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JamesCude said:

Every product from Meross I ever tried field after a month or less. Failed as in stopped connecting to HomeKit, and could not be resuscitated.

That's been my story too. My first died after about five weeks. Wouldn't power up at all. Second lasted about eight months before it started randomly cutting power every half hour or so. Third (and last) made it a year and a half but is now showing signs of heat stress as after about an hour, attached lights start to flicker.

A very old iDevices outdoor unit, and a two year old Lutron caseta unit have been slogging away happily all the while though.

Meross are crap.

JP234 said:

The customer's experience was an outlier. I've never encountered a more customer-friendly service than Amazon. If my order is delivered to the wrong address, Amazon immediately issues a refund, and takes on the shipper, unlike so many other companies, who leave that to the customer. Returns are way easy. They provide a prepaid return label, or let me drop it off at the local Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh store (we have both within 3 miles of our house).

When you consider the almost impossible logistics of managing the millions of orders Amazon processes every day, it's shocking that there aren't more mistakes.

I use both Amazon US and Amazon UK.  Amazon UK are nowhere near as helpful as Amazon US, and even the latter is slipping from what it was a decade back.

pscooter63 said:

Having never gotten any up to now, I have some questions for current users.

I presume these lumen ratings apply when every LED in the bulb is driven at 100% output? Thus any color variant will be some degree dimmer, depending on the hue you choose?

So I’m thinking this new 100W equivalent will be closer to 75W in practice?

Yup.  The math is pretty nasty though, because Hues don't just stack RGB LEDs to make white. They typically have at least four but sometimes five LEDs, being RGBW or RGB with warm and cold white.  Additionally they'll dial in red or blue to increase or decrease the color temp which means some tones of white are brighter than pure white.  Daylight white on my gen-3 strips for example is brighter than pure white.

By and large for whites you'll get *in the ballpark* for lumens.  Start dialing out to fancy colors though and the brightness can drop off a cliff.  I don't think the RGB LEDs are anywhere near the lumens levels of the white LED(s).

nunzy said:

India needs Apple more than Apple needs India.

India does not need Apple at all.  Apple, on the other hand, definitely needs a billion plus market.

greg uvan said:

nunzy said:

What would happen if Apple banned Spotify from all of its devices?

They might lose a couple of device sales, but probably not many. Apple has the ability. But do they have the nerve?

They'd be subject to anti competition legislation. It's something of a mystery to me that they aren't already, for the fact that the Music app comes prebundled with every iPhone. Doesn't it feel a bit like Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows and giving MS an unfair advantage over Netscape? 

 Not comparable.  MS firstly had a much larger share of the market, and thus could wield vastly more influence, and secondly, which is the big one, their actions with IE amounted to 'dumping.'  MS gave away a product that Netscape charged for.  

In Europe, the decision was made to address the IE issue by tackling the 'bundling' side, but that was just the least bad option for trying to shove the genie back in the bottle.

Since Apple Music requires a sub subscription in the same manner as Spotify does, and there is no reason to think Apple are artificially under-pricing the Apple Music service, a case for anti-competitive behavior here is currently weak.