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Samchase said:

snapjack said:

Does anyone still use Twitter?

Are you kidding or simply, you are a democrat. 

While I'm sure you thought you were scoring a point there, you were actually unintentionally making a different point. The more Mr. Musk turns twitter into a safe space echo chamber for conservatives, the less relevant it actually becomes.

As I've mentioned on an earlier thread about this subject, social media was always a lousy place to do customer service, because it's really more about performative damage control. Apple already has robust, effective in-person and online customer support. Social media customer support is about being seen helping the people who are too dumb or too entitled to contact customer support directly, and would rather yell into a random crowd about how they can't work their iPhone. Companies started doing customer support via Twitter because those inept "Karen" customers could hurt a company's reputation by giving unsuspecting bystanders the false impression that normal help is either unavailable or ineffective. 

As Twitter becomes less crowded, less random and more of a like-minded political echo-chamber, there is less reason for a company like Apple to worry about doing that sort of performative damage control, or even to have much of a presence. The space will be left to ads for lumpy pillows, catheters and home medical device Medicare scams.

coolfactor said:

Not surprised. Today's streaming services are very cheap for the amount of quality content that's available. I used to be solely Netflix, but tried out Crave and Prime Video and was amazed at all the great content I had been missing out on!

I'm just annoyed by how TV+ displays previews of other shows at the beginning of its own shows, same as Prime Video. Sure, it is definitely effective at surfacing content that may not have otherwise been discovered, but I choose those services specifically for the content that I choose, not to have content pushed onto me.

There's an on-screen button on AppleTV that lets you skip those.

jeffythequick said:

Microsoft Voice Command had this back in 2004.

Contacts on your Windows Phone that you wanted to call, simply hold the button and say, "call Mike Jones on mobile"
Voice command would instantly respond with "Call Mike Jones on mobile?"
I respond, "Yes"
and the call would go through.

The whole idea of having my voice be telegraphed to some computer for processing 20 (it was November 2003 when Voice Command was released) years later is a bit ludicrous, especially when the Windows Phones at the time were still 5 years behind the first iPhone.

Voice recognition isn't new, by any stroke of the imagination.

The phone I had was pretty tricked out.  I had the HTC TyTN, with 64MB of RAM and I did put Voice Command on my 128MB SD card.

All voice recognition is not the same. Microsoft Voice Command was very limited in what it could do, and required the user to be literal and specific. "Call Mike Jones on mobile" would get a "try again" response if he was listed as Michael Jones in your contacts. "Call my brother" would never get beyond "try again," and you'd certainly never be asked to identify who you brother is for future reference.

The point of sending Siri commands to "some computer for processing" is to allow for far more sophisticated computational work to be applied in order to allow for different accents, interpretation of varied ways of stating commands, and for a significantly wider variety of tasks to be carried out. In 2003, sending voice commands over the cellular/wireless internet for processing wasn't even possible. BlackBerry was still cranking email through its proprietary centralized email system in order to minimize the use of a very, very limited capacity for data transmission over cellular networks.

By 2011, the calculus had flipped. With increased bandwidth, transmitting voice commands over the cellular internet for offsite processing allowed for significantly more robust voice recognition and linguistic interpretation than could have been handled by an A5 chip in an iPhone 4S.

Now, with significantly greater processing power in portable devices, things can flip again, and Siri commands can effectively be processed on-device without a loss of computational capacity. This, in turn, allows for the higher level of data security inherent in not transmitting the voice command data at all.

This news is encouraging evidence that Apple is continuing to invest in classical music. Is there any news or inkling that Apple will soon expand the Apple Music Classical app beyond the iPhone platform? 

Starting out on a single device made sense for working out the kinks before expanding to other devices. This is particularly true when one can imagine that there is likely a high correlation between the classical music listener base and people who have worked out their own customized catalog of their digitized classical archives. As such, no matter how robustly organized an Apple Music Classical App is, when expanded to other platforms - particularly Mac - it will be functionally different than however most people have built their own customized archives. Those people will of course be annoyed, irritated or angry about that. It's a sure bet.

Still, it's high time for Apple to bite the bullet and move forward with the other platforms. There's also a strong correlation between the classical listener base and people who have dedicated audio hardware setups for sitting and actively listening to music. I'm one of those people. I can play everything from century-old (and older) 78 rpm records to full-immersion Dolby Atmos recordings in my den. So at present, I have to follow the non-optimal process of using the classical music app on my iPhone to search and explore, then save items of interest to my 'library,' use the regular Apple Music app on my Apple TV to go to my library, pull those albums up there and finally play that on my home audio system. It's time I should be able to search and explore the classical music app directly on the ATV.

So I'm hoping the fact that Apple acquired not just the BIS catalog, but also their entire staff means that they're still pressing forward with the classical App as a featured item across all of their platforms, rather than as a quirky cousin kept in a back room on your iPhone.

I can’t see dedicating the real estate to do it, but Apple could accomplish a big F.U. by selling E.U.-compliant iPhones that include both a minimum standard USB-C port and a fast lightning port, along with a fast lightning cable in the box.