techrider

Thanks for the summary.  A table by Apple Insider would be so very appreciated (since Apple doesn't publish one) that lets you see details such as touchscreen (or not), wireless CarPlay (or wired), and screen size

Any HomePod owners out there that also have a HomeKit door lock or garage door opener?  If so have you tried a ‘Hey Siri’ command to open the garage door or unlock the door, either from outside your home (e.g. though a closed or cracked open window, or even a closed door), or by calling your home landline and waiting for the beep on the answering machine to give the command?  The mics are so good, I’m guessing an unwanted individual might be able to pull this off to gain unauthorized access, assuming there are no voice recognition-based or other controls to prevent it.  If it works, does HomePod allow let you to manage Siri commands related to accessing your home?  I suppose an iPhone charging on the counter could also be triggered if the conditions were right. I’m also assuming that a Google Home or Alexa might also accomplish this kind of access.

Do Not Disturb (DND), while generally awesome, is starting to feel a bit inflexible. 

For example, if you own a Bluetooth-capable Panasonic cordless phone at home (you likely do along with Tommy Bahama loungers if you're a Costco  member), that phone's Bluetooth pairing feature (which allows the cordless handset to answer/make calls on behalf of your iPhone) stopped working 'as expected' once DND While Driving got introduced.  I don't necessarily blame Apple for mistaking the Panasonic Bluetooth-paired phone as a 'Car Bluetooth' (that could be Panasonic's fault), which turns on DND by just being at home.  However I wish you could optionally configure DND to exclude selected paired devices, or otherwise optionally configure iOS to categorize Bluetooth devices as car, speaker, etc... to influence how DND works.

Another example is with Notifications and DND.  As HomeKit becomes more widely deployed in the house, there are certain notifications that I'd like to override DND to play a sound in the middle of the night (when DND is scheduled to be enabled), such as motion detected in my garage (burglar?) or a water leak sensor detecting moisture under my water tank.

Hmmm... Will moving to WPA3 on an access point render a hubless, Homekit-compatible device obsolete, unless either a) the less-secure WPA2 is somehow supported in parallel or b) the HomeKit device supports a WPA3 firmware update?  While I say HomeKit, I'm implying any Wi-Fi device in a home or office.  Modern APs don't support WEP anymore.  That makes very old Wi-Fi laptops and smartphones, which can't do WPA, obsolete.  While a laptop is 'expected' to go obsolete within 4-7 years, would a Wi-Fi garage door opener, light switch, outlet, fan, heater, sensor, camera, etc., bought just before WPA3 gets adopted (in the name of security) experience a dramatic obsolescence event?

Sharing caveats and consequences from my experience setting up, not specifically included in the 2 official articles Apple has posted at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532 and https://support.apple.com/en-jo/ht207428.

1. Caveat - not for under 13 AppleIDs.  If you have a family member with an under 13 AppleID, at least in Canada, Messages in iCloud looks available but doesn't work because it requires 2 factor authentication which an under 13 AppleID doesn't support.

2. Consequences from my setup experience

I started by turning on Messages in iCloud by enabling it on my iPhone first, but not before deleting old messages or message images/attachments I no longer needed.  The setup worked as expected, and after some time the Downloading (or Uploading) Messages from (to) iCloud message went away.  On to the iPad.

I took a gamble that enabling Messages in iCloud on the iPad without a "pre-cleaning" wasn't necessary, hoping that it would recognize another device is already using the feature and simply sync with that content.  Wrong.  It uploaded everything from the iPad, which was then downloaded to the iPhone.  Oh well.  I cleaned up the messages on the iPhone again, and the changes sync'd to the iPad.  On to the Macs.

On my Mac mini, based on what I learned from the iPad, I painstakingly deleted A LOT of messages that dated back 5+ years.  I never cleaned these because of Messages for Mac's lack of bulk-delete capabilities (yes I'm aware of methods posted by others - option+command+delete doesn't work on any of my Macs, nor does deleting the Messages folder in ~Library... Apple Support got involved as well and still no luck).  Anyway, with them removed, I enabled Messages in iCloud.  The sync took a very long time - so long that I just left it overnight.  Next morning, in the end, all of my effort to supposedly delete the Mac's old messages was pointless.  They all re-appeared on the Mac mini, and were sync'd to my iPhone and iPad.  In case you're wondering, the 'Save history when conversations are closed' option is not enabled.  At this time, I chose not to delete them again, just yet, as I still have a MacBook to setup.

On the MacBook, this was a bit simpler as it had just been rebuilt without a Time Machine restore, so Messages had just one message in it.  I enabled Messages in iCloud and waited, again for a long time, for the messages to sync.  Eventually they were all there.

Now I deleted all of the messages I no longer wanted, using the iPad (which has the easiest (for-me) to use interface to bulk delete.  All the deletes immediately sync'd to the iPhone, Mac mini, and MacBook!  

That's when I realized that there were unique-to-device messages remaining on each device.  I deleted those on each respective device, and finally, I had an equal number of messages remaining across all devices that were in sync.

Last thing I noticed is, in a few of the messages, pieces of the conversation were missing (e.g. something I wrote, something the other person wrote was on 1 of the devices, but not the other 3).  This I have no fix for, but I'm not too concerned.

I hope you find this helpful, or at least relatable in a commiserative way.