robjn

“the accessory is also Apple's answer to intelligent home speakers like Amazon's Echo and Google Home”

Not exactly. Apple’s speaker is first and foremost a speaker. The media seem intent on spinning a ‘battle of the personal assistants’ narrative. But this is a false narrative with respect to HomePod. It is also a battle Apple is certain to lose since they refuse to play dirty with our privacy.

HomePod introduces ambitious, groundbreaking computational audio that delivers outstanding audio performance. You could just control it from your phone and it’s built in touch controls and never use Siri and you will still have a great product with no equal.

Just look at the market for great sounding AirPlay speakers and you have B&O and Devialet. Then consider that you can buy 4 HomePods for less than the price of 1 Devialet. - It’s a bargain!

So let’s not reduce HomePod to ‘Apple’s answer to the Echo’ and judge it on the basis of what Siri on it can and can’t do, or as an independent platform for developpers to write apps - apps on a speaker are a bad idea!

Are Samsung still cheating on the benchmark tests - it seems like they are called out for this every year. Typically, they have some script that recognizes the benchmark test and over-clocks the processor during the test.

There have been a number of tech ‘experts’ professional journalists and bloggers that have complained about ‘having to press the side button’ in situations where they can’t raise to wake - totally unaware of the fact they just tap the screen!

I took my 5 and 7 year olds into an Apple Store. They picked up iPhone 8s and started playing a game. I played with iPhone X on the same table and after several minutes I wanted to find out what my kids would do if handed a phone with no home button - with no coaching! This is the best test of whether something is intuitive.

They were engrossed in the game they were playing and did not want to participate in my experiment. However, my 7 year old decided to humor me by giving the iPhone X two seconds of his attention - what did he do? He tapped the screen to wake - looked down at the home indicator and immediately swiped up on it!

I was amazed! How did he know to do this? (Given the same experiment my wife used the side button to wake and then after several seconds she needed Apple’s ‘swipe up’ prompt to get in). For my son, as an iPad user that typically uses the home button to wake, tapping the screen to wake was intuitive. How did he know to swipe up on the home indicator? Simple, this design language is not new and my 7 year old recognized it from his prior use of iOS - he knew something was hidden down there and what he needed to do to reveal it.

This is fastest, most fluid user interface ever! It’s much better.

(I sometimes somehow activate Apple Pay when trying to unlock my iPhone 6. The user interface says “press to unlock” when you really just need to touch the sensor.)

By the way Daniel, the use of the definite article with a product name is not improper and comes across as a petty criticism in your article. The ‘angry tone’ you detect from the use of the definite article is subtle at best and not what the definite article usually communicates. You yourself use the same syntax when you write “Next he moves on to the A11 Bionic”. Of course Apple can dictate some linguistic conventions around their product names such as whether certain letters are capitalized but they can’t change the rules of grammar for the English language that will in some contexts require the definite or indefinite articles and in other contexts allow them.

Of course some writer deliberately want to defy Apple - for example insisting on writing “iWatch” but then there are typical grammatical conventions. For example, it always bugs me that in typical American English usage people refer to “legos”. The company prefers “Lego” to be used when grammar appears to call for plural form. European’s are on-board with using “Lego”. As a native British English speaker legos/Legos seems wrong to me but that’s all I hear as a California resident. Americans are of course simply modifying the word according to grammatical convention by appending the most common plural modifier ‘s’ because they know that Lego is made up of many pieces.

Tim Cook already said publicly that AR glasses are not happening any time soon - the the technology required to do it well does not yet exist. I expect Apple would want to implement it with strong privacy, in a way that users are not able to record and developers are not able to take image data to their own servers.

Tim’s comments confirm that Apple are definitely experimenting with AR glasses - but what they have now is not anywhere near good enough for them to ship as a product. I imagine it works but it is big and heavy and ugly and the technology to miniaturize is not yet available. Implementing it in a way that ensures privacy is probably another technological hurdle to overcome.

If AR glasses were coming “as soon as 2020” Apple would at this point almost finished them. Tim’s comment asserts that this is definitely not the case - far from it!

The media needs to push back against these reports and present them with deep skepticism that gives more weight to what Apple has publicly stated. Overwise, these reports stir up unrealistic expectations that Apple has already publicly tried to dampen.

It is likely that given Apple’s stated position on AR glasses competitors are inclined to seed these rumors in order to put Apple under pressure with a new tide of cyclic waves of expectation and claims of failure designed to disappoint consumers.

so Apple Insider - DON’T BE PLAYED.