dewme

I was under the impression that iOS 16.3.1 contained a fix for a WebKit zero day vulnerability that’s been actively exploited. There are also kernel level fixes addressed in iOS 16.3.1. 

welshdog said:

tzterri said:

 They leak more current than my other smart plugs so I've had issues with LED panels glowing when off. I tried adding a load capacitor, but that did not help. I finally switched these devices to one of my other brand smart plugs.

Do they not use a relay to make and break the circuit? If they are leaking current AND using a relay, that seems crazy bad. 

Unless it’s using a solid state relay, which exhibit leakage in the OFF state.

Just to be clear, the fact that solid state relays leak a very small amount of current in the OFF state is not a negative assessment of their worthiness or quality. It’s simply a characteristic of the technology they use. The leakage is observable in this particular case because LEDs have very low current requirements so you get to observe the leakage in this very specific case.

Solid state relays have many advantages over mechanical relays (or more accurately described, electromagnetic relays) especially for switching or controlling AC loads, including having no switching latency, no contact wear, no contact arcing, insensitivity to mechanical vibration, and greater operational energy efficiency. The main disadvantages are the leakage, a small load voltage drop (~0.5V to 0.7V) due to the semiconductor junctions, and lower suitability for low voltage applications.

A single HomePod’s ability to fill a decently large area and volume of space, for me this comes down to about 1000-1500 sqft with 8-10 ft flat ceilings, with what I consider very pleasant sound was always impressive. By “pleasant sound” I mean that I recognize that I’m hearing all of the sound components from the original source represented throughout the space. Nothing bothers me more than moving around in a large space that has a multi speaker setup to distribute the sound across the space, but what your hear varies considerably based on what speaker or speakers you happen to be standing closest to. By “varies considerably“ I mean some sound components are missing, underemphasized, or overemphasized. 

A solitary HomePod excels in these volume filling scenarios, but I’m sure it has an upper limit on how large of a volume it can fill. For comparison’s sake I also have a single Echo Studio. When the Echo Studio was first released putting it to work in the same role as my HomePod served was distinctly less appealing. The bass in particular seemed over emphasized and Amazon’s computational processing just didn’t seem to produce a natural sounding mix. But after a while and with subsequent firmware updates it got a lot closer to the HomePod. I have no issues with it now, but I still prefer the sound of a single biggy-sized HomePod over the Echo Studio, but they are a lot closer than I’d like to admit.

Having full access to Apple Music on both HomePod and Echo Studio is rather interesting. Early on, Alexa would sometimes stumble and not automatically resume playing if I queried it for information about the song being played, like “Alexa, what album is this song from?” while Siri had no problem with similar requests. Again, over time Alexa interaction got better and better and no longer pauses playback after responding to inquiries during playback. In terms of responsiveness and accuracy Alexa absolutely crushes Siri.

I’ve been experiencing problems with Siri working with my most frequently invoked query; “Siri play (or shuffle) my music.” My music collection is around 30K songs and for some reason large collections of anything seem to be choking Apple’s clients lately (HomePod, iPhone, Mac, etc.) and Siri will produce an error on my HomePods and give up. My Echo Studio, in stark contrast, responds immediately and works. After using Alexa for a while, going back to Siri feels like you’re interacting with a child. Going the other way, Siri to Alexa, in similar scenarios, Alexa seems to be clairvoyant. 

Unfortunately my biggy-sized HomePod died prior to the 2nd Gen HomePod release and I replaced it with two HomePod minis. The HomePod mini does’t come remotely close to supporting the scenarios that the original HomePod excelled so perfectly at. Even as a stereo pair for constrained space listening the minis just don’t have much in the bass department. In the role of desktop computer speakers they remind me a little bit of my Audio Engine A2 Plus USB wired speakers without a subwoofer. Adding a subwoofer to the AE’s blows the HP mini stereo pair away, but at additional cost, more wires, and less convenience. The HomePod minis would seriously benefit from a subwoofer. The biggy-sized HomePod not so much.

I too am surprised that Apple didn’t come up with a way to allow stereo pairing of v1 and v2 HomePods. They developed their own isochronous synchronization implementation for stereo playback so they had all of the bits necessary to make it work. I don’t believe the acoustics of the two versions are too disparate to obtain a very satisfactory result.

If I had to guess, I’d say that their isochronous synchronization implementation is wired to the silicon and they tweaked it for the second go-round to the point where it was not easy, or would be a burden for future growth (say to support subwoofers and surround sound) to drag along legacy support for the v1 HomePod to the v2 HomePod. Apple may also be quietly working towards isochronous real-time (IRT) synchronization model that incorporates precision time protocol (PTP) based on IEEE-1588 that has become popular in industrial Ethernet implementations, or their own lower cost equivalent. This move to provide precision real-time based synchronization across a network of connected devices would dovetail very nicely into Apple’s HomeKit, home automation, and ambient computing ambitions, besides falling in-line with the underpinnings of Matter and the networks it supports.

Has Apple published any technical papers that describe the architectural changes that are coming to HomeKit?

I’m a lot less nervous about the new architectural rollout than I was a couple of weeks ago only because I feel some level of confidence that I can rebuild my small Home fairly quickly even if it gets totally borked. I’m going to keep treating HomeKit more like a beta or experimental feature until it gets a lot more miles on it. 

Gaby said:

I have had intermittent problems with all my HomePods where Siri is concerned for what must be 6 months now. Where they are responding with “that request is taking too long” or “there are no devices that do that in this home” 

But since 16.2, two of my HomePod minis in my bedroom have been stuck “configuring” on a permanent basis. I have rebooted them, and reset them countless times, even going so far as to plug them into my Mac to restore twice to no avail. I did the same the second 16.3 
was released which still didn’t resolve the issue so I’m praying to God that this is what this update finally resolves. Can I ask has anyone else had similar issues of late? 

You should consider removing them from your Home app, remove them from your AppleId in Settings, remove any duplicates of them, if present, in Settings as well, plug each one into your Mac using the USB-C cable attached to the HomePod and resetting them to the latest firmware version (should be 16.3.1) when they show up in Finder.