rare comment

I have been hoping for years that walkie-talkie would be exported to AirPods.  

My vision was that one could create ad hoc voice groups in small geographies that allowed regular people to have the same sort of always on communications as you see for security teams (like in the movies, but in less exciting situations).  My use case was for situations like crowds or walking with a group down a city street where, with noise cancellation, you could have a conversation without yelling or needing to stand right next to someone.  

And, in some future vision, if AI got good enough, it might be able to guess whom you were speaking with (maybe the start of the conversation is with all but then narrows to a pair when obvious whom the participants are).  And dynamically adjust volume so others can sort of hear but assume they don't really need to pay attention until context makes it clear that something was meant for everyone.

discountopinion said:

Absolutely love my HomePods, have the 1st get, 2nd get and the mini. 

Siri is acting drunk most of the time these days, but still a great product.

Hoping for a HomePod 3 this fall.

I love mine also (2 originals, 4 minis) but man is Siri crazy these days.  Saying it has problems connecting to the internet and then suddenly playing music anyway.  And then stopping.  Sometimes showing up on the watch while playing.  There seems to be some weird multiple user account issues going on.

mike1 said:

Since it's now July. I suspect "final quality testing" has long since been completed if they are going to be used in the 16 models.

If the author meant to say that Samsung has delivered sensors for production and that inventory is going through normal quality inspection of incoming materials, that would be different.

I think mike1 is right but maybe (maybe?) the idea is that Sony is the sole supplier today and Samsung is being approved now and will become a second supplier later in the 16 run.  But it seems very late to be adding a second supplier for a product that will be released in a few months.  This is especially the case as I would imagine it is the initial ramp where suppliers have the hardest time meeting demand, not six months into production.

applguy said:

What search ads is Alphabet buying?

This (the report, not your question) is wacky.  It's almost as if they are confusing cases where Alphabet is the nominal buyer of space from a site (through its ad exchange) but the real buyer is the person who contracted through Alphabet.

maestro64 said:

Yep we never shut down our Mac desk top, it only goes to sleep at the end of the day, it can be months before a restart happens. I do from time to time run maintenance utilities to clean up logs files and such and make sure everything is working fine. I have done this for years with no ill effects. We run a 2012 Imac 27" to give you and idea and only had to replace the HDD because it start to die, replaced it with a 2TB SSD and now the computer is like new. Thinking about replacing it with the new OSX 12 coming out which will render the compute obsolete from a software upgrade stand point. 


I can tell you PC can not deal with being left on, my work PC has to be shut down all the time otherwise it get laggy or just begins to misbehave

maestro - we are finally updating to the new 24" from our 2011 (we did two SSD upgrades) and only because software support is really vanishing.  But with 10 years from a desktop that is still going strong (speedy, reliable, etc.) and has pretty much powered on for the entire 10+ years, I can't complain about finally being pushed to buy a new machine.  I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who has been able to hold onto an iMac for so long.  And it's easier for us than you - we have a 21" so the screen will be bigger, not smaller.