retrogusto

Still just a rumor, of course. But it might make sense for Apple to do what they have with the Watch, offering premium lines with specific niche attributes at a much higher price for the relatively small number of people for whom price is no object. As many have noted, the current screen technology is already excellent, so most users would be fine with a lower priced model incorporating that, as long as the stuff that matters most is also included. In the same way, I wouldn’t be upset if they offered a gold-plated model at a big markup, because somebody would buy it, just not I.

sdw2001 said:

Great review, thanks. As a musician, I can’t escape asking “who is this product for?“ as you noted in the article, people who are going to invest in a turntable ecosystem, aren’t necessarily going to choose this. Is someone who’s been fascinated by analog versus digital music and how consumers respond to them, I don’t really get this one. Who would invest in an analog system just to run it over Bluetooth? It’s not really analog anymore, even without the network issues.  Certainly not Hi-Fi people.  The people I know who are into this kind of thing won’t even run a turntable through an integrated receiver. This product really seems like some sort of urban chic thing to me.  

Yeah, the only target group I can think of besides that might be someone who had a lot of vinyl because they bought it back in the day or inherited it but has money to burn and really just wants a stylish way to play the records without prioritizing sound quality. I can imagine my mother enjoying something like this to listen to my grandfather’s old jazz records periodically if she didn’t already have a way to do this. 

Dooofus said:

Of course, what's not mentioned is if it costs more. "Clean" energy certainly costs more to produce, so if the power company is charging you more, this feature is costing you money. I'll be turning this off. Until China, India and other developing countries are compelled to share the burden of "saving the planet" with those of us in the west, I'm (literally) not buying it.

No, the phone can’t tell your utility company how to generate the power your phone is using to charge. Maybe next century! If you read the article, you’ll see that all it does is to do its best to use power when power is least needed by others (when it can do so without impacting your charging rhythms), based on a few calculated predictions, thereby minimizing the burden on the power grid. It could save you a small amount of money if your utility company charges less for power used off-peak, but I don’t see how it could ever cost you more. 

Probably just for the priciest models, and hopefully Apple has a way to keep prices under control, with economies of scale, reduced cost of other components, etc. Different people have different priorities, but as someone who spends hours each day using an iPad Pro, weight and thickness are two of the few areas left where I feel like any improvement would be clearly noticed and appreciated. Thickness would be less important if they returned to the rounded and tapered edge design, which makes it feel thinner, but the only way to make it feel lighter is to make it lighter. The other thing they could do is to design all models based primarily on a landscape orientation, with the front cameras on the longer side and stereo speakers on the shorter sides.

Cross-platform (non-iMessage) texts don’t appear with green and blue bubbles on Android, do they? On iPhone, they appear gray and green, of course. Do Android phones even visually distinguish between messages to iPhones and those to other phones?