myopiarocks

These homes must be disposable. Imagine having a house specially-wired with SOTA twenty years ago (10baseT, NTSC-resolution rear-projection built into the walls).... you wouldn't be able to use any of it, today.

In 10 years the only thing these screens and mics will be good for is surveillance. ...assuming they can do more than that, today.

There's nothing like a trip down memory lane with the 2006 apple maps launch to remind me that all complaints about Apple's recent QA decline suffer from recency bias. 

My big complaint with carplay is turning on the car: on a honda pilot with "wired" carplay it's russian roulette whether to plug in the phone then start the car, or start the car then plug in the phone... and then will the honda display launch carplay or stay in its own system... or connect to the phone with bluetooth and not connect with carplay?

I shouldn't have to sit in the driveway with my car idling for 5 minutes while I disconnect and reconnect my phone until carplay successfully launches. The problem is the honda software not having a prioritized list of connections (ie, prefer carplay and detect it!).

New half-baked business idea: make an aftermarket car stereo that *only* works with wireless carplay.

avon b7 said:

Then bring up the drawbridges and cut yourself off from the rest of the world.

US intel agencies prefer to keep the drawbridge down and reverse-inflitrate to gather intel and occasionally do more than just gather.

There are two issues:
1) Many of the underlying communication systems rely on dual-use technology, and so regulated under the EAR (US export control list from a non-military wing of the feds). Huawei (and ZTE, and others) contracts with the PLA for same types of communication technologies. So a US firm working together with Huawei could aid a foreign military power and violate the EAR. AT&T doesn't want to do that, and congressional folks are implicitly threatening this (this is the pressure they're applying to AT&T).
2) There have been strong concerns for close to two decades that many Chinese firms are funded (run?) indirectly by the PLA (People's Liberation Army). The PLA is very wealthy and powerful (duh) so not a huge stretch of the imagination given China's governing structure. There isn't direct [public] evidence making this connection but the scuttlebutt is that intelligence agencies from multiple countries strongly believe this to be the case. Insert "CIA guarantees there are WMD in Iraq" joke here.

If you're a US business you do not ever want to violate export controls, because people go to jail for doing that (google "export control jail" for a fun 45 minutes of reading) and there isn't the same kind of corporate immunity shielding employees for violating export controls like there are for other white-collar crimes. So the AT&T execs got a threatening call from congress and they knew to take it personally.

I have a 6 128gb, and here's why I'm waiting one more year (not that you care):
- T-Mobile's 700MHz spectrum not supported this year. Probably next year.
- Wireless charging supported, but I'll wait for Apple to release their version before jumping on-board: usually when apple enters a field they do something to slightly tweak the standards and their version works better in their own ecosystem (W1 for headphones, homepod for speakers, etc). Risk is that next year's phone foregoes a lightning port entirely (yikes).
- Can we not be stuck with lossy bluetooth audio? Why not wireless Airplay headphones? I'll suffer the princess leia headbuns look if that's what it takes.
- I'll let someone else show me how great face ID works before I adopt it, thanks. Looks great, but still a version 1.0. Touch ID was so much better on the 6 than on the 5s.

Bottom line: iOS11 reminds me of OSX 10.6: Lots of stuff like "Grand Central" and "Open CL" that are building for the future. Similarly, the iPhoneX reminds me of the first retina macbook pro (which I'm typing this on right now): lots of really great "I see where Apple is going with this, and I like it" but it took another model year for the hardware (and battery life!) to really catch up to what the graphics wanted to do. Tech is always better "next year" but there are certain sweet spots every 3-5 years where the software and hardware align and the gizmo shines. Based on what I see, I think next year will be that year for a lot of different Apple products.