welshdog

Wife and I have iPhone 11 models. Hers is the base model and it has always been not so great. We'll get her a new 16 Pro so she can have the better camera features. She will also appreciate the speed and improved run time. Pretty much everything else Apple went on about to day, she will never use. In fact I can safely predict that after she accidentally hits the Activate button a few times, she will hand me the phone requesting I disable that feature. The camera button - that's either going to be great or frustrate a lot of people - hard to say at this point. AI? Come on, no one who is a grown ass adult and who is able to express themselves adequately with words, really wants any of that stuff. Someday it might have real value to the broadest class of users, but right now it all seems rather trivial in functionality.

Trump is the unsurprising result of concepts and rhetoric that were started by Reagan. He used his phony, homespun speaking style to convince people that it was okay to dislike your government. It was okay to disassemble your government because "big" was bad. It was okay to think that helping people in need was an intolerable expense. While Reagan is not so popular with young extremist conservatives now, he and his goals were worshipped by Republicans for a couple decades. During that time you can see how each wave of conservative victories at the national level led to incrementally more extreme positions. Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, GW Bush, neo cons, the Tea Party and now the most extreme - MAGA. Reagan started the ball rolling and Trump is the result anyone paying even slight attention should have expected was coming.

For me today's event was a huge information and feature overload. I am not a developer and a pretty low level user of OS features as it is, so all this new stuff was exciting, but also a bit off putting from a "it's all too much" standpoint. However, it really is very impressive how much effort Apple puts into their privacy efforts along with expanding features. As someone said above, this puts Apple in a unique position in the AI space compared to literally everyone else. Pretty sure the financial analysts won't understand the implications of today's event and the stock price will drop initially.

avon b7 said:
"The YouTubers do serve a purpose when it comes to comparing devices out in the real world."

Youtube comparison tests are of no value unless they somehow manage to test the two phones in a scientifically repeatble manner. I've watched videos where they drop an iPhone from some distance out of their hands. Then they do the same thing with a Android phone. Since they are taking no measures to insure that each phone impacts the pavement in a measurably identical way, the results are meaningless. Only machines can perform tests identially and repeatably. Each phone the Youtuber drops hits the pavement in a differnt way - the angle, position, chassis location, orientation etc. are not the same for each phone so the results cannot be compared. Some dude dropping phones from his hands is click bait.

For me there is always this bit of discomfort using Siri - it just feels weird talking out loud, but not to a person. I don't even like talking on a cell phone around other people unless there is no convenient place for privacy, not to mention it's rude to people nearby. Regardless of my hangups, Siri of course often fails at simple requests and it would be nice to see it improve. Her inability to find and play specific songs or even bands is pretty maddening. As far as using Siri for complex requests, I would think most of the time it would be easier to just do it yourself on a Mac or phone rather than wasting time to figure out how to get Siri to understand what it is you want. Is AI really going to improve Siri's request comprehension or just make it worse? We'll see I guess.