161–170 of 467 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't own an Apple Watch, but I know lots of people who do and love them. But in any case, I think the last ten years of iPhone and iPad releases do somewhat agree with me.
So if we only look at Apple's successful products, we can agree that Apple's only makes "very carefully designed" things..
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugge…
The joke's on us. Not even Orwell thought people would be willing to pay for that kind of technology. He thought government would have to force people to get it into their homes.
> "But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
> "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley re marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusi...
I was battling back and forth FOR A MONTH with their skill certification approval team for a skill update that would allow customers to call people by name, where in the first version it was only by phone number. They would fail the certification because apparently people didn't know how to test, or used fake numbers to make phone calls and complained the call would not connect, or the certificate validation (that wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Amazon's products are cheap. Echo first gets out, it is merely 99 dollars, and at the time, a vanilla bluetooth speaker worth that much. It is about accessibility.
Amazon Echo was $199 when it was first introduced, which was still fairly competitively priced against premium bluetooth speakers.
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugge…
Any echo owners feel like they would get additional value out of this? 90% of my interaction with my standard echo has been "what's the weather". Even when I want visual controls for music, I'd rather pull out my phone than walk over to a screen.
I do see the Echo Show sitting on the kitchen island, but at $229, not so sure.
People are missing this: "With the Alexa App, conversations and contacts go where you go. When you’re away from home, use the app to make a quick call or send a message to your family’s Echo. Alexa calling and messaging is free—to get started download the Alexa App." Alexa is now in the messaging and communication game. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/amazon-enables-free-calls-...
Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…
Slack is an outlier because you don't actually need to communicate with everyone in the world on Slack.
But for others, it would be completely unreasonable to ask your acquaintances to pay to install Skype to talk to you. And you probably wouldn't pay for Skype if it didn't interop with whatever other people were paying for.
In a world where switching costs for consumers are so low, interop becomes less important because you can ask your contacts to install an app if it's useful enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't own an Apple Watch, but I know lots of people who do and love them. But in any case, I think the last ten years of iPhone and iPad releases do somewhat agree with me.
So if we only look at Apple's successful products, we can agree that Apple's only makes "very carefully designed" things..
But if you want to argue that Amazon is a better product company than Apple, then have at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Amazon's products are cheap. Echo first gets out, it is merely 99 dollars, and at the time, a vanilla bluetooth speaker worth that much. It is about accessibility.
Amazon Echo was $199 when it was first introduced, which was still fairly competitively priced against premium bluetooth speakers.