tjwolf

Interesting article.  But it’s more than a little annoying that the article presents Apple’s autonomous car efforts as facts when, in reality, the examples - 1000+ people working on it, supposed halt due to disagreements - were really just rumors.

Highly unlikely for Apple to leak anything intentionally - much less to a large audience.  And what would be the point?  I could understand it if Apple wanted to get design feedback from a few more people - after all, glasses are the most difficult wearable to get right, given that they'll sit on our faces all day.  But a presentation doesn't even serve that purpose.  Fake news I think (and I don't mean that using the Trump'ian definition of 'anything that disagrees with me'.)

I completely agree that Siri should not require internet for basic things - how many times have I been hiking in the woods and tried to increase/decrease volume for my AirPods or change songs in my local library only to have Siri tell me it can't do that because there's no internet connection :-(

But using "transcribing" is kind of an odd choice for your argument - since that doesn't even require Siri.  The on-screen keyboard lets you dictate using voice and it's automatically transcribed into whatever app you're running.

joshbish said:

eji said:

Arlo users, what's your experience with these devices? Good, bad, indifferent?

I'm looking to replace a couple of EZVIZ 1080p Minis. For cheap cameras, they've worked surprisingly well, but I'd like something with a bit more placement flexibility (which the Arlo's battery power offers) and HomeKit integration.

In my opinion, look somewhere else. I have five Arlo Ultra cameras around the house and one Arlo Pro 2 in the garage. I’ve struggled with the range of the cameras and ended up buying a second base station to solve that problem. The configuration of the cameras is overly complicated and the app isn’t very intuitive. I had one Nest Cam before going with Arlo and Google hands down has a much better user experience overall. I have nothing Google in my home now and I have many many Apple devices so it hurts my soul to say that. Ultimately I’m dealing with Alrlo because I’m all in on Homekit, but I’m definitely missing a lot of what Nest had to offer.

If your primary consideration is placement flexibility, you can't do much better than Blink.  While the video is mediocre and there's no zoom or other fancy features, the cameras are cheap, their batteries last 2+ years (I started with 3 cameras and now have 8 - the original ones, purchased when Blink first came out 3+ years ago, are still on their original batteries!!!), and setup is a breeze.  There's no local storage/SD cards - but there's enough cloud storage (no charge) for quite a few clips (the max length of which is 1 minute).  Alas, it does not have HomeKit compatibility - and since they were purchased by Amazon, that is likely never to happen now :-(

Did I mention the batteries last forever? :-)  And an 8 camera indoor/outdoor setup set me back less than $500?

If these are, indeed, AirPods - i.e. buds that just sit in your ear, not over your ears, nor sealed-off in any way - I wonder how they'd achieve active noise cancellation.  Seems like a very difficult problem.  From what I understand, noise cancelling headphones basically try to generate an "opposite" wave of all the external sounds that make it to your ear.  That's easier when some of the sounds are already muffled or eliminated by either sealing the earbuds in the ear canal or by essentially putting 'bowls' over the ears.

And all that has to be done in these tiny buds.  Pretty impressive, if it can be done.  Sign me up.  I have these Bose QC-15 collecting dust in a drawer since the AirPods came out.  Loved their noise cancellation capability, but they're not exactly portable (and are wired).  Just took a quick look and it seems like the sealing foam is starting to fall apart :-(   Oh well - not using them anyway.