pepe779

eightzero said:

Obsoleting products is nothing new to Apple. Consumer expectations and company expectations for hardware are often very much different. I suspect Apple internal designs consumer devices for the 3 year time frame. Consumers subjectively expect much longer. I was thirlled to head High Sierra will run on any Sierra mac. Yay for my late 2009 iMac!

Seems to me that Apple's apparent decision to not make home wifi network products is short sighted. But it is possible that these products have a lot of competition, have low profitability, and there is the risk that the market is easily saturated. Apple can't really justify them on their standalone economics.

It is also possible they feel the same way about displays.

I like Apple's airports, and use them exclusively. But I've not upgraded to -ac ones simply because I don't need to. 

Totally agree, but obsoleting products is one thing (as long as there is some sort of replacement or different direction), abandoning products that your home ecosystem is built upon while giving your customers no other options is something completely different and very anti-Apple in my opinion. Kind of an eye opener and it makes me realize I relied on Apple solutions a bit too much and simply shouldn't trust what Tim Cook has to say about "enriching people's lives".

This has been, at least for me personally, one of the most disappointing and irrational decisions Apple has made in recent years. They basically ripped the heart out of their own ecosystem (from a "household setup" perspective) and instead decided to rely on 3rd party solutions. Needless to say, I still wasn't able to find a truly solid replacement for their AirPoirt routers (from the overall functionality and ecosystem integration point of view). Then again, my last gen AirPort Extreme has died twice (each time the same design/manufacturing problem, each time after roughly 1 year), so I'm also not going to invest in that model again. The AirPoirt Express has a very weak signal coverage, so unfortunately even the existing AirPort solutions no longer work for me. Apple not only abandoned their own product line in this case, they have also abandoned their own customers without providing them with any other solid options.

IMHO, this is utter BS. Apple is releasing "something" that doesn't even make sense to begin with only to keep the masses quiet. I had my iPhone 6 completely replaced for a new unit in the Apple Store only weeks ago because of this very problem after battling it for months. Ironically my other phone which is a 6S works just fine. So no Apple, it's not about apps using excessive battery or whatever nonsense you want us to believe, I can kill all apps and still easily simulate the problem out in cold weather. It's about some percentage of iPhones having faulty batteries, nothing more, nothing less. This problem only seems to develop after certain time so you better hope your iPhone is still covered by warranty, otherwise you're out of luck. They just don't want to acknowledge such problem exists because it would result in a mass recall, so they handle it on a case by case basis. And yes, my battery mostly suffered in low temperatures, it went down from 40-50% to 1% within minutes for no apparent reason and then back up to 30% once I plugged it into the charger. And btw my wife has a 5S and experiences exactly the same problems, it's way more widespread than Apple would ever like to publicly admit. 

There's one more important catch behind this and I had to learn it the hard way when I tried to change my Apple ID (and then had to revert back because of this). ALL in-app purchases you have ever made in any of your apps will be invalidated. You'll only be able to re-download apps that you paid for upfront (purchased for the full price directly from the App Store). Unfortunately the majority of apps that my family uses are free to download and you have to unlock their full content from within each app, but those types of purchases are forever linked to the Apple ID they were purchased with, so once you change it you have to re-purchase everything again. This is probably the most nonsense policy Apple ever implemented (or failed to fix for that matter) and there's no way around this whatsoever.

Really glad AI brought this one up. This is the finest example of Apple's totally mismanaged MFi strategy. I own this controller and as such it's a really great product, there's just one problem with it - hardly any apps support the MFi standard. Steelseries even has a dedicated app for iOS, where you can see all the latest apps that gained MFi/Nimbus support, but guess what - this app was last updated in July 2016, no new games since then. The reason is very obvious I guess - as long as Apple doesn't make it a requirement for developers to include MFi controller support in their apps, they simply won't do it. Why would they even bother, right? In case of the Apple TV, Apple at least required devs to include support for the Siri remote, which wasn't the best decision to begin with, but it was at least some standard. Later on Apple decided to remove this requirement, hoping that it will attract more devs (which it didn't for a variety of reasons and the ATV still feels rather abandoned) and now there's no controlder standard whatsoever. So yes, the Nimbus gamepad has some great potential and is probably the best solution for Apple devices out there, unfortunately it doesn't look like this potential will be fully utilized anytime soon.