k2kw

mieswall said:

No, it's not a great article. The problem with Daniel is that each time somebody has the adventurousness to criticize anything about Apple, even when that person Is a known Apple follower like Kirk, DED vomites his diatribes to him. DED: HoPs are not good sounding speakers, they are not even a decent stereo speaker. If you keep sustaining that, we must conclude you don't have a clue of what you are talking about.

Kirk is absolutely right. HoPs were promoted by Apple as high fidelity alternative to the crap of "smart" speakers out there (And I agree they are crap: precisely the point). But it fell absolutely short in that, in spite of the spectacular possibilities its stellar technological design could have allowed. It is NOT a stereo speaker, it is a boom-box aberration regarding faithful music reproduction. The fact that it has an array of tweeters pointing in all directions, with some software controlling its dispersion patterns, doesn't make it a "stereo speaker" if it is not properly controlled by software, and working in tandem, software that this now fat-Apple is just too lazy to do. The stereo experience requires a precise and controlled projection of sound, to a specific point in space where the listener is located; it requires a control of the phasing of waves between both speakers, in order to project each instrument at a specific virtual point in space. Requires the recreation of depth of the recorded event. The HoPs do exactly the opposite in all those aspects. The only aim of Apple is to fill with sound the room, not to recover the spatial event engraved in the record.

Among many disappointments I had with Apple in the recent years, the way they've been handling all what's related with music is the biggest one. Music interface is almost unusable; the flaws in the service counts by the hundreds, and I found new ones almost daily; the unbelievable refusal (approaching 2020!), to stream lossless music (at least, as a paid option) is just infuriating: Apple may have exquisite retina displays, transmit 4K video content in high quality, but an't transmit music in the same HQ fashion, when it would demand a tiny fraction of te bandwidth of video?. The promises unfulfilled by HomePod are perplexing. Not to talk about the performance of Siri as the main way to command HoPs: Siri IS bad by nature; a Siri that has to trust in an inexistent relational database of music is simply useless.

Why doesn't a pair of HoPs make a better acoustic scanning of the room, given they could triangulate every detected response with both working in tandem, for much better adaptive sound patterns? Why that awfully bass-heavy tuning of the units? Why they can't track users position and give a true *stereo* experience (without that, a pair of omnidirectional speakers only make things worse: they just render a mud of sound)? etc.
The article hopes for the HoP upgrade coming in two weeks. Apple will certainly move exactly in the opposite direction of the initial promise: a Speaker that would disrupt the home audio market, they way Apple used to do. 

Knowing I had to upgrade my speakers, I waited and waited for the HomePods first to handle a paired stereo, then to finally arrive to my country -literally for years-. And yet, after all this time they are still not available here. When I finally got them, OMG, what a disappointment!. I end up buying a pair of used KEF LS50 (the passive ones) at little more than the price of one HoP, and the quality is order of magnitude better than that boom-box of Apple. THAT is nice stereo, DED, not the HoPs! THAT is, at least if not even better, what Apple was supposed to do with the HoPs! Then I wonder: why the spectacular ten anechoic chambers they built, why the stellar team of world renowned acoustic engineers recruited for the project, why all that: for that piece of sh...?

In the end, I think Apple at some point in time lost sight of what is the true purpose of this product. I think that low IQ of Iovine had much to do with that, he must have pushed the company to make the boombox HoP finally is, just like his Beats headphones crap. And the result could be -awfully- listened.

rogifan_new said:

How does Apple arrive at that 2.4M figure?

zimmie said:

ravnorodom said:

Nice. Finally a MacBook that has cellular chip. I wonder why in the past years laptops in general don't have cellular built-in except mobile devices and tablets only. In today's age, we need it. I used to setup hotspot from my iPhone for my MacBook. But I couldn't now because I upgraded to unlimited cellular data and the hotspot feature is disabled from carrier. A G5 MacBook would fill that need.

Aside from those from Apple, every "business" laptop I've seen in a decade either includes a WWAN card or has a slot and antennas for one. Every single Thinkpad W, T, or X. Every Toughbook. Every Getac. It's a pretty common feature. Some even have combination WiFi/WiMAX cards, as an example.

The biggest pain of integrated WWAN, though, is the relatively short lifespan of cellular technologies compared to the lifespans of the devices carrying the cards. I have some Toughbooks from 2006 in my fleet. The firmware is locked so it will only boot with approved cards (or no card), and the only approved cards talk EvDO or 3G. I don't think anybody sells EvDO service anymore. 3G is still available in some places, but not all.

JWSC said:

So, Tim is right, as far as his statement goes.  But let’s not forget who built up China - American bean counters who, it turns out, really didn’t know which beans they should be counting.

First it was, ‘Chinese labor is cheap’ so let’s manufacture there.  And then ‘oh crap, the Chinese don’t have proper infrastructure’ so let’s get them started with that.  Then more second tier Chinese suppliers sprung up, and more infrastructure was put in place.  And then large regions such as Shenzhen turned into massive draws for subsistence farmers looking for a better life.  And they morphed into a large and highly skilled labor force.  And then even more infrastructure was put in place.

But the bean counters neglected to take full account of the logistics needed to ship all the bits and pieces all around the world.  And what might have worked OK 20 years ago is woefully out of date today.  But we can’t change our sourcing now.  China has the infrastructure, right??!

So yea, China has all that going for it now.  I begrudge them not.  But the US, and Europe, can and should have that too.

All the excuses in the world can’t take away from the fact that American CEOs, CFOs and their assorted bean counters sold out their communities and their company rank and file to get a few extra pennies on the dollar out of product so they could please their stockholders and get those extra bonuses, while their US factories got shut down and their once loyal employees got a pick slip.  That’s a f-ing bitter pill to swallow.

Tim, do better!