shapetables

That thing is pretty ugly, but I'll bet the glass cover doesn't come unstuck so Apple can charge $200 to glue it down again.

Home automation for the masses is something that has to work 100% of the time (like electrical outlets themselves) and be secure from hackers (not just for the benefit of their owner's privacy, but also to prevent the owner's devices from being weaponized against others, in other words, the common good), so I do totally understand the real value that Apple is bringing with its mandated quality assurances and chip-level encryption in their ecosystem vs. say the junk that the local big box peddles for half the price. But most people don't understand that value proposition and so it was brilliant to kick it up a notch with the inclusion of a high fidelity digital speaker that cosmetically appeals to their sense of luxury and ego. Apple is truly way ahead of the game and hopefully will be an example for the government to hold up to others when it eventually reigns in all of the get-rich-quick-and-worry-about-consumer-safety-later players peddling very dangerous home automation peripherals programmed in Asia by electrical engineers concerned mainly with pinching pennies and passing UL/FCC certification.

"Are you kidding? Do you even know anyone that has one." They look like the replaceable end of an electric toothbrush...hanging out of your ears. Why not double down on that (even after dropping a billion picking up a way more fashionable headphone company) and in-waist billions more adding sensors to them?

All of this is given in fun/sport.  None of this could possibly affect the stock price --at least until well after the iPhoneX product-cycle (when people will really begin to listen to stock analysts as they complain about "misses" like AirPods, AppleWatches and A/R rather than executing better in more lucrative new markets like Cognitive, Cloud and IoT, though Apple could still buy IBM or ORACLE to have even more breathing room to find the next iPod).

Mine are causing spinning beach balls. Unplug their arse and the MBP'16 magically resumes running (one would expect 'em to instead go deeper into a beach ball coma or crash but they resume just fine).  Nothing connected to the ports on the monitor and minimal RF. I should box 'em up and drag 'em into an AppleStore and ask for the post-Feb models. More likely to involve the credit card companies which can see enough in the Press to know they have us in debt (albeit at i%=0) for garbage.

Although this is a good Start, this isn't The Way.

What we need are lamps/fixtures/bulbs that conform to a low voltage DC bulb-standard and DC powerline-standard (like USB-C) that will eliminate RFI, heat/HVAC and current loss from the AC/DC conversion/inversion and BLE emissions.

The problem, of course, is that one has to "go custom" to do this now (https://hackaday.io/lists is a good start) until some multi-billion dollar dominant player under pressure to enter new markets and keep making its numbers (while hitching its fortunes to a controversial new DC-power standard and home automation platform) decides to extend their specifications all the way to a (potentially outdoor) battery that sits on the side of a home/business (and ties into a grid transformer or renewable energy source).