Apple Just Quietly Announced One of their Best Products, and Loudly Announced One of their Worst

The regular apple peaked with the pie innovation

The 2017 Apple WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference for those of you not in the know) is currently in full swing. The estimated 5000 attendees packed in on day one to hear the Apple brass talk new software, and some new hardware, to loyal Apple fans worldwide. The WWDC is not the place for new iPhone launches, except for the 3GS and 4 models, but is a place for the Cupertino company to show off new software and sometimes for them to show off their next wave of home computers. Previous WWDC saw the reveal of macOS, the App Store, and Safari. The pressure is usually not as high for the company as it is for an iPhone launch, but plenty of people still pay attention. No matter what Apple does, when they take the stage, people listen.

The 2017 edition of the WWDC was heavy on new software upgrades. Apple's latest operating system, named High Sierra, was put on display. iOS 11 received some new updates including enhanced augmented reality abilities. The voice assistant Siri is getting some much-needed updating. These reveals and updates are par for the course at WWDC.

Lost in all the hoopla of the software advances, Apple announced one of their most mind-blowing products ever. The new iMac Pro is one of the most beautiful, and insanely powerful, computers ever packaged for the consumer market. The specs on this machine, and the price to own one, is off the charts. Much like the light bulb for General Electric, Apple seems to keep its computer business around to show respect to their past. This part of the business is usually neglected. This WWDC is different. With the incredibly iMac Pro, Apple just released the best home computer a whole lot of money could buy.

The iMac Pro was not the big reveal at the 2017 WWDC. That honor was reserved for Apple's entry into the marketplace of smart speakers. The new HomePod joins the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and whatever Microsoft says is coming as the big kids on the personal assistant speaker market. The Siri in a speaker will tell you the news, play music, and do other not described things like all the smart speakers that came before. Apple is confident that their loyal fanbase will give up their Echos, Google Homes, or newly jump into the smart speaker market with their branded offering. The HomePod goes on sale at the end of 2017 for $350.

The Apple HomePod is the dumbest product Apple has ever been happy to sell to their customers. Most of the time Apple will see a market where no one has found the true potential, and then they take over that market with a well thought out product. Apple's offerings are never the best, they never do everything the customer wants, but they do the simple things extremely well. And they look good doing it. The HomePod is nothing like the successful products of Apple's past.

The HomePod is entering a marketplace where the Cupertino company's competitors have been adapting to the customers wants for over a year, and they are all doing it for far less money than what a HomePod will cost. Apple knows they are behind on the smart speaker market. The only way the presenters at the WWDC could differentiate the HomePod is to talk about how good it sounds. That has been proven to not be important for the smart speaker market. The original Amazon Echo was hailed by many in the tech media as a "premium" speaker with the benefits of Alexa. Once Amazon released the affordable Echo Dot, the one without a good speaker, sales skyrocketed. Amazon learned that people want a smart speaker for the smarts, not how the music sounds out of it. If someone wanted a great Bluetooth speaker, they would buy something from a company known for good speakers. Bose, Harmon Kardon, Sonos, they all offered great speakers for less than $300, and they all connect wirelessly to the Echo. Amazon and Google have already used Apple's model of introducing hardware, and now they will swat away the HomePod like all the other failures before.

Apple's claim of making the HomePod a great speaker shows how lost they are with the product. The tech press has predictably been there to hold the water for Apple's bad decisions. Once the HomePod is availbale for purchase, tech media sites like CNET and Gizmodo will no doubt praise Apple for having the best sounding smart speaker on the market. Check out this comically idiotic defense of the HomePod from the Cupertino bootlickers at Engadget. The author wants everyone to forget about the smart applications of the HomePod, and just focus on how awesome the speaker is. This is a speaker allegedly built by the scam artists who built the Beats Audio headphones and speakers. The same people who ruin good sound quality by overemphasizing bass and put unnecessary metal into their products so the headphones / speakers would feel heavy and therefore the consumer would think the product is high end. The HomePod was made by a group of people concerned more about marketing than they are concerned about actual audio quality. That should say all there is to say about the sound quality of the HomePod. 

