soundvision

While this monitor is gorgeous, it has been a disaster for the clients I had who bought them. I am no longer recommending them, nor are the Apple Stores I've worked with. Below are the problems I've seen on 4 separate monitors:

- Flickering due to wifi. We sent our first monitor in to be fixed with the extra shielding but the problem still happened after it came back. We ended up returning it.
- Kernel panics when connecting TB3 and/or waking up from sleep (seen this on 4 separate monitors)
- Display brightness arbitrarily turns down to the lowest setting, giving the appearance that it is off
- USB post on the back are not always recognized when hooking back up via TB3, forcing the user to unplug and plug back in the USB cables.

I know not everyone may have these issues, but we'll see countless references of them on Apple's review page, Apple discussion boards, and other places where people discuss these issues. Luckily this monitor has been such a disaster that it has reminded Apple that they need to make monitors again which they've confirmed they are working on for the future.

I'm thinking Apple will treat this similar to when they came out with wifi and the Airport Base Station. Apple will take this technology, give it a cool name, include the chip in products moving forward, and sell the base stations for those that want to use it. Apple is the perfect company to take a new technology and make it mainstream.

Maybe Apple's obsession with thinness at the cost of battery is because they envision a future where your devices get a little trickle charge most places you go, extending your battery indefinitely.

trashman69 said:

If it's true (and I am sure it is) I wonder
why apple doesn't buy the company  Considering the Apple Watch and any other wearable they make will use this tech.

Eventually, I would guess Apple wants this to be mainstream and accessible everywhere, much like wifi. I'm sure they'll have an exclusive on it for a while, but eventually having a third party offer it to the masses is the way to go. The chip manufacturer partnering with Energous for production would be my guess as a company who would acquire them. 

thewhitefalcon said:

Why wasn't this the case from the start? Cost?

Not sure, but I have my own pet theory. I think the people at Apple are in their own bubble and aren't used to acquiring music from places other than iTunes. Almost all my live music from bands I enjoy are purchased from 3rd party sites as the bands released them. They probably didn't know this would be a problem until it was a problem.

This is a good reminder to everyone that while your iPhone may be super secure, your data is still available to law enforcement if uploaded to iCloud. While Apple keeps your data in iCloud encrypted from other people, they still hold the master key for iCloud data, thus they will hand it over when forced too. You do you have options on selecting what gets backed up to iCloud, but not everything. Items like iMessages are encrypted end to end and are not stored on Apple's servers, but they do make their way back up to Apple's servers via iCloud when iCloud Backup is turned on. Unfortunately Apple does not allow you to turn off Messages for iCloud backup, which I always found discouraging.