lordjohnwhorfin

Wink was great in the beginning. They had an awesome iOS app, added support for new devices on a regular basis... Things have never been the same since the demise of Quirky. The app was never updated, popular new devices not supported, and the whole system got unbearably flaky. Just this past week my hub disconnected and required a reboot. TWICE.

There was such an urgency in the way they initially demanded subscription money it’s clear they needed it to keep the lights on and the servers running. I am not expecting any of that money to go to new developments, instead it’s just going to be used to keep a moribund system on life support until it dies of irrelevance. It’s been impossible to buy a new Wink hub for the past three years, the user base is shrinking, not expanding. It’s dead.

So I bit the bullet, bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and installed Homebridge on it. That thing is amazing and not that hard fo figure out! It has tons of plugins to support pretty much any device under the sun, you just need to add a ZWave USB stick and a Zigbee interface to support your legacy Wink devices, and they’ll magically show up as HomeKit devices in your Home app. Much better use of money than a Wink sub.

This almost sounds reasonable except it’s total BS. First, the fees are a percentage off the sales. If you sell a $3 app, $1 goes to Apple and $2 goes to you. It may sound steep until you realize the size of the market you’re gaining access to, and also how much pre-digital distribution markets were costing to software developers. If you make a software package that’s for sale physically at MicroCenter, Fry’s, Best Buy... and it lists for $100, by the time you’ve paid distribution and mandatory advertising costs (you have to pay to get listed) you’re lucky to get $10. I don’t think a lot of developers are eager to return to that model. Apple created the concept, showed the world how it’s done, and that can’t have been cheap. This is really vindictive coming from MS which failed every single of those endeavors. They used to own the smartphone market with their crappy windowsCE, which ran apps that you couldn’t buy anywhere you had to get a “copy from a friend”. They could have developed the App Store. Jealous idiots.

Microsoft released the ARM-based Surface Pro X last years to tepid reviews. It does come with a (sluggish) emulation layer a la Rosetta, but it only supports 32 bit apps.

Stay away from this turd. I bought the highly rated tri-band Velop mesh router based on the rave reviews and the hype, to cover a relatively large house and yard. It's been nothing but pain, with random node drops, random crashes, and the final straw recently was complete unrecoverable failure. Even when it worked, coverage left a lot to be desired. I replaced it with a Netgear Nighthawk RAX120 which has no trouble covering the 3400sqft house and half acre lot, from a meter monitor in the front of the house to a Rachio irrigation system attached to the fence at the end of the backyard -- and video cameras on the sides. Also, no problems streaming 4K to three TVs throughout the house.

Actually they don’t advertise it but currently Apple Music streams for free on Southwest.