elijahg

StrangeDays said:

elijahg said:

bigtds said:

This thing is useless to anyone other than and apple user. Too bad. Just allowing Bluetooth streaming would have opened Homepod up to so many more people.

It does actually have Bluetooth, but (presumably) because Cook wants you to help inflate his services income, it won't stream anything but Apple Music directly, and trying to stream other services over AirPlay is a hassle.

You're high. Streaming via AirPlay is effortless, and sounds much better than BT. You want a BT speaker, go get one, plenty on the market. But if you want a high-quality AP speaker, there are much fewer excellent options, and HP is certainly one of them.

You're the one who's high, on Apple fumes apparently. Try removing your head from Apple's ass once in a while, the air out here is quite nice.

It's not effortless. iOS frequently forgets that I'm controlling the HomePod and the controls just go away, so another dive into the control centre/music app's Airplay button to select the HP. Same on the Watch.

Playing from iTunes to multiple Airplay devices is slow and clunky, enabling another output causes the music to stall while it waits for the device to wake up and then there's a 50-50 chance of it actually working or going back to one output, so then I have to go through the slow and frustrating procedure of trying to coax iTunes into enabling multiple outputs again. And before you make your usual excuse that the Mac is too slow or old hardware/user error/can't possibly be an Apple issue, it's a 2019 i9 iMac and a 4K AppleTV over a gigabit connection through Ubiquiti networking gear. And the iOS multi-output Airplay UI isn't much better.

Oh, there's no way to add a delay to an AirPlay output either, so Airplay on my AppleTV ends up with a few tens of milliseconds delay relative to the HomePod, making its output unusable anyway. Airplay should be using broadcasts when more than one device is playing instead of unicasting to each device, would help with synchronisation. And before you try and blame the speakers attached to the AppleTV, the delay is still present with different speakers.

Bluetooth can stream lossless audio, so that's nothing to do with anything. The quality from a decent BT speaker can be just as good as the HomePod. I have a Bose Bluetooth speaker, and it's pretty damn good, especially as it was less than half the cost of the HP. 

GeorgeBMac said:

I like FireFox for a number of reasons -- one of which is it provides commonality between my Windows and MacOS devices -- where I can share bookmarks and pick up on one device where I left off on the other.  I would prefer to use Safari on both, but Apple discontinued it on Windows -- so now I use FireFox.

Installing iCloud on Windows lets you sync bookmarks between Safari on iOS and FF on Windows

benji888 said:

It’s really, extremely irritating to be playing a playlist/album in my car, go into store, come back, hook iPhone back up and it HAS LOST WHERE IT LEFT OFF!?!? It will either play the first song in my library (alphabetically), or an often played album.

They actually fixed that a few major iOS versions ago... and now it's back to doing the same. It's really really annoying.

chasm said:

rogifan_new said:

Like I’ve said many times Apple wasted $3B on Beats. And don’t throw headphones at me; that’s not why Apple bought Beats.

Good to know you’re still wrong. Let me direct you to the last few years’ of Apple’s financial statements and the growth of wearables ... let’s see how many billions more than three they’ve made ...

The Watch and AirPods along with their H1 chip came out of the Beats acquisition? Who knew?

henrybay said:

usersinceos1 said:

henrybay said:

...I don’t trust Face ID because it bombards my retinas with infrared laser dots (which can’t be healthy)....


...Also, edge to edge screens are just another gimmick - like those frameless reading glasses in the early 90’s.,,,

Then, I presume you also stay indoors and only use fluorescent lighting.  After all, the sun and other types of indoor lighting also supply lots of IR radiation, probably much more than the "infrared laser dots" emitted by Face ID..

The point of the edge-to-edge screen is that it provides more screen real estate in a smaller external package.  An SE-sized overall size iPhone with an edge-to-edge screen would have more screen area than the current SE.

I would not be so sure about the safety of IR lasers. There are dozens of scientific articles pointing out the dangers of these types of lasers (even at low power). It’s true that there is ambient IR light all around us but this is quite different to shining a concentrated laser beam of IR directly into your retina and cornea. Here is a useful link. 

https://blink.ucsd.edu/safety/radiation/lasers/effects.html

The iPhones do not use lasers.