Eric_WVGG

eightzero said:

I find the wifi/ networking space all quite confusing, and really don't know what to make about Apple abandoning it. For all their "we make peoples' lives better with better products" and "be true to ourselves as Apple" I sure am not seeing that in this case… 

Wifi should be like my other utilities. A fee to have it made reliable and safe. Apple could do this easily. 

Gads, how coole would it be to take a device out of a box, plug it into the wall, and say, "hey Siri. Set up my wifi." She might ask a few questions, and...done.

Regarding their leaving the router space, it's because Apple still runs like a small company. They can dedicate engineers to boring shit like laser printers, displays, and wifi routers, or they can revolutionize the world with iPads and Airpods. They don't have enough engineers to do both and if they did the company would grow so large that it wouldn't really be Apple anymore.

They can't make wifi "like a utility" for the same reason that they can't fix cable television with the Apple TV: the "pipes" are run by companies like Verizon and Comcast that are hostile to their customers.

The experience you describe at the end is honestly not far off from Plume, though. They'd make a "plum" acquisition target for Apple IMO, kind of a hands-off Beats style arrangement.

Soli said:

Eric_WVGG said:

Damnit. This means that their new external display is probably another year off too.

I know a lot of folks want the cheese grater back, but there's no reason for a computer to be that goddamned heavy. 

1) To me, that seems more defunct than getting an AirPort mesh network.

2) What about a compromise with a tower design that is much smaller?

Apple acknowledged that there would be a new display alongside the Mac Pro promise.

I honestly couldn't care less how big or small the tower is (hell, I'm exclusively a laptop guy). I was just always annoyed with how unnecessarily heavy the cheese grater models were.

I hope this is a step toward Bicycle as its own option in Apple Maps directions. Cycling with Airpods or an Apple Watch with turn-by-turn directions is just amazing, but "car" directions sometimes send riders down unsafe streets, and "pedestrian" directions send against one-way streets.

Google Maps always get this right, but doesn't work with Apple “wearables”. Just another reminder that the future isn't quite here yet…

Speaking of external drives, I'm reminded of how Peter Jackson used Firewire iPods to move Lord of the Rings footage from New Zealand to Hollywood, as it was the most handy fast high-speed storage that was easily available at the time.

I know it’s fun to imagine what these rumors phones might look like, but designs that are obviously wrong and impossible are a bit annoying. 

An LCD phone with FaceID is not gonna have rounded corners or a Notch; LCDs can’t do that.