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I’ll be sure to listen to you instead of all of the studies and reviews that say otherwise. Maybe sit the next couple plays out kiddo.
Ok Siri is better then Google assistant, if it makes you sleep better you go ahead and belive that :) Let me guess you think airpods sound good too??

Anyway this has gone way off topic. Have a good one!
 
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Very close, as you say, but still not as good from a hardware perspective. It’s a high end speaker for a smart speaker, obviously there are better speakers out there. It’s more comparable with Sonos, which some say is better and some say the HomePod is better. It’s definitely a great speaker and there are studies that show it to better than Alexa in a few areas, and better than the Google Assistant in smart home commands. You can keep spouting nonsense if it makes coming to an Apple fan sit better for you, but the HomePod is anything but trash.

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I think the Homepod is useless as its neither here nor there. Siri needs a lot of work to be useful and I honestly think that Siri without display is a DOA. So, if you strip Homepod to just sound then its ok but as assistant its not.

I would rather Apple remove the mic, Siri etc. and have it just a speaker. Drop the price and you have something.

Personally, I don't like Alexa or Google version too. To me, these products are DOA.
Airport express - airplay anything you want. AppleTV - airplay anything you want. These speakers are just not very useful to most people.
But hey, if it works for you then its fine. :D
 
I think the Homepod is useless as its neither here nor there. Siri needs a lot of work to be useful and I honestly think that Siri without display is a DOA. So, if you strip Homepod to just sound then its ok but as assistant its not.

I would rather Apple remove the mic, Siri etc. and have it just a speaker. Drop the price and you have something.

Personally, I don't like Alexa or Google version too. To me, these products are DOA.
Airport express - airplay anything you want. AppleTV - airplay anything you want. These speakers are just not very useful to most people.
But hey, if it works for you then its fine. :D

How long have you owned your HomePod?

Having had mine for about a year now, and listening to it 3-5 hours a day, I can say it is far from useless.

Sound quality is superb. I have an oddly shaped room with multiple reflective surfaces and a high ceiling. With other speakers it's tough to get decent sound. Not so with HomePod. HomePod uses a speaker array and and advanced adaptive beamform signal processing techniques to acoustically equalize the listening environment it's placed in. It sounds great no matter where I place it in my room due to the above equalization techniques.

Verbal commands to Siri can be spoken in a normal voice no matter how loud the music is, or if there are other sounds in the room. I can give HomePod a verbal command from 20 feet away no problem, in a normal voice. How can that be? Apple uses a microphone array and similar dynamic adaptive beamform signal processing techniques to spatially locate my command and reject all interferers, including music that is playing and other sound sources in the room.

The above is an example of outstanding Apple innovation, being the first to use both types (emitting and receiving) adaptive beamforming techniques in a relatively low-cost compact desktop speaker.

Siri... It works great for its intended HomePod use as a user interface to play music. Is it 100% perfect? Of course not. But it does get my music commands correct 9+ times out of 10.

So... How long have you been using your HomePod to reach the conclusion it's worthless?
 
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48 megapixels?! That’s not a typo? Who the hell needs 48 megapixel have a smart phone? 48 megapixels is excessive for an SLR, let alone a mobile phone. The device with this thing had better have a crap ton of storage.
 
The fifth biggest smartphone company in the world.
So, not a player.
[doublepost=1550983694][/doublepost]
Yup, their product line has been painfully embarrassing since.
$265B in 12 months.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

A 10X optical zoom spec doesn’t mean anything without the whole package. Does it work well? You don’t even care, do you? You just want to bash Apple and call every spec higher than Apple’s spec innovation.

You know what’s innovative? AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Pay, FaceID, custom chips, and Apple’s silicon.

You need to watch an interview from Steve Woz. Innovation isn’t slapping more megapixels in a camera or increasing the optical zoom spec. Innovation is so much more.

