mpantone

AppleZulu said:

You might look into JBL, Harman/Kardon, Kipsch, Sony, Bose or some other brand for what you want. 

... knowing that those fine speaker brands might not make listening to NPR Radio much better...

They might make Sir Georg Solti's landmark recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle more enjoyable. An AM radio broadcast of the ballgame? Perhaps not as impactful.

The biggest problem here is that there are some people on the Internet who don't understand that there are many usage cases and that different people will do different things for different reasons. And that some people will do lots of different things with one device. They only accept their own sole usage case as the sole valid one.

Some of the discussion in this thread seems to be indicative of this extreme myopia, pretty commonplace online and seems to be happening with more regularity these days.

Pity.

melgross said:

JP234 said:

Growing earnings organically by making great products that everyone wants, rather than buying other companies? What a concept! Too bad some other S&P 500 corporations haven't learned this lesson. The great Magellan Fund manager Peter Lynch had a name for growth by acquisition: "Diworsification."

Do you know what type of companies Apple buys? Other than two exceptions, it small, usually unknown companies with some software if hardware that Apple needs for their products. It’s almost never to buy an actual product. The only time Apple really did that in a big way was buying Next and Beats. Otherwise they bought small software companies for their software, but totally changed for their use.

Apple didn't buy NeXT for the hardware which was discontinued in 1993 (the company renamed from NeXT Computer to NeXT Software) -- three years before Apple's acquisition. The acquisition was primarily for engineering talent and software IP. Some NeXTSTEP concepts ended up in OS X but the hardware certainly wasn't the reason.

Note that there was a mysterious two-year delay between OS X Server 1.0 in 1999 and the initial desktop OS X release in 2001. There were persistent rumors that the delay was caused by a Jobs-enforced internal mandate that OS X run on x86 hardware. In 2006, Apple made the transition to Intel CPUs, presumably because they had been running OS X on x86 for years.

It's highly disputable that Apple bought Beats for the hardware either. They really bought it for the brand/market presence to compete with Samsung for the youth market. Dr. Dre's name and likeness was worth way more than the hardware. Heck, Apple recently killed off the arguably best Beats hardware product: the Pill speaker.

Well, one thing for sure, Apple isn't going to take a massive cut on gross margins.

Anyhow, let's not forget that even Gurman -- whose prediction accuracy is better than most of this peers -- still bats way below .500. That means the majority of the things he predicts end up being inaccurate.

It is highly unlikely that the full-sized HomePod will return.

I could see another model maybe twice the cubic volume as the HomePod Mini arrive, but nothing nearing the size of discontinued model.

It is highly likely that Apple had prototyped a wide variety of sizes (which a wide range of components and functionality) before it released the original HomePod. I'm willing to believe that hundreds of prototype configurations existed in their labs but we only say one.

As we have seen for previous products, there are tons and tons of unreleased designs that end up on the scrap heap or in some warehouse that never see the light of day as a shipping product that will end up on a store shelf.

mikethemartian said:

But it is contrived. Like when Johny Srouji pretends he is speaking from Apple’s hardware labs. It is just a dressed TV set. It isn’t s real hardware lab. It is just for show.

Hell, it's not just Johny's lab. It's ALL green screen.

There are often no/little shadows for the presenters, just what is carried over from the green screen even if those shadows make zero sense relative to where the light is coming from in the shot. No reflections despite the fact that many of the "sets" are shiny surfaces including impossibly clean and scuff-free floors, glass, metal, etc.

Infinite depth of field. No backlighting or exposure issues. No optical defects/aberrations, lens flares, etc. 

The audio is even more contrived. No echoes whatsoever, even in spaces where the speakers should be difficult to hear (spaces in or around the Steve Jobs Theater, Tim walking through an empty spaceship building ring, etc.) where crisp audio should be impossible. No one ever wears a microphone. Not even the sound of footsteps even when the presenter is wearing shoes that should make noise (e.g., women wearing heels).

The outdoor scenes are hilarious. Apple won't simulate real wind for the presenters' hair in outdoor scenes. Everyone's lighting is perfect despite the fact that most outdoor daytime scenes appear to be midday where the overhead sun should cause sharp and unflattering shadows (like photos from a real estate property shoot). Perfect weather conditions. Out of season foliage in landscape shots.

More sterile and contrived than a utopian sci-fi movie from the Nineties.

I love watching these pre-recorded announcements for the sheer plasticness. It's like a "Where's Waldo?" game trying to identify all of the inconsistencies and incongruities.

One thing for sure, they have excelled at learning to read off the teleprompter. No interminable delay waiting for the video source to switch to the demo machine or the next presenter to step to the right place on the stage.

Everything is faker than Beverly Hills augmentation mammoplasty which still casts real shadows...

  

currentinterest said:

Flat sides so it can charge an Apple Pencil 2, makes perfect sense.

Apple Pencil recharging capability would invariably come to the iPad Pro first, not a low end model. Knowing Apple they would probably release a newer, more expensive Pencil for this rather than make the functionality available on existing hardware.