Amazon is working on a new Echo that will improve on the first speaker in practically every way, a source tells Engadget. And, not surprisingly, it’s aiming to take some of the hype away from Apple’s HomePod.
The new Echo will be both shorter and slimmer than the original, almost as if it were three or four Echo Dots stacked on top of each other, our source claims. Amazon is also softening its design with rounded edges and a cloth-like covering, rather than the current Echo’s plastic shell and flat ends. And yes, it should sound better, too.
I get why Amazon wants to improve the Echo to take on the HomePod, but I just don’t think it’s going to work for them. I’ve listened to Apple’s HomePod at WWDC and it was pretty amazing—and even better when you connected two of them together.
Apple is going for a full fledged music listening experience with HomePod. Yes, there are still a lot of questions to be answered, but the fact is, HomePod sounds really good.
Amazon is trying to do a cross between a digital assistant and a music experience. That’s not a recipe for success when taking on Apple and the HomePod.
Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message.
For example, I texted the words “send me cake” and got a text back (in about 30 seconds) with a pic of Wayne Thiebaud’s “Dessert Tray”.
SFMOMA has about 35,000 pieces in their collection, only a fraction of that on display at any moment. This gives you random access to the entire thing. Fun!
This video shows a more sophisticated bit of ARKit, letting you walk around a room and quickly map out the floorspace. While this app might not widely useful, it does show the tip of a pretty large iceberg.
For example, imagine walking/measuring around your entire house and ending up with a reasonably precise set of up to the minute blueprints. You might feed those into another app and place/rearrange furniture to get a sense of what will fit and what works where. You might use the numbers to order the precise amount of carpeting you need, or take your app to a store to make sure that bookshelf will fit in that corner.
The chess move? Amazon used the heavily promoted Prime Day to sell as many Amazon Echo devices as they possibly could, in part in an effort to disrupt Apple’s entry into the market with December’s HomePod rollout.
Amazon said that it sold three times as many Echo devices worldwide midway through Prime Day. Imagine what the grand total looks like seeing as Amazon was hawking the smart speaker for a low, low price of $89.99. What this means to Apple is rather simple to understand: Amazon has managed to stuff more homes with Echos in front of Apple’s major HomePod launch. Hence, if you bought a discounted Echo why in the world would you want a HomePod, too?
While I do agree that Amazon is doing everything they can to maximize their home assistant market share in advance of Apple’s entry into the market, I disagree with the premise that Amazon is making big headway in eating future HomePod sales.
First, there’s price. $89.99 is a low enough price that it will not prevent someone from spending $349 to buy a HomePod. If the Echo was, say, $299, this might be a different story. But the vastly different prices puts the products in different market tiers.
Then, there’s capability. The HomePod gives inside access to the Apple ecosystem. The most likely candidates for a HomePod purchase have already invested in an Apple product, have made a little ecosystem nest out of music, files, apps and, most importantly, experience. While they might pop for $89.99 to give Alexa a try, I don’t see that sunk cost being enough to stop an Apple folk from buying into HomePod.
And folks who’ve heard both systems consistently say that HomePod is head and shoulders better sounding than Alexa when it comes to playing music.
What Amazon has not done is deliver a better quality speaker system which is also compatible with Apple Music. While Echo can act as a dumb Bluetooth speaker, you’d still need your iOS device or Mac in the loop to control the Apple Music experience, and that defeats the purpose.
I see HomePod entering the market in the same way as Apple Watch. The market is crowded, but crowded with devices that offer no real advantage to the Apple ecosystem. And to me, that’s all the difference in the world.
Things are really coming along. The focus this month is the landscaping. Keep an eye on the details, like all the shrubs and trees, and the landscape leveling/grading. And, about 2:45 in, you’ll see they’ve moved the historic Glendenning Barn into place.
Editor Paul Machliss has cut some difficult movies. You’ve seen his work if you’ve ever seen the quick edits in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End, both personal favorites.
From the linked Premium Beat article:
For the film to work just right, Machliss had to be on set editing to verify that the timing of each shot was perfect: “To make it work you had to sort of be there at the moment of creation . . . I was there every day of every moment of every take. Edgar would do a take and yell ‘Cut!’ and then from the other side of the set go ‘How was that Paul?’ . . . and sort of wait until you went . . . ‘Yes it’s good.’ Then he felt he could move on. The advantage, of course being, we knew that six months down the line we weren’t gonna go ‘Ugh, we missed a trick here,’ ‘This didn’t work.’”
And:
To keep up with the production, Machliss had to be mobile and fast. He managed to put together an editing cart, pictured above: “This was the edit cart, basically, which was loaned to me by the sound department when we very quickly learned that I had to be absolutely mobile.”
The cart is pretty bare bones — a MacBook Pro, some external hard drives, “[Avid] Media Composer with an A-grade monitor which doubled either as a second screen for Media Composer, or as a full screen in its own right when Edgar wanted to come over and say ‘How does that look?’”
Check out the image of the extended keyboard at the very end of the article. It was new out-of-the-box when the film started.
Experts said a 5,800-square-kilometer (2,239-square-mile) section of Larsen C was confirmed to have broken away between Monday and Wednesday by NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite.
The security issue, uncovered by research from cybersecurity firm UpGuard, was caused by a misconfigured security setting on a cloud server due to “human error.”
