rossggg

mike1 said:

This looks interesting. I'm in the market for a Smart Lock and was leaning towards the new August WiFi. The only thing that gives me pause with the Level is changing the battery. Even though they claim it will last a year, changing the battery looks like it will be a mini-project in itself, as everything needs to come apart again.

There is no need to disassemble the lock to replace the battery, you simply extend the deadbolt while the door is open, and then unscrew a cap on the end and swap the battery there.  That is why the deadbolt strike is cylindrical rather than rectangular, and why it includes a new strike plate for your door frame to accommodate the new deadbolt shape.

I could be wrong, I've mostly only ever used the free Wink app to integrate various third-party services, and I have used the Wink Relay.  I believe, however, that the wink hardware all operates on the ZWave protocol, so all of the various devices purchased will still be usable if paired with any other compatible ZWave controller.  The things that are moving to a subscription are the cloud services which includes the app and, more unfortunately, the hub since it seems to have been designed to rely on the cloud and provides no local control api.

I never invested in the Wink Hub because I didn't like that it was not an open platform that would allow you add your own integrations, and I was also weary of its complete dependency on the cloud.  The cloud services have been notoriously unreliable for many users over the past couple of years, and this latest move only further proves that it was a flawed strategy to begin with.  The writing has been on the wall for quite awhile that something was amiss.  They probably ended up in a position where they were stretched too thin and needed more money so that they could invest resources into resolving the reliability issues they have been facing.

The right move would probably be to open the existing hubs up to work without the cloud, at the sacrifice of some convenience, but at least giving users and opportunity to extend the life of the ecosystem they have invested in.  With a little effort from the community a solution could be developed at that point to use the hub as a bridge to another ecosystem or protocol that would restore much of that functionality that was provided with their cloud service.  They could offer the subscription to users who just want things to keep working they way they are used to, and promise to use the new revenue to improve reliability and add new functionality down the road.  Unfortunately, they are probably already stretched too thin to dedicate resources to opening up the cloud-reliant parts of their hardware.

The silver lining is that for all of the users that decide to move on from Wink, they should at least be able to migrate all of the various devices, other than the hub, over to another ZWave compatible hub and not loose all of their investment.

rotateleftbyte said:

Rayz2016 said:

Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.

True. 

The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA. 

From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.

I could say,

So What? Who Cares?

TBH, does it really matter?

People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming.  This argument seems to be pretty myopic.  What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs.  That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.

I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming).  I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines.  As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die.  Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.

Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career.  I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only.  A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions.  What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac.  It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.

Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well.  I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC.  Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway.  Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable.  That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going.  Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products.  I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances.  Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple.  Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences.  I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.