Apple are trying to expand their services to keep people in the ecosystem. At least one or two of those TV shows they are developing will stick.
They already have iCloud storage and Apple Music.
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Apple Music Now Playable on Amazon Echo Speakers via Alexa in United States
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They already have iCloud storage and Apple Music.
No, no it actually doesn't. I tried all kinds of variation and it never shuffles (even after playing the first song or skipping the first song).
They are a tiny business relatively, most of their services revenue comes from the App Store.
Yes they are selling tens of millions of iPhones every year because of the tiny annual tweaks that are made to iOS.
Deary me..
They are still selling hundreds of million of iPhones a year because of iOS.
They sell tens of millions because of the hardware.
To give Jony credit (which he deserves): some people came for the hardware and stayed for the software.
Excellent assessment. The big unknown, however, is whether it's already too late for Siri. It's not just a matter of developing a new ML powered voice assistant. It's building the training sets and continuing to refine them. Siri is probably years behind Alexa now, which might as well be decades.
That 1.3 billion number is a little questionable. They never specified if they were talking about devices or people. If they were talking about devices, all the people that own an iPad, an iPhone, and a MacBook drastically changes that number.
Please, please, PLEASE fire Timmy Cook and bring back Scott Forstall.
Tim is killing the company. Just visit any Apple store, the vibe is totally different than 6 or 7 years ago. The only thing happening there is people bringing back old crap to have it get fixed, then get all pissed off it's so expensive. People are leaving and they're having to hike up prices. No innovation. None.
Tim is killing the company. Just visit any Apple store, the vibe is totally different than 6 or 7 years ago. The only thing happening there is people bringing back old crap to have it get fixed, then get all pissed off it's so expensive. People are leaving and they're having to hike up prices. No innovation. None.
Apple has always been allied with Amazon.
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Apple has always been at war with Canada.
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Apple has always been at war with Canada.
That's not the vibe that I got when I went to the apple store to pick up my new iphone. I saw people buying computers and phones and great customer service.
It’s not too late because Siri isn’t competing with Alexa directly. Apple isn’t trying to sell Siri as a product to Amazon customers like Amazon is selling Alexa in Echo devices to their customers. Siri is a feature that is included in Apple devices that people buy for a number of other reasons. And that’s why Apple doesn’t sell HomePod as a “smart speaker” like Amazon sells Echo. Apple sells HomePod as a really good speaker (which it really is) that happens to work with Siri. They’re different markets.
Ultimately, Apple just needs to get there by the time voice assistants become a dominant interface for computers with fully natural conversation like you see in the movie Her for example. None of the voice assistants is anywhere close to that now, including Alexa.
I do want to point out that Apple hasn’t been sitting back doing nothing all this time. They realized they had hit a dead end with Siri several years ago when it became clear that it wasn’t designed to scale up and they essentially started over. They’ve been developing a new Siri that is infinitely expandable and that Siri is hidden in plain sight on HomePod.
While Siri on HomePod can do less than the old Siri on iOS because it doesn’t have a screen and the new Siri isn’t yet feature complete, the one on HomePod is far smarter at both understanding what was said and then understanding what it means and what really was asked of it, in context. I’ve been performing tests with both and Siri on HomePod is clearly different than what is on iOS.
So, while Apple has been developing a new Siri, the original Siri currently on our iOS devices has been getting only maintenance updates which gives the impression that Apple has been ignoring it and letting it fall behind. That changed with iOS 12 as Shortcuts were introduced and the new and old Siri have begun to merge.
Shortcuts are a big turning point because it’s not just a user facing feature, it’s the underpinning of how Siri can now infinitely expand. While the user is charged with setting it up, Siri — the AI that looks for usage patterns — is now beginning to determine intelligently what actions you perform routinely to determine shortcuts for you to setup. Right now it just suggests them to you but in future advances, it’ll be able to set up these shortcut connections transparently in the background and know what you mean the first time you say: “I’m leaving for work” and run a series of actions without you having to have programmed them previously.
Siri is getting very powerful. To the average user who doesn’t see the mounting web of features as one strategy, it seems like it just has a bunch of loose features that they don’t use because they’re too complex. HomePod is key to how the new Siri will roll out as it reaches feature parity with the original Siri and then grows beyond that.
HomePod is here to stay because it’s far too important to Apple's strategy for the future of home computers where leveraging the power of the internet and the smart home is just a casual conversation away, not sitting in front of a device or pulling one out of our pockets to interact with like we do today.
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This is somewhat available today. If your iTunes movies are from Disney, Universal Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros. or Sony Pictures, then you can sync them with your Amazon account with Movies Anywhere. The major holdouts are Lionsgate, MGM, and Paramount Pictures.
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Siri is a brand, not a technology. Siri on my HomePod, Siri on my Apple TV, and Siri on my phone are 3 distinct applications (at least).
Some of the Siris are better than others.
All Siris are not created equal.
Uhh ITunes purchased movies are available on Fire devices through movies anywhere.
Honestly location falls under I don’t care if it’s available where I live. Buy another service but whining about it just makes no sense, blame government regulations, laws, licensing, or economic realities. Unless of course tinfoil is one’s favorite hat
I read your post as implying you were referencing the Mac Rumors article, I didn’t know you were referring to an Amazon press release! That makes it even worst...
I’m sure it’ll come to other countries eventually....
Ha! Yeah and then you woke up. I NEVER see anyone by the macs, ever. Even at the NYC World Trade Center store. A few weeks ago I moved the keyboard on the Mac Mini on display and put a little pencil mark on the table where I moved it.
Well fast forward 2 days and it was in the EXACT SAME PLACE.
WTF, nobody looked at the BRAND SPANKING NEW MINI in 2 days! (thurs/fri).
Yeah, I had wondered exactly the same thing about #1.
Somewhat bizarrely, Apple released an expensive and hugely creative advert for the HomePod which (unwittingly) cemented the idea that the HomePod is for live-alone singles leading dreary lives:
I absolutely love the ad. As a piece of art it's brilliant, but it sends entirely the wrong message about the product. That, and the fact that the girl who lives in the high-rise apartment building would face complaints from neighbors - possibly eviction - should she crank up the HomePod volume as the ad suggests.
To be brutally honest, she'd be better off with AirPods.
I hadn't seen that! Definitely a great (artistic) commercial... but yeah... it does kind of drive home the type of person Apple is targeting.
They do the same thing with all of their products... all of these products were meant for ONE person and don't allow any user profiles at all: iPod, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, AirPods (can only be tied to one iCloud account).
That's why, instead of waiting for Apple to come to its senses and implement multi-user support I tried out Echo and Google Home. Google Home has pretty awesome multi-user support. It can link multiple Spotify accounts and pull up the right one based on voice recognition. The same for calendars, to-do lists, etc.
Couple that with the fact that Google Home does great whole-home audio and integrated perfectly with all of my Homekit gear (Lutron Caseta, Hue, August Locks, Ecobee3) and it has been perfect.
Now I rarely even think about asking Siri on my phone (or even my Watch) to do anything. I turn to Google first... it's rock solid and everywhere in the house.
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But not through an iTunes App itself.
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True enough - but that's not Apple actually bringing the iTunes Movie Store over to FireTV... just accessing things you've bought in the iTunes Movie Store through a common broker.
I like the store in the oculus as well. But that wasn’t the store I was referring to. MacBooks, which are computers, were what I was referring to.
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