John Lockwood

1STnTENDERBITS said:

Apple has lost this battle in almost every conceivable way.  At some point you'd think they would abandon the Samsung strategy of appeal, appeal, and if you still don't win... appeal again.  

I've always felt that if Apple finally came to an agreement with VirnetX, they could expand the reach of FaceTime and iMessage.

Apple's position is even more stupid than your comment suggests. Not only as implied by your comment have they been wasting a (large) fortune on lawyers and repeatedly loosing but literally there have been times when the VirtneX share price was sufficiently depressed that Apple could have bought their entire company for less than the amount they have been ordered to pay. This has also been going on so long that even though Apple are now [sarcasm mode on] a poor impoverished debt ridden firm these days [sarcasm mode off], back then they had literally mountains of cash they could not think of other things to spend on except it seems lawyers fees.

See - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/alphabet-google-parent-now-has-more-cash-than-apple-2019-7-1028404234

Apple would then have been receiving the license fees being paid by Microsoft et al to VirtnetX.

None of Netatmo's cameras are wireless they are all wired and this does include the smart doorbell. By wired I mean power, data is of course wireless over WiFi. Apple's restriction is that HomeKit cameras must be mains powered i.e. power via a wire. However it does seem they may be gradually relaxing this criteria. (NetGear have announced HomeKit support updates for their Arlo Ultra and Arlo Pro 2 - see https://www.arlo.com/en-us/about/press-releases/2019/ARLO-TO-ADD-APPLE-HOMEKIT.aspx )

Apple currently as per the screen shot in this article let you have one camera on the 200GB iCloud plan, and a maximum of five cameras on the 2TB plan. The 2TB plan is of course the biggest plan they do. This is utterly brain dead!!! I already have five Netatmo cameras - four outdoor Presence cameras and one indoor Security camera and will be getting their smart door bell after it launches making six! On top of that HomeKit is designed to support multiple houses. It will therefore be very, very easy for many people to exceed this stupid limit of five cameras. One cannot even get round this by using multiple iCloud accounts since then they would then be also on separate HomeKit systems.

It should be noted that Ring have two similar video storage plans but their top plan supports unlimited cameras - clearly they have more common sense than Apple. (Ring also give you 30 days of storage.)

@Davgreg I also want HomeKit for the Netatmo Weather Station. I also feel they need to update their external module in several ways most importantly to include a Stevenson screen to prevent temperature distortions and secondly to add a lightning sensor. (See this as a comparison https://weatherflow.com/smart-home-weather-stations/ )

I suspect a more likely issue is the fact that currently Apple only allow cameras with wired power connections. Since the August Smart Doorbell is a battery powered device it therefore would not be currently allowed.

@Hmurchison
The soon to be released Netatmo smart doorbell is both wired and includes an SD card for local storage - hence no cloud account required. This is HomeKit compatible. I plan to get one of these myself although I may use an FTP server although it also supports Dropbox. Of course to some extent my choice is dictated by the fact that August have so far failed to address international markets and even though they are now owned by Assa Abloy a Swedish firm _still_ have not released anything outside the US. Netatmo is a French company.

One of the problems is that Displayport 1.4 is still not available on Macs. This would allow running 5K displays over a single cable. Intel was believed to be to blame for this delay. Once Displayport 1.4 is available then PCIe video cards could use it like they currently do Displayport 1.2a. The new Dell 8K display uses Displayport 1.4, like the Dell 5K display you need to use both ports on the 8K display to a single computer to support driving the massive 8K resolution.

Due to the massive delay in shipping Displayport 1.4 chipsets from Intel Thunderbolt3 does not support Displayport 1.4 and hence even Thunderbolt3 cannot drive an 8K display.

Since Displayport can run over Thunderbolt connections it has a cascading impact.

Also contrary to what the article says, you can do 4K displays at 60fps over HDMI but you need HDMI 2.0 which can be done with some PCIe video cards and with Displayport to HDMI 2.0 adapters. HDMI 2.0 is however not able to do 5K displays, for that you will need HDMI 2.1 which it not yet available. Sadly it is still the case the Apple's support for PCIe video cards is appallingly bad, OS X apparently does not support HDMI 2.0 on the Nvidia GTX 980 card even though it does have a HDMI 2.0 port. It used to be that Apple could argue that a) the Mac Pro was discontinued and b) they never sold these cards themselves, however Apple have admitted they made a mistake with the Mac Pro 2013 and committed to a new 'modular' Mac Pro for 2018 onwards and this therefore is expected to use PCIe video cards. So Apple now have a need to properly support PCIe video cards again, although arguably their drivers have always been inferior even for cards they sold themselves.

Note: Where the term Displayport is used this equally applies to Mini Displayport.

It's cheaper then re-wiring your house to add three-core plus ground cable needed by many smart light control systems, and this also does not take in to consideration that all the current HomeKit compatible light switches are US only due to the fact the makers think the world is flat and you fall off the edge if you leave the US. (I am pointing my finger at you Lutron.)

It should be noted that Philips a European company has already indicated this will also be available to flat-earthers aka Yankees.