atomic101

Fatman said:

I guess that will save about $30million/yr in salaries. Hire some more people to the Siri team to finally catch up with Amazon/Google.

Amen to that. As a whole, Siri is terrible. After almost 9 years I’d expect it to have reached a level of pristine refinement. As it stands, every time I use Siri, I have to meditate a little to prepare myself for the intense disappointment and frustration. Dictation and voice recognition are absurdly poor. 

foregoneconclusion said:

gatorguy said: The rational explanation says they had created a BAD PR situation with the intentional throttling stories flowing out of the iOS update and needed to do something positive to counter them. Thus the battery program for which they got GOOD PR.

Apple didn't create any "bad PR". The tech media did by misrepresenting both how iOS handled voltage supply issues AND how lithium ion battery technology works for voltage supply. The throttling in iOS was introduced only to prevent auto shutdown in situations where the voltage demand was higher than the battery could supply. Those kinds of voltage demand problems are not limited to old batteries that need replacing. They also occur when the battery charge is too low (like 20% or below) or if you're using your phone in cold temperatures. Apple was forced to clean up the mess created by someone else. 

I call shenanigans.  Apple had a hand in the mess they created and eventually owned up to it.  Their communication of this issue and initial handling of the situation (prior to coming clean and offering the battery replacement program) was poor and created an environment ripe for conspiracies.  I'm still bitter about my experience with this even though it's over a year behind me now.

ericthehalfbee said:

davgreg said:

Fanboy drivel.

Google is an advertising company.  Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet.
Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform.
Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.

Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?

After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.

The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.

So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?

Troll drivel. Welcome to the block list.

A bit rash to silence?  Some interesting counterpoints at the very least.  Perspective is important in any conversation.

What benefit does this lawsuit realistically serve the public other than making the attorneys a little bit richer? Sad when the new frontier of information and technology only gives greedy opportunists another avenue of loophole treasure seeking.

Speaking from someone who is a bit of a technology nut, and from someone who always salivated at the newest iPhone release, the magic of smartphones is gone for me.  The feature set is largely fleshed out, and the phone has become a bit of commodity with all of the cheap competition out there.  At this point, the yearly nips and tucks aren't terribly compelling, and utility/usability are more important to me overall.... which explains my satisfaction with an older and totally competent iPhone SE (that can be easily wielded with one hand).  I suspect that the phenomenon that I'm facing is shared by many others.  It's not that I can't afford a new iterative phone - it's just that I don't see the need.