franklinjackcon

Call me crazy but surely if you don't care what time you wake up, as long as you've had enough sleep, wouldn't you just not set an alarm and sleep till you wake up naturally?

MacPro said:

This is awesome and could have made it possible for an American grandmother (my wife) who, when alone and lost in Paris last year, was met by nothing but refusals to help unless she spoke in French from anyone she asked.  Her abilities in Latin and Spanish were of no avail.  Happily after an hour, now in darkness and quite fearful, an American couple who knew Paris came to her aid.  

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if seeing the use of an aid, such as an iPhone, help would still be refused on the grounds this still wasn't really speaking French. /yep still really, really pissed off about this!

Google Translate is available on iphone. It can be used offline, can translate voice (mic) and text (camera). And translates more than 100 languages. Sorry to hear about your wife. It's awful to think anyone, no matter which language or culture, would be left helpless and lost

razormaid said:

What do you know?  They got one right.  Out of all their idiotic and ridiculous rulings if they put this into law they'll at least have gotten one right.  <grin>

I'm not sure if you live in Europe but there tends to be more protection here for consumers, tenants, and employees than in other parts of the world where the laws is on the side of corporations, landlords, and employers. Take a look at GDPR - it's not all that surprising that there's a push in the direction of privacy, despite the cost to the private sector

jbdragon said:

longpath said:

I'm hoping this proves true. It always seemed less than idea for a HomeKit control center to be on a portable device, and since Apple declined to make the Mac the control center, this seems like a much better option.

I think it makes far more sense to be on a portable device's.  In this case, the Apple Watch which works great.  Works in every room in my house, in my front and back yard and away from home.  Son I can ask Siri to open and close my garage door, my main way to get in/out of my house. Try opening the garage door using a Siri speaker or a echo or hone.  Put them near a open window and yell really loud?  I think it's so old school to have to rely on some box plugged into a power source.

The Apple Watch works so well.  I can do so much with it.  I saw no point in one of these limited boxes.  Maybe it works for a family to control things.

You make two mistakes here - first assuming everyone has the same behaviour and preferences as you and second assuming it's just one or the other. You can keep your watch but also have a dedicated device sitting in the kitchen/living room for everyone or in the case of Echo, Dots all through the house. Not everyone wants to wear a (or one specific) watch and not all day. There are also limitations on a watch - the speaker and mic is physically tiny. For me, I listen to music or youtube while I cook so having a speaker that can also set timers or give me recipes in the kitchen is perfect

"Amazon lacks the critical element of a phone business or even a substantial hardware business with a real development platform, while Google has a huge platform of mostly low end phones and very poorly selling wearables. "

The trouble with these articles is that they view everything through an Apple lens and struggle to criticise Apple or praise competitors if they operate with a different business model.

Saying Amazon lacks a phone business is akin to saying Apple can't succeed in phones because it doesn't make its own components or assemble them. Amazon wants to make money from shopping and content not hardware. It's also happy to launch new services, like AWS, that might not make a tonne of cash at first but grow into large units eventually. Some of them will flop, that's fine too if some of your bets pay off. Alexa gives Amazon a new channel for shopping, a means of consuming Amazon's content, a better shopping experience that helps it cut returns costs (the new video version), a hub in the home and reason to invest in an assistant and AI. It's also an "independent" third assistant that can be put into home appliances by brands that are scared off by Google and Apple. Those are not necessarily things Apple cares about but they are Amazon's bread and butter.

Google's platform may be mostly low-end phones but the low-end phones of today are more capable than the high-end phones of a few years ago. Its primary goal is to sell ads, it doesn't need high-end phones for that. As the article states, mobile is now more than half of its ad revenue. This was an area of weakness a few years ago. Wearables are slow going but for everyone, including Apple. Google won't make money from them until they become mass market once the hardware makers themselves start seeing profits decline. Google, like Amazon, makes a lot of bets and is happy to cut some flops early and stay in others for the long run. Look at what Maps turned into - simple maps to satellite images and street view to navigation and crowd-sourced reviews with the technology in place for AR and autonomous vehicles. Google is comfortably placed to be a big part of the computing-everywhere future, whether it sells a lot of phones or not. It's in your pocket, in your car, in your home either on DT or connected speaker and eventually, I am sure, will be in your ear like Hint or on your face like Glass, but perhaps via kit made by someone else.