jurassic

"Among famous Doers are... current U.S. President Donald Trump."

Donald Trump: "I am a doer of very biggly things, using my stable genius brain, which happens to be the most genius brain in the world... and there is no collusion!"

Bebe said:

This is not really surprising, is it?  Anyone remembers the move from PowerPC to Intel based processor?

If you want to get a good understanding of HOW Consumer Reports came out with such a negative assessment of the HomePod, in contradiction to the almost unanimous superlative reviews and testing results done by audio engineers and technology professionals, read this excerpt from CR's "review":

"Consumer Reports evaluates sound quality for speakers, smart or otherwise, in a dedicated listening room in which our experienced testers compare each model with high-quality reference speakers. Each test unit that allows for user controls is tuned for optimum sound quality—we want the speakers to sound their best."

Also, take a look at the photo of CR's testing "rig”. It has all speakers crammed together on a multi-shelf stand with many speakers in front of, behind, above, and below each other. It is a very cumbersome setup, in a very unnatural test environment (unlike ANY room and speaker placement that a real person would ever experience).

In the photo of the Consumer Reports speaker setup in the listening room, notice that the HomePod speaker has no space or flat wall surfaces on the left and right sides, and on the back. The HomePod uses that free space around it, and the rear and side walls to reflect the left and right channels, using audio beamforming, while the center channel (audio that is centered in the sound space) is beamed forward.

The HomePod is unlike other speakers that just have their internal speakers facing forward, and that DO NOT rely on reflected audio beamforming.

In Consumer Report's setup, instead of clear, reflected left and right audio channels, the sound would have been muffled. It is unknown whether this debilitating positioning of the HomePod was done purposely, or if it was done due to a lack of understanding by the CR testers.

In other words, it was a very poorly setup test environment, and the review consisted of "listeners" giving their own subjective feelings about which speaker they liked best. Aside from any unstated motives or biases of the "listeners" at Consumer Reports, there was no methodical or scientific testing done of the speakers, in various "natural" room environments. In contrast, this type of analytical and realistic testing WAS done by other reputable audio engineers and technology professionals.

""We do not expect a red iPhone X model since the metal frame is too challenging to paint," Zhang wrote."

The back of the iPhone X, like the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, is coloured glass (space grey or silver), so it should be no problem for Apple to make a red glass back for the iPhone X as easily as they can do it for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.

Various reports today are stating that Apple sold less iPhones in the recent holiday quarter than they did a year ago... But as they say in math class, "Do the math."

iPhone sales hit 77.316 million units in Apple’s 91-day Q1 FY 2018 quarter. That compares with 78.29 million sales in the year-ago quarter.

You’d imagine those figures meant that sales shrank, but it’s not the case: Last year’s quarter extended over 98 days (14 weeks), while this year Apple saw a more traditional 91-day (13-week) quarter.

That means Apple sold around 849,600 iPhones every day in Q1 FY 2018, in contrast to 798,877 iPhones it sold each day across Q1 FY 2017.

In other words, Apple sold iPhones in Q1 FY 2018 at a 6.35% FASTER rate than they did in Q1 FY 2017!

Or, another way to put it, if this year's 91 day Q1 was equal to the 98 days of last year's Q1, the total count of iPhones sold would be 83,260,800 (Again, 6.35% MORE than last year!).