nunzy

ihatescreennames said:

holyone said:

franklinjackcon said:

ihatescreennames said:

franklinjackcon said:

DanielEran said:

franklinjackcon said:

I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.

The article doesn't say that every  HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision. 

However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:

a) it's not an amazon/google with surveillance/ad/marketing motivations
b) it's not behind in making money in mobile
c) Apple's huge business requires it to think about things before it deploys them to hundreds of millions of users
d) as Lkrupp noted above, Apple is scrutinized in the media the way other smaller companies are not (Google, Facebook, Amazon)

d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it

Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4.  Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected.  Nobody cared.  But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.

That’s just one example.

Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.

Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones, 

I’ve always figured the reason they talk about their efforts regarding the environment was to head off being called out by, for example, Greenpeace. And even if that’s not the reason, there’s nothing wrong with eliminating/reducing toxic chemicals or conflict minerals in their devices. If they didn’t mention it from time to time how would anyone know? I doubt there are that many people making their buying decisions based on Apple’s environmental stance. If it helps other companies to do the same then that’s great.

By the way, when does Apple advertise “so much” about their environmental efforts? I’ve seen it mentioned during keynotes and I see things on AI but I have yet to see a print ad or television spot by Apple touting their environmental efforts. 

davidmalcolm said:

I really hope that Apple has a lot better stuff to announce at WWDC than some headphones with too much bass.