Many of the Apple faithful will fall for the reviews from a subservient tech media, and they will trust their favorite company and buy the HomePod. These early adopters will then brag to everyone in their social media circles about the superior sound quality. These HomePoders will then have to deal with the smarts of Siri. Here is where they will lose. 

Siri is widely considered far and away the worst of the popular smart assistants, and the HomePod buyers will have only Apple's voice helper. No Spotify, limited use of smart home devices like thermostats and light bulbs, and spotty comprehension. Apple says Siri will be smarter, but they have said that before. In the HomePod reveal, the presenter spent almost no time on the smart assistant features that Echo and Home owners enjoy, and spent a bunch of time having Siri play music from the Apple Music app. On the biggest stage, Apple decided to not show the flaws of their new smart speaker by showing how dumb the HomePod really is.

All these early missteps of the HomePod makes the $350 price tag look even more ridiculous. For the same price people could buy any of these smart home combinations:

2 Amazon Echos (one for the main floor and one for the bedroom)

3 Google Homes (one for the kitchen, living room, and bedroom)

9 Echo Dots (One for every damn room you have, note: you can purchase six Dots for the price of five)

An Echo Dot and a Bose Soundlink Revolve + (this is listed as CNET's best Bluetooth speaker.)

An Echo Dot, Nest Thermostat, and two TP-Link Dimmable Smart Light-bulbs that work with Alexa

An Echo Dot, a Bose Sound Base, and a Harmony Hub (control the television with your voice, and connect to a high-end speaker with Alexa)

An Echo, Echo Dot(s), Google Home, and numerous smart bulbs, locks, streaming devices, whatever, because Amazon and Google have thousands of skills (apps) to properly connect your home. Talk to your house like you live on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Therefore the $350 price tag for a bass heavy, not very smart speaker, is kind of dumb.

The HomePod will not end Apple. The software updates, the new iMac Pro, and the anticipated tenth anniversary iPhone will keep the small Cupertino company in business for a long time. On the backs of the useless Apple Pencil, the HomePod is just a little bit worrisome. Has Apple given up on innovation? Are they relying solely on the ability to separate idiots from their money? Let's hope not. We need the Apple that goes all out and shows off the new iMac Pro, not the one who tries to sell you an overbuilt, lacking usefulness, speaker. Let the HomePod die a Newton like death. Apple should know better.

RD

RD is the Founder and Head Editor for SeedSing. He created his MySpace profile on an original iMac. It had a red shell.

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Welcome to the Future: The web as the platform

You may not need to upgrade to Windows 10

I have long waited for the day that the platform I use would be primarily the internet browser. Years ago, I installed a Linux based desktop distribution and stripped out much of the software aside from Firefox. This was when Google Docs had yet to become Google Drive and Google’s Chrome browser was in very infantile stages. It sort of worked. There was not much for web based services for video editing, software development, or photo management the way there is today, but I did not really expect it to fulfill all my needs at the time. I just wanted to see how far we had to go. I ended up using it as my baseline, adding software as I needed it after the browser when nothing available through the web sufficed.

Today things are quite different. I have been using a Chromebook for about a year now and I have not found that I need to go back to a full desktop for anything that I use a computer for on a personal level. Those three things I mentioned above are now taken care of through web based applications. I do all of my writing on Google Drive. I use a service called Codeanywhere for coding. I use WeVideo to edit together video clips. And Google Photos works great for photo management and editing for me. If I do need access to a desktop computer, I have a headless Mac mini sitting in my living room that takes care of some automated tasks. I can use remote desktop to get at it, but I have not used it for anything that I couldn’t do with Chrome OS. Maybe someday I would put a Chromebox in it’s place, but the Mac is doing the job fine right now.

