tjwolf

I think judging a company's spending on R&D as a percentage of revenue is stupid.  Extreme example: a smartphone startup is spending 100% of its revenue of $1m.  AAPL is spending spending 5% on its revenue of $200b.  Who do you think is going to come up with more ideas & products?

According to this article, AAPL also lags 4 other tech companies with respect to total spending.  But how many markets are these companies in and how complex/costly are these markets?  AAPL spends its R&D dollars on a pretty narrow and related set of markets.  That saves money.  Contrast that to AMZN - R&D in smart warehousing has very little in common with their cloud services R&D :-)

You mention the XPS has double the SSD storage - but you didn’t give any information about their relative performances.  Not all SSDs are created equal.  Personal example: started a new job last year and they gave me a super powerful Lenovo Windows desktop w. 64gb RAM and a 1TB SSD.  A complete build of our application  - very IO intensive activity -  took 15 seconds.  Very fast compared to my colleague’s hard disk based times (30+ seconds).   When I needed to replace it with a laptop, I got a 2017 15” MBP with 16gb RAM and a 512gb SSD.   It builds the same application in 7 seconds flat.  Because the SSDs in Macs are the fastest on the planet.

I'm not sure what the primary reason is for that category's disappearance, but it probably has something to do with Amazon buying door bell companies.  A couple years ago, I discovered a cool company selling completely portable home cameras: Blink.  Advertising battery life of 2 years and a fairly low price ($99/camera) at the time, I bought into their setup after I heard it implied that HomeKit support would come.  Bought a total of 4 cameras.  Every now and then I ping'ed Blink about the status of HomeKit support, but they were always pretty circumspect.  Finally - just before the announcement that they were bought by Amazon - they answered my latest query in the negative - they're not planning on having HomeKit support.  Also, they announced a door bell almost 10 months ago - it's still whose as "coming soon".  I doubt it will ever come, since it would compete with another Amazon purchase: Ring.

It could be that Blink had trouble with the encryption requirements in HomeKit that the author conjectured about - but it could also be that they knew a long time ago that they'd be purchased by Amazon and put their efforts into better Alexa support instead.

I'm still happy with my Blink setup - but wish I could include it in my HomeKit automations.

BTW, I don't think location based HomeKit automations work all that well.  I had it set up to turn on some lights whenever I came home.  It worked most of the time, but on occasion those lights would turn on in the middle of the night while I was at home already!  After doing it 3-4 times in succession I turned that automation off and left it off for a few weeks.  I just tried turning it on again - and now it won't work at all.  Great - no error or log messages to give you a clue :-(

calisurfboy said:

...  Apple released a standard but rely solely upon third parties to support it. There are barely any products and what is out there just does not work which is what a smart device and accessories needs to do with the general public.

Sorry, but that's just a load of uninformed nonsense.  I've had my Lutron Caseta light switches for over a year - and they work perfectly.  Similarly, my August Smart Lock works 100% as expected too.  Both were a breeze to install and configure.  Apple's HomePod and Apple TV are HomeKit enabled - so much for "rely solely on third parties to support it".  And I'm pretty certain that there are more HomeKit enabled devices than there are Google Home devices.  But both are eclipsed by Alexa-supporting devices at this point.

Uh, what is the “Convert Format” this article talks about???  When I go to “Surround”, I only get the options “Best Quality Available”, “Dolby Digital 5.1” and “Stereo”.  I have tvOS 11.4.

And I have exactly the setup - and problem - described:  when I play music directly to my two HPs, it’s perfectly acceptable at normal volume.  When I use the HPs for audio from an ATV 4k, I have to up the volume to 80-90% to get decent volume on Netflix, DirectTV Now, Amazon Prime.