stevenoz

What bothers me: I will not be able to play my CD-ripped songs in iTunes with the HomePod... like I can through the Apple TV to my sound system when my Mac is on, iTunes booted, and on the network. Not being able to do that with the HomePod is a deal-killer.

If you want to pay $20 a month for Apple Music, fine, but I don't want to pay for that when all my extensive music collection is playable through my Mac and AirPlay.
(The HomePod will also know about any digital songs/albums that were bought from Apple via the iTunes Store.)

I want to be able to say to Siri, "Play Whatever-Album in iTunes." Perhaps my needed feature will come in a future firmware upgrade.. but that is not mentioned in this article... nor anywhere else that I have read.

Too bad... I was ready to buy a HomePod.

New assembly factories presumably will be a robotic domain, more and more, as they should be.

Take Donald's iPhone away from him and tell him to worry about the national deficit.

To quote Adam Engst: 

• For power users, Apple should optimize the theoretical MacBook Pro for performance and connectivity, worrying about size, weight, and battery life secondarily. A 13-inch model might have similar performance specs to a tricked-out version of the proposed MacBook Air but with an industrial design that offers more ports: MagSafe, Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 2 port, USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet, and an SD card slot. Its price might start around $1500 and go up with additional CPU and storage. For those who need the ultimate power, the 15-inch model could support amounts of RAM above what laptop chipsets can generally handle, along with a plethora of build-to-order options that could push its price from a starting point of maybe $1800 into the stratosphere. Such specs would reduce battery life and increase weight but would enable mobile professionals to rely on a single machine.

The core problem is that Apple no longer seems to understand how Mac users choose their machines. Right now, it’s nearly impossible to figure out what Mac laptop to buy, because the three key differentiators of price, size, and performance are difficult to tease out, with all the models converging on the MacBook Air’s focus on size at the expense of price and performance.

Plus, as Andy Ihnatko also pointed out, Apple has become a design and manufacturing company, not an engineering company. Unsurprisingly, the only Mac for which design and manufacturing matter more than anything else is the canonical MacBook Air, which needs to be magically small and light and is willing to compromise on price and performance.

The prime directive of an engineering company is to provide products that solve users’ problems. It’s all about helping users achieve their goals with the least amount of wasted time and effort. That used to describe Apple to a T.

Nowadays, Apple is ignoring the desires of many Mac users and focusing on making gorgeous objects that are possible purely because of the company’s leadership in advanced manufacturing techniques. That has a place with an iPhone or iPad, but who cares if an iMac is thin? You look at the front, not the edge! We don’t mind if our Macs are carved from single blocks of aluminum and feature chamfered edges, but that design won’t make us more productive. 

When it comes to Macs, form should follow function, not force us into uncomfortable compromises.