They had all of US Congress on Blackberry, and a number of other government contracts besides. They believed it was a fad, because real keyboards made them what they were.

GeorgeBMac said:

glynh said:

I stopped reading at the first paragraph, quote; "In the past, this was accomplished by network extenders that issued their own network name, or SSID, meaning users had to manually switch sources on their device." What an absolutely load of tosh...I mean it's not like you can't logon and change some basic parameters! Let's face it the first thing you would do is change the default username & password and you're already 50% of the way there! I've been using and setting up friends wifi for many years by making sure the router and all access points irrespective of make have the same SSID, Password & Encryption! Seamless hand-off all over the house, garden, garage, studio, bar & even hot tub without 'manually switching sources on their device.' Having lived with Mesh networking for the last seven years on my Sonos system I have to say I do fancy taking a look at something like Gen 2 Eero at some point in the near future...

I didn't find using a network extender seamless at all.   Whether using the same SSID or not it was a flaky PIA...  My network extender is now in a box in a closet somewhere (I think).

I read this article trying to understand if the handoff works any better using this setup -- but didn't find any information on that.   I guess if your network consisted of all stationary units it wouldn't be a problem.  But, roaming from room to room was the issue for me.

Roaming from node to node is half of what mesh networking solves (the other half is speed improvement over extenders). It will almost certainly work better than network extenders (and I put the caveat there because I don't know which mesh system you'd choose to go with. I did experience roaming problems between nodes with Eero when I reviewed it.)

glynh said:

I stopped reading at the first paragraph, quote; "In the past, this was accomplished by network extenders that issued their own network name, or SSID, meaning users had to manually switch sources on their device." What an absolutely load of tosh...I mean it's not like you can't logon and change some basic parameters! Let's face it the first thing you would do is change the default username & password and you're already 50% of the way there! I've been using and setting up friends wifi for many years by making sure the router and all access points irrespective of make have the same SSID, Password & Encryption! Seamless hand-off all over the house, garden, garage, studio, bar & even hot tub without 'manually switching sources on their device.' Having lived with Mesh networking for the last seven years on my Sonos system I have to say I do fancy taking a look at something like Gen 2 Eero at some point in the near future...

Thanks for not reading further?

If you're using extenders, you're not doing true mesh networking. Each additional extender is dropping your bandwidth by as much as 50%. Changing the SSID and password to match the main one can lead to situations where you stay stuck on a device further than your closest one, which is worse. Mesh networking as we're reviewing here does the seamless handoff to the nearest node properly, where extenders do not. Your situation sounds like it would definitely benefit from Velop, Eero, or one of the other proper mesh network solutions.

ireland said:

HomeKit ecosystem of available products lacking in this part of the world compared to the US. I also dislike how Phillips have (as far as the average consumer is concerned) currently a near monopoly on the HomeKit lightning market with so-called “starter kits” consisting of three bulbs and an unwanted customer lock-in hub for €200. WTF!? I can get three regular LED bulbs for €15. So sick of these companies ripping us off. I got to believe this is largely due to Apple making the HomeKit development process so completely onerous. Hopefully, for the consumer’s sake some of these new policies help to democratize the HomeKit lighting market.

The bulbs are zwave. The unwanted hub is required to convert ethernet to zwave so the bulbs can be on the network. The hub also has the secure chip that handles the encryption homekit requires. If you want to do away with the hub, you can put bluetooth in each bulb and then use a bluetooth to wifi hub (darn hubs again), or put wifi in each bulb and put the security chip in each bulb, which makes every bulb cost more.

The bulbs are zwave, not plain LED. You can get cheaper zwave bulbs, but still need a way for ethernet and wifi devices to talk to them. Philips use the hub for every home automation system they work with, not just HomeKit. This isn't on Apple, it's on Philips. Lifx don't use a hub at all - but they're expensive because each one has wifi built in.