chaicka

Gosh...I have been on Z-Wave and ZigBee products for years and honestly, the lack of deep investment on R&D to improve the shortfalls and expand functionalities to be more holistic matching lifestyles and use-cases of its audience have driven me away from them progressively. 7 years on Fibaro Z-Wave and 5 years on Philips Hue - all the fragmentation, piecemeal and tons of man hours spent to pick up coding and various skills just to make a decent home automation is enough. HomeKit came along in the last few years and slowly but progressively improve and expand with ease of getting started and using shortcuts to easily create automations - is just so much easier for new consumers jumping into home automation.

And these IoT players blame the big tech firms for their failures to invest in R&D, expand its talent pools, etc to compete when they have head-start for years (if not for a decade)? Yet, when they have investors fundings during the beginning years, they spent huge on (somewhat false or never materialise) marketing, nice trips and benefits, paying the top execs handsomely, etc.

And that's anti-competitive behaviour? Wow...this era's leaders and regulators sure amaze me every now and then.

genovelle said:

I believe Tile is threatened by more than Apple. Apple’s platform allows for competition to compete without having to buildout their own network. The barrier to entry has been erased over night. 

That’s essentially the key point. Now, any device maker in the world can simply build or integrate better tracking without heavy R&D investment and threatens Tile’s main market lead.

In short, Apple helped to create competition to Tile’s business and Tile isn’t happy about that.

FizzyPanda said:

Tile is probably wishing it hadn't poked the bear. They're now just a commodity and irrelevant with products that integrate Apple Find My directly. I never liked the fact that Tile tried to block Apple from releasing a competing product under the guise of anti-competitive behaviour. It always felt like Tile were the ones being anti-competitive.

Great move by Apple, the move adds a lot of value to the whole ecosystem, making what was a narrow service much more relevant and mainstream.

And the much delay in releasing 'AirTags' may also be a move to wait for other 3rd parties accessories to be ready and available so as to avoid any perceived anti-competitive flaming. It's great to have choices and integrated 'Find My' devices, equipment, etc without having to solely depend on Tile's devices. Totally agree with what you mentioned - a great move that adds lots of value.

It’s rubbish of Facebook argument.

As a consumer, I performs my own research on products I intend to buy, be it physical visits to retailers, word of mouth from extended family or friends, search engines, etc. If it happens that Facebook dished me ads relating to these products that I end up buying from an online store, and they get credited as success influence for their ads???

I am totally behind Apple on this one. As consumer, we should have choice and control over how our digital footprint is being managed, not being invaded silently without choice to opt out. Same thing telcos are doing - ads to your mobile number and we becoming their product to sell to businesses who choose to put ads via telco. Unacceptable!!!

As a small business owner, the last thing our business needs is false-positive claims of success for ads we choose to buy/put out. IMO, if it isn’t direct ad link purchase, it isn’t counted towards to ad platform. Period!

maestro64 said:

And this is the company that wanted to f-with Apple. I wondering if they’re rethinking this may have been bad idea. 

It would likely have been a better long-term deal if Qualcomm had took the initiative to change its charging model before Apple even started exploring the idea of developing its own modem-chip (and whatever connectivity chips). The relationship turning sour means a bigger push within Apple to accelerate development of its own 5G and other related connectivity chipset (or even integration into the A-series chip itself).