saarek

From what I can tell the US Covid peak has not been reached yet and Apple decides to open their stores......

Come on Apple, do the right thing. It’s not like you can’t afford it!

wood1208 said:

Wov! no 14",no WiFi 6. Minor spec-bump upgrade. Could have released at the same time as Macbook Air.

It should really have been released alongside the 16" MacBook Pro, but I suspect Apple wanted to sell as many of the more expensive machines as they could and leaving the duff keyboard on the 13" model for another few months almost certainly helped them do just that.

mistergsf said:

All said and done, in my experiences, I can't say that Alexa is far superior to Siri. Maybe because I use them both generically. That's not to say I don't believe you when you say Siri is far behind. I would just like some examples that I can try out myself.

I find Siri is actually superior to Alexa when giving basic commands to control connected gadgets. For example when I ask Alexa to “turn on the lounge plug” she will sometimes do it or else she will reply “lounge doesn’t support that”. With Siri the same command goes through 100% of the time.

Where I find Siri falls down is outside of these specific commands for home automation.

Let me give a couple of examples:

Ask Alexa what Gas Mark 3 is in Celsius and you’ll get the correct answer. Ask the same of HomePod and you get the generic Sorry, HomePod does not know this type of answer. It’s amazing how many seemingly simple questions Siri just does not know!

Another prime example, and one where the HomePod should absolute destroy Alexa is with Apple Music. If I say to Siri “Play shotgun” it plays the version from the 60’s by Junior Walker, which is not the song I want and is in fact a song I have never played. I ask Siri to play a different version of shotgun, it just plays the same damn song. In the end I have to specify, Siri, play Shotgun by George Ezra.

Now my children love Shotgun by George Ezra, I’d not be surprised if they have listened to it a 100 times or more and yet for some reason, on the HomePod, it insists on playing a song that we have never listened to instead of using logic to work out the one we want.

If we ask Alexa to play Shotgun it gets the George Ezra version every time and on the odd occasion where we ask it to play a song where the name has been used a few times over the years the command of play a different version actually plays a different bloody version!

I could give so many more examples, but I think you get the point. It’s crazy how Apple Music is better via Alexa than via Siri, that’s just embarrassing for Apple!

Interesting, some of my companies web portals and services were all designed around IE5 and don’t work on my Mac.

I wonder if this Internet Explorer mode will fix the issue for me...... off to download I go.

dysamoria said:

davidmalcolm said:

Well this story alone makes the feature worth it.

Fully agreed. I was unaware of the feature; this article was my first exposure to it. Makes me want to share this info with the people I know with iPhones.

Do droid devices have anything similar? A girlfriend of mine has been considering driving across country to bring her car here and I’m uncomfortable with her being by herself on that trip. (Going to go look now)

As far as I am aware there is no universal Android equivalent. I know an emergency SMS can be sent and I believe certain Android phones from the likes of Samsung provide it in one form or another.

One advantage of Apple products is that they all have it, the Apple Watch does too. So many examples of how this has saved lives, from car crashes to abductions.