Your definition of innovation is personal.
[doublepost=1550984262][/doublepost]Interpolate = inserting data that is not really there via software.

What does this mean? It means this is not true optical zoom and might look very artificial/terrible. Ever see interpolation in action on a TV? Not always pretty.

Everyone stop getting too hyped about specs...Let’s see if it works well before we plant the “so much more innovative than Apple” flag.
 
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Oh, this is just showing off now.
[doublepost=1550956287][/doublepost]
Just bookmark the posts and wait until Apple introduced 10x optical hardware zoom in a few years* and see what they said then.


*Few Years: 8 years from now.
I want to see how huge these files are considered it requires 48 Megapixels. So one shot takes up 4 times as much space on my phone.
 
Well, yeah, because Oppo isn't their team and that's what this is all about.

Any particular reason you seem so eager to be insulting toward others?

On an Apple forum, you're going to find people who like the way Apple takes existing ideas (and on occasion their own ideas) and refines them in ways that puts them several steps ahead of the competition, ways that are often dismissed as "obvious" or "common sense" after the fact but which nobody else but Apple seems to be able to figure out.

Technical innovations, like phone cameras with optical zoom, are typically impressive on paper and in concept, but often bogged down with lousy implementation due to the scatterbrained nature of platform development in the tech world. When you have multiple parties contributing to a single product, it often lacks focus (no pun intended) something that causes usability to suffer. The implementation will often yank the rug out from under impressive technical features.

Android phones, for example, often have advanced technical features before iPhones but tend to be worthless as they are poorly implemented. When people on this forum dismiss things because it's "not their team," that isn't just a mindless bias. It's the expression of low expectations we've learned over the years from most tech companies. If I were forced to bet, I'd say the phones released with this camera will suck. Apple will take the idea, refine it, figure out a way to make it work well and then we'll see the value of such a feature once it's integrated into your actual day-to-day life.

It's happened before. A lot actually.
 
Who cares about folding phones? Notch-less screens and powerful cameras? Those are ALL GIMMICKS!

Apple will give us more watch bands and watch faces next iteration, probably will take some features off of the iPhone to show courage, that’s INNOVATION.
 
If you want to impress me with your phone camera, tell me which magazine spreads or feature films have been shot using them, by photographers who have access to the highest end gear there is.
 
Whose “everybody”? And is a personal definition of innovation at play here?

BBK ( Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus ) , Samsung, Huawei. This isn't 7 years ago when everyone were copying Apple, they are actually putting effort into putting R&D.

If the Camera works as advertised, this will be one of the biggest improvement in Smartphone Camera History. Oppo were not the first to invent or try the periscope design, but they were the first one to put it in such a tiny volume that fits into current Smartphone thickness.
 
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BBK ( Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus ) , Samsung, Huawei. This isn't 7 years ago when everyone were copying Apple, they are actually putting effort into putting R&D.

If the Camera works as advertised, this will be one of the biggest improvement in Smartphone Camera History. Oppo were not the first to invent or try the periscope design, but they were the first one to put it in such a tiny volume that fits into current Smartphone thickness.
To that point, for now, rumors aside, little is known about the iPhone Xi. Apple may join the crowd or not. But the sure as shooting* didn’t start working on the phone starting today.

* pun intended
 
In my days young boys where bragging about who had the ‘biggest’ when taking a shower. Nowadays all you hear is: “mine has more mega pixels than yours”.

Times do change.
 
Apple really should have added a super-wide-angle lens instead of a telephoto lens first. Super-wide-angle lenses are so much more useful than telephoto lenses.

I think it was a good decision because the portrait photos are really distorted in case of a wide lens. That is the main difference of camera when taking pictures using XR vs XS. Portraits look much nicer on the telephoto because of less barrel distortion.
 
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To that point, for now, rumors aside, little is known about the iPhone Xi. Apple may join the crowd or not. But the sure as shooting* didn’t start working on the phone starting today.