The reason I have been so excited for the web to be operating system rather than merely another application on your main operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux, etc.) is because every platform has a portal to the web. At this point it makes more sense to build a web app before any platform specific app. In fact, a lot of the apps that can be attained from the various app stores of the modern mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and others) are little more than a native app wrapper around code that runs in a web browser. This does not always mean that the device needs to be connected to the web for the app to function. Many offline apps are built using web browser technologies as the core. Many websites can be placed on the homescreen of your device and be indistinguishable from an app store app to the untrained eye, even without going through the app store. I like this idea since I do not believe that any app store curator be it Apple, Google, Microsoft, or whoever, should be the czar to the digital media we enjoy.

Another positive reason to celebrate the web as a platform from a developer’s perspective is that an app hosted on the web can feature the ultimate piracy protection. Using a system that the user has to log into and pay if they want to continue to get certain features means that there is no way that a pirate can use your software without paying. Now I do believe that users should be allowed to try before paying, and I think that is one of the main lessons we have to learn from the state of piracy today. However, individual developers are free to try other models.

Problems with the web as a platform at this point are mainly the complexities. Most people are used to the world of software being something installed locally. Though web apps can be installed locally, most do not require it. The expectation is that you will likely be online when accessing these services. Many people are not comfortable with this. I can use Google Drive offline to some extent, but I cannot edit video from within a tunnel on the Metro. I think that some of the heavier web apps will evolve to work offline, but our connectivity will also evolve to a point where we will not be offline ever. It may still be a while, but even as I write this I am hardly ever away from access to the internet. I almost have to go out of my way to make it so that I am totally outside the boundaries of an internet signal. I went to a cave on my recent vacation and they had wifi hotspots in there. Seventeen hundred feet underground and I still could not escape internet access. Even with my example of the Metro train, I would not be surprised to see wifi installed in the near future. And if not, do I really need to be doing heavy web applications from within a Metro tunnel?

So the web is the platform. Some people are currently stuck using a more fully featured version of Microsoft Office or Photoshop, but I think it is silly to think that every feature of those software packages would not be available through a web app one day. I think someday soon native software will be dwarfed by what is available as a web app.

Kirk Aug

Kirk has settled into his virtual cubicle at SeedSing. He is curious if future space tourism will have good wifi coverage. Follow him on twitter @kirkaug.

Welcome to the future: The Babel fish lives (in electronic form)

Welcome to the Future is SeedSing's look at trends and technology that are shaping the world we will live in. Submit ideas of interesting sociological or scientific ideas that are altering our current lives to seedsing.rdk@gmail.com .

Ever since I heard of the babel fish in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the universal translator used in the Star Trek series, I have been thrilled with the concept. As someone who is interested in the perspectives of as many people as possible, the idea that I could communicate with anyone no matter where they are from or what linguistic background they had was very compelling.

I remember when I first became aware of Google Translate. The first thing I did was find various Spanish or German chat rooms on IRC and tried to talk to people by translating my English into their language and then translating the response back manually. As cumbersome as this was, it also gave me a feeling of exhilaration.

Playing around with translate on the internet is fun and all, but it has become a useful tool in meat world too. Last year when my partner and I went to Mexico I used it quite a lot. Not only was translate helpful, but Google Now recognized that I was in Mexico and knowing that I was natively from the US gave me an easily accessible currency conversion without my having to do anything except enter the numbers. The way technology does things like this without me even having to think about it is tearing down international borders and I am overjoyed to see it.

We still have a long way to go before we will have babel fish or Star Trek level universal translation, but the space is progressing nicely. Coupled with voice transcription technologies, we are starting to see near real time language translation. Earlier this year the Google Translate app began to have a feature which takes what a person says in one language, transcribes it to text, translates it, and says the words aloud in the target language. From what I have heard the feature is still pretty error prone, but it will only get better over time. Another feature that came with that same update is the ability to hold the camera up to some text and get a translation of that text overlaid on the camera’s image on screen. It even does a pretty decent job of matching color and font on the translated image.

