sflagel

nht said:

AppleZulu said:

Seems like the “eventually” part is the thing that all the “if Steve Jobs was still alive” people don’t want to remember. There really weren’t any instant successes in Apple’s history. It’s almost always a new thing that gets incremental upgrades until it becomes the brilliant thing everybody thinks it was in the first place. 

Then we forget all that, and when we watch it happening again in real time, It’s all “Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is an idiot, and if Steve Jobs were alive, we’d have an instant success every six months!”

Eventually may be a given but not in any sort of good timeframe.  Take for example the stirrup...something completely obvious in hindsight but humans have been riding horses since 4500BC and the stirrup on a treed saddle didn't appear until somewhere between 206BC and 302 AD in China.  It didn't make it to Europe until 6th century AD.

Without Jobs and the Mac we could have been using ever better versions of command line interfaces and textual user interfaces (curses) for a couple more decades.  That a GUI is obvious hindsight ignores that if the Lisa and Xerox had been the only early examples and market failures its possible IBM PCs and Unix wouldn't have moved to GUIs.

Likewise full screen smartphones are "obvious" in hindsight but without Jobs and the iPhone we would have been treated to ever better versions of the blackberry and stylus based UIs.

Jobs was unique in that he jumpstarted two major computer interface paradigm shifts.  Three if you count voice interaction with virtual assistants which we probably should.

He didn't just skate to where the puck would be but knocked it in that direction when everyone else wanted it to go somewhere else.

mike1 said:

sflagel said:

kiowawa said:

foregoneconclusion said:

sflagel said:

Did the old one have this:

Yes, the original HomePod had Bluetooth 5.0. 

I had the impression the Mini version did not have Bluetooth, which made it hard to use for me as I travel a lot and wanted to bring it along without hooking to Hoel wifi.  

Although apparently the large HomePod did have Bluetooth 5.0, you could not use it to play music…. So if someone came to your house with a phone that is not from Apple, they could not share their music. The biggest reason not to get one.

Why would that matter? If they wanted me to hear something, they could just tell the HomePod to play it.

Not really concerned with how my home interacts with visitor's devices.

kiowawa said:

foregoneconclusion said:

sflagel said:

Did the old one have this:

Yes, the original HomePod had Bluetooth 5.0. 

I had the impression the Mini version did not have Bluetooth, which made it hard to use for me as I travel a lot and wanted to bring it along without hooking to Hoel wifi.