* pun intended

Yes, but for some reason I am not expecting much *New* this year. ( I hope I am wrong ), A13 will be the CPU uArch Improvement, Better GPU and NPU + 7nm EUV. Apple is now basically working in a three years cadence fashion similar to Intel. Not entirely convinced on the Triple Camera, but Computational Photography seems to benefits from it. Newer Intel 7660 Modem to finally fix all the crap Intel didn't get to fix with their first 14nm Baseband Modem Design. Retuned 4x4 MIMO Antenna that arguably were unfinished by Apple Standards, New Internal Layout with larger battery space. Possibly Faster NAND. Most of these will be Refinement correction, to what I seen should have been done with XS in the first place. ( Likely running out of time ). All the major improvements will likely be next year when they have 5G iPhone that requires to rethink everything in terms of design prespective.

I am expecting iOS 13 will be the star this year.

We will have to see how the periscope design work as well. In practice you get much smaller CMOS, higher crosstalk and noises. It could have been the trade off between much better Zoom while getting degradation of captured photos.
 
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Always thought 2x zoom is more of a gimmick vs ultrawide since you can't back into a wall but can zoom with your feet. 10x zoom, on the other hand, can be useful.
X2 is much nicer for portraits. Less distortion
 
So, not a player.
[doublepost=1550983694][/doublepost]
$265B in 12 months.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

A 10X optical zoom spec doesn’t mean anything without the whole package. Does it work well? You don’t even care, do you? You just want to bash Apple and call every spec higher than Apple’s spec innovation.

You know what’s innovative? AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Pay, FaceID, custom chips, and Apple’s silicon.

You need to watch an interview from Steve Woz. Innovation isn’t slapping more megapixels in a camera or increasing the optical zoom spec. Innovation is so much more.

Your definition of innovation is personal.
[doublepost=1550984262][/doublepost]Interpolate = inserting data that is not really there via software.

What does this mean? It means this is not true optical zoom and might look very artificial/terrible. Ever see interpolation in action on a TV? Not always pretty.

Everyone stop getting too hyped about specs...Let’s see if it works well before we plant the “so much more innovative than Apple” flag.


Oppo is the fifth biggest smartphone makers and Apple is the third. Not really a player anymore either?
 
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Isn't Oppo a Chinese phone company?
It sure is, which is a good thing, right? I remember we used to have phones from Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, Apple. They are all gone. Well, Apple is still fighting but the trend is clear. Now we have Samsung, LG, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi.
 
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Whatever about folding phones, which I personally believe will remain a gimmick for the next decade, until they become good—at which point I still won’t want one because I’m trying to be diet digital for mental health reasons, the idea of adding more cameras to phones. Something that sounds odd at first, has genuine practical use for all users. Imagine the chambers of a gun for a moment, and each one is a camera of differing focal length and the center bearing is the flash. With elegant software this product could be an amazing camera in a phone body, able to zoom in on many more things and provide awesome clarity with awesome after the fact focus correction.

They have the potential to be hardly a gimmick. Browse reddit in portrait on the front screen, unravel it to a big screen and watch a video with your friends or play a game with a nice sized screen in a small form factor.

It's only a gimmick to the uninspired.
 
Ok Siri is better then Google assistant, if it makes you sleep better you go ahead and belive that :) Let me guess you think airpods sound good too??

Anyway this has gone way off topic. Have a good one!

B*tching time?

Assistants
I have amazon echo, google assistant and Siri and to my needs they do not differ that much. I have unplugged echo recently as it speaks randomly,without me asking anything. Creepy, when it is in the middle of the night in a quite quiet room. Also, minimizing on Google things due to heavy spamming.

AirPods sound good enough. Not perfect, I think nobody expected them to be perfect anyway. but I only have 23 years of experience of producing music and about 5 years of DJing, so what do I know about sound.
And, please, do not compare $150 earbuds to a $500 monitor cans, anyone will know which sounds better
 
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