yellowjackets

In North America and Japan, smartphone=iPhone and everyone else is an inferior imitator, making paying the extra cost for an iPhone worthwhile. In other markets i.e. China, India and to a degree Europe - where Nokia's Windows Phones actually had decent market share - Android made inroads, and did so with quality and often locally branded and manufactured devices, before Apple was able to establish themselves as the market leader and best option. That's the thing: in the early days of the Android/Apple race, it was Apple devices versus Android ones that had suspect hardware, buggy software and terrible apps. Android was able to improve the hardware, OS and app store situation before Apple was able to establish a real presence in most markets. So unless you are relatively affluent AND highly influenced by western consumer culture there is no reason to reject a $200 Android device that works fine in favor of a $600 iPhone that works better. (Or a $400 iPhone SE that works better but has a 4 inch screen.) If Android was still the mess that it was with the early Qualcomm and Samsung SOCs and Gingerbread/Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich operating systems, then Apple would have an opening. But since Jellybean and the Qualcomm Scorpion, Apple being better has not meant Android being bad, so it is debatable how many would switch even if Android and iOS products cost the same. You can console yourself with the realization that Samsung and the rest aren't making much profit by selling the $250 smartphones in China and India, and that Apple will make as much or more by selling a few than Samsung and the rest will by selling a lot, but that is about all there is. That may be bad for the hardware manufacturers, but Google has invested a ton on the prospect of future revenue from Android services in India. It is a long game, because while India is #1 in app downloads for Google Play by a huge margin (6 billion apps downloaded in 2016, up from 3.5 billion in 2015) India is not in the top 10 for revenue: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/companies/india-number-one-in-google-play-app-downloads-usage/articleshow/56680067.cms However, as Netflix is making a good amount of revenue in India from Android devices, India will be in the top 10 for Android revenue pretty soon.

For goodness sakes it is like the negative nellies on here have never left for a promotion or something. There is a limit to how high "the head of Apple Music" can rise at Apple, especially in a relatively short time if she is one of those "never stay in one place more than 5 years" types. But at Uber this is a significant promotion and if she succeeds she could jump into the top executive ranks. If she fails ... well hey let's face it she is already rich so who cares, she'll be fine and it isn't as if she won't be able to get another job. If nothing else she could go to Google and do something with the mess that is Play Music (almost as much a lost cause as Uber). So this is no big deal. Just climbing the corporate ladder, which is what a lot of folks did when they joined Apple in the first place.

Eric_WVGG said:

If no line-in, that's a pity. A lot of folks will be weighing a Sonos vs this; Sonos will do their TV audio without latency. I'm sure this'll work with AppleTV, but that's useless for other boxes, Playstations and Xboxen, etc.

Regardless, I'm one of the rare fans of the Apple HiFi, nice to see it live on in some kind of form.

I disagree here. This is not something intended for home theatre audio systems. Apple is partnering with Bose and other third party manufacturers to provide HomeKit compatibility for home theatre systems and other large speakers. Allow me to say that anyone who pays $350 for home theatre speakers that do not have A) subwoofers or surround sound/stereo did not make a very wise purchase. This device is meant to be another entry in the small bluetooth speaker space, similar to the Beats Pill, which was ONCE a very popular product and stuff before Beats went under new management with new marketing ...

People who claim that Nintendo should stop making hardware and focus on software seem to forget how well that approach worked for Sega and Atari. Who? Exactly. 

The folks who claimed that Sony and Microsoft ripped everything off from Nintendo and Nintendo should sue them ... all right Never mind that Atari preceded the NES and Milton-Bradley preceded the Gameboy. Or that the Playstation and XBox always were ahead of Nintendo products in CPU, OS, graphics, streaming capability and storage media and still are. By contrast Nintendo still can't even manage an online store properly. Nintendo fell so far behind with their OS that they actually went to Cyanogen, asking them to make a closed down version of Android for the Switch initially, because Android was far ahead of the OS that they were using for the DS and the Wii. When Cyanogen refused - objecting to the closed source thing - Nintendo had to hire out and create a new OS from scratch, which delayed the Switch by a year. And their new OS is STILL far behind the XBox and Playstation in terms of performance and capability. Lots of third party developers have abandoned Nintendo entirely because they are unable to hobble titles that run fine on Playstation, XBox and Steam down to what it would take to run on Nintendo. And the Nintendo Switch isn't even as powerful as the Nvidia Shield Android TV set top box, which gives 4K output (the switch is only 1080p, not even 2K). 

Also, comparing Nintendo to Apple just isn't fair. Apple: the biggest company in the history of the world. Nintendo: they make video game consoles and a few (aging) video game franchises. The Wii, the best selling product in Nintendo's history, sold 102 million units. And this was over the life of the console WHICH WAS SEVEN YEARS. After that, the Gameboy Advance (thanks to the Pokemon craze) which sold 81 million units way back in 2001, and the 3DS selling 66 million, and it has been on the market since 2011. The original NES sold 61 million way back in the 80s, and no other hardware of theirs reached 50 million.(SNES 49 million, N64 32 million). And oh yes, you DO NOT want to compare the average selling price and profit margin for a Nintendo gaming system to that for an iPhone, or even an Apple Watch, iPad or iPod. And that speaks nothing of the HUGE margin that Apple gets on their Macs, and I would imagine that Apple sells more Macs annually than Nintendo does consoles. 

Nintendo, despite their huge global cultural impact, really is a small company in a niche industry. The percentage of households that own a PC or smartphone dwarfs the percentage that owns a gaming console, and always has.