rcfa

Hm, wondering how easily the watches, and consequently an entire AppleID account and its data, can be compromised with such a tool…

Apple needs to allow security researchers access to these. 

It’s not like one can assume that everyone working at Apple is trustworthy by virtue of being an Apple employee.

cgWerks said:

It has to either be smart, or sound good.
And, if it is in that 'sound good' category (like discontinued HopePod) then it needs an audio input so it isn't a one-string-banjo.
I'm not sure why Apple is having such a hard time with this.

Yup; thankfully *I* can do everything with AirPlay; but just the ability to also use it as a bluetooth speaker outside the Apple ecosystem, would have gone a long way…
…an actual speaker input, such as to be able to use it as an active speaker, would have helped, too.

The biggest issue is, that for a mono speaker it’s overkill: if you want quality, you want stereo or surround. As such, they should have predominantly been marketed and sold as stereo pairs, with singles being the exception, not the norm.

macxpress said:

IMO, I think it was silly to drop the HomePod and just focus on the $50 speaker market with a $99 speaker. Why can't Apple do both? The regular HomePod was just way too expensive. I own 2 and I only purchased them because I got them on sale for $199 both times. I think they work great, but they're just too expensive. Apple can't always get away with its pricing schemes in every market they try to enter. 

The Homepod wasn’t too expensive, it was marketed wrong.

As a single speaker for Siri, etc. the HomePod is total overkill, the HomePod mini is ideal for that.
The HomePod should have been predominantly or even exclusively been marketed as STEREO PAIR, in a set of two speakers.
Given the quality of its sound relative to its size, it was a BARGAIN compared two twp equivalent active speakers or two bookshelf speakers with a power amplifier. And neither of these two options would have had Siri, HomeKit support, or AirPlay.
Heck, even selling sets with two HomePods and an AppleTV 4K would have made sense.

I use a video projector, aTV and two HomwPods: one of the best and easiest to set up Hometheater combinations money can buy for that money.

Apple doesn’t need a new software engineer for HomePod, they need a new marketing team; one that actually understands home entertainment, rather than computers.

Good riddance! Another entitled brat who tried to politicize the workplace, and get a fat payout as a result.

In a country like Russia, they would have a car accident.

In the US they will sue, until the company will settle for a large sum of money under an NDA not admitting any guilt, just to avoid the damage to the reputation the continued legal action causes. You can bet that’s the endgame of her and her lawyer.
She’ll try to claim whistleblower status (even though there was nothing to blow a whistle about) and then sue for wrongful termination.
Some woke idiot in Hollywood, likely from competing corporations like Netflix or Amazon Video, might even offer a dramatized movie deal, where “based on actual events” something despicable is covered up in a company called Prune Computer, Inc., just different enough that Apple can’t sue for defamation…

Bad behavior gets rewarded these days, because due to entitlement, wokeness, nobody dares to tell such people anymore: “You’re a loser, pack up your sh*t and f*ck off!”

A generation that wants communist equality, at a capitalist level of wealth, while being lazy and irresponsible.

No, we do NOT need the cool factor, what we need is PRIVACY, things that JUST WORK and then get out of the way, we need glass that DOES NOT SCRATCH, we need maybe a sticky ecosystem, but sticky because it works best, not because it locks people in.

THAT is why the iPhone is gaining. There are plenty who switched around between the “hot phone” of the moment, just to stick with the iPhone in the end: it works, it’s not a gadget to attract some attention and then gets old.

Flipphones mean mechanics that wear and break, exactly the thing Apple wanted to avoid when it started to build and glue the battery into the phone.

Much more useful would be an e-ink display on the back of iDevices: personalized appearance, reading, (subway)maps, QR codes (tickets, vaccination certificates) on the phone in an always-on (even without battery charge left) state.  THAT is useful, not a flip phone.