Microsoft, who owns Skype, is also making huge headway in the universal translation space. Skype users can now connect with people translating between English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, and Spanish in near real time. Google is reportedly working on similar technology for its Hangouts service.

Language barriers are definitely being broken and this is amazing. The more that people of different backgrounds can understand each other, the more compassionate we will all be toward each other. It surely is not the pervading solution to violence and hate in the world, but it will at least be helpful in the reduction of it.

Kirk Aug

Kirk is able to communicate with his SeedSing colleagues. The problem is he is seeking more insightful conversation, and that conversation may be in another language. Talk to Kirk by following him on twitter @kirkaug.

Welcome to the Future: Kirk looks at self driving cars Part 1

Art department discovered stock photos

Welcome to the Future is SeedSing's look at trends and technology that are shaping the world we will live in. Submit ideas of interesting sociological or scientific ideas that are altering our current lives to seedsing.rdk@gmail.com .

We are quickly coming to a point in time when vehicles will be driven by computers in addition to humans. Once this point comes and takes hold, it seems the vehicles that are driven by humans will be the biggest safety risk on the road.

As many are aware, Google has been testing self-driving vehicles for six years and counting. The vehicles have driven about 1.9 million miles since they hit the road and have not caused any collisions. Of the 14 collisions that they were involved in, 11 were caused by human drivers rear ending the robot vehicles. Although, I am not sure that you would get that impression if you happen to merely skim the tech news headlines.

Every time that I hear about one of Google’s vehicles being involved in an accident, before reading the article, I am tempted to think that Google’s vehicle must have caused the accident. For what other reason would the involvement of a self-driving vehicle warrant a mention in the headline?

The following are examples of headlines related to the most recent such accident: “Google Self-Driving Car Involved in First Injury Accident” - ABC News. “Google self-driving car has 1st accident causing injuries” - CBC News. “Google Sees First Injury Accident for Self-Driving Cars” - TIME. “Injuries in Google self-driving car accident” - CNN Money.

If the self-driving capability is not an element in the accident, as has been the case in all incidences with these vehicles, I am having trouble coming up with a reason for them to be part of the story at all. It nearly always seems that once I get past the headline, the story is much more of a couple sentences in the weekly accident report of the local newspaper. Something like: “Rear end accident on 12th & Maple. Minor injuries.” That’s the whole story.

So why do we add in the part about the self-driving vehicle getting hit and expand it to a full article? And why do we often have a vaguely suggestive headline about Google to go with it? My suspicion is clickbait. If there is a way to squeeze an element of fear into a headline, people are more likely to click. New technology, as with any change, is scary. Handing over control of our transportation to a machine that has been proving itself to do a better job than humans is degrading. Many humans want to think they are superior to the machines. They want to believe that the machines will fail. They do not see the machines as an extension of ourselves, but a scary other to fear and conquer.

This fear is only human. These machines, while built by humans who are specialists in building and programming machines, are meant to be used by humans who do not understand them. There is a big divide here and the only way it will be overcome is through time. Just as historically with any new technology, time will bring comfort. People will start to see the convenience and benefit over their fears. They will start to understand it better and trust it more. In fact, as baiting as these headlines may be, those who do actually read the article are going to keep seeing this new era of self-driving vehicles to be safer.

I am not saying that self-driving vehicles are perfect and the day will not come when a self-driving vehicle will be the cause of an accident. I expect that it will. To some, I am sure, that will be all that it takes to dismiss those vehicles entirely. It is my hope, however, that the majority will see some of the major benefits to be gained from these vehicles. It is for those reasons that I am excited. You can read more about that in the second part of my musings on this topic tomorrow. (Read Part 2 here)

Kirk Aug

Kirk is still excited about the New Horizons data. His excitement has led him to be the point person on SeedSing science and technology insights. Follow him on twitter @KirkAug