The error made customer phone numbers, names, and some PIN codes publicly available online. PIN codes are used to confirm the identity of people who call for customer service.
iOS 11, however, will let you record the screen directly on your device, keeping your Mac out of the equation entirely. Here’s how it works in the developer and public betas.
This is a really handy addition in iOS 11. I’ve recorded my iOS screen with my Mac before, but now I’ll be able to do it right on the device.
Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc, Alphabet Inc and dozens of other major technology companies protested online on Wednesday against proposed changes to U.S. net neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to certain internet services over others.
It’s hard to believe we’re still arguing about this.
Autoplay video: The bane of the web. You either hate them, or are completely disgusted by them. Fortunately, with Safari 11 in macOS High Sierra, you can easily disable autoplay video and surf the web in relative peace.
I hope the irony of this tip being posted on a page with autoplaying video is not lost on Macworld.
Unless you’ve had a chance to try some Apple HomeKit products in someone’s home or apartment, it can be hard to understand how it all works. In order to help with that, Apple has unveiled interactive HomeKit experiences in 46 of its retail stores worldwide.
Now, when you go into Apple’s new retail stores, you’ll be able to use the Home app from either an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad to control devices like the Phillips Hue light bulb, the Hunter ceiling fan and many others. If you tap to the lower the shades in the living room, for example, you’ll see the shades lower in the house shown on the screen.
Ronald Wayne lives in a little house in the town of Pahrump, Nevada. The 83-year-old designer and engineer was Apple’s original third co-founder, though nowadays he is perhaps best known as the unlucky guy who sold his 10 percent stake of the company for $800 just 12 days after it was incorporated in 1976. Today, it’s estimated that his shares would have been worth $67 billion.
Fascinating interview. My favorite response:
Q: What Apple products do you use now?
A: I have never owned an Apple product in my life, and I didn’t even have a computer until the mid 90s. What would I do with it? If you say “anything you want,” I’d come across the table at you. I had to have a reason. It popped up in the mid 90s when a friend asked to write him a short story and I delivered to him on a typewriter. So I had someone cobble a computer together for me and it just had basic internet and (Corel’s) WordPerfect on it. And over the years I have never had anything but the simplest computers.
Microsoft is killing off Windows Phone 8.1 support today, more than three years after the company first introduced the update. The end of support marks an end to the Windows Phone era, and the millions of devices still running the operating system.
While most have accepted that the death of Windows Phone occurred more than a year ago, AdDuplex estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Windows-powered phones are still running Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, or Windows Phone 8.1. All of these handsets are now officially unsupported, and only 20 percent of all Windows phones are running the latest Windows 10 Mobile OS.
Reminds me of a funeral parade Microsoft threw for the iPhone, back in the day. Karma, baby.
Siri remains the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to a new report from measurement firm Verto Analytics out this morning, but it has seen a 15 percent decline since last year – or 7.3 million monthly users. In addition, the study found that engagement with Siri has also dropped by nearly half during this period, from 21 percent to 11 percent.
Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa usage has been skyrocketing – jumping 325 percent in monthly active users – that is, from 0.8 million to 2.6 million monthly users, as its user engagement also increased from 10 percent to 22 percent during the same time frame.
Cortana has seen an increase as well, growing from 0.2 million monthly users in the U.S. to 0.7 million, or a 350 percent increase. Its user engagement tripled, from 19 percent to 60 percent.
Siri is about to undergo a sea change, as iOS 11 shifts from human to digitally generated Siri voicing. At the same time, Apple is hard at work building out SiriKit (first introduced with iOS 10) and Siri’s native intelligence. I suspect this year over year drop will be more than made up for over time as Apple starts shipping more enhanced versions of Siri with each new iOS release.
Add to that the benefit that will come when HomePod ships later this year. These are still the beginning times.
Apple began to pursue the prepaid market more aggressively in 2016, as the market research firm gap intelligence noted in September, and that pursuit has only grown more ambitious over the last year. The iPhone’s prepaid retail channel placements more than doubled from the second quarter of 2016 to the second quarter of 2017, growing from 15 SKUs to 46 SKUs, and they increased 35% from the first quarter of this year to the second quarter, according to fresh data from the San Diego-based firm.
And:
Meanwhile, Apple secured a new prepaid distribution deal through Costco in the second quarter, and it increased prepaid retail placements at AT&T (up 200% quarter over quarter) and Best Buy (up 125% quarter over quarter), according to gap intelligence. The iPhone has seen 15 new retail placements across five prepaid carriers recently, gap intelligence said.
Who owns the pre-paid market? Android. This is a natural market for the iPhone SE, 5s, and 6, Apple finding ways to sell more phones, compete in every market.
Twenty-one percent of streaming viewers ages 18 to 24 said they had accessed at least one digital video service such as Netflix Inc, HBO Now or Hulu by using log-in credentials from someone outside their household at some time. Overall, 12 percent of adults said they did the same thing.
There is no doubt this is a problem for these companies. I’m not sure what solution they’ll come up with, but I hope they don’t overreact and make it difficult for everyone.
The service policy has been in effect since last year and applies to any first-generation Apple Watch, including Sport, Edition, and Hermès models, even if the device’s limited one-year warranty or extended AppleCare coverage has elapsed.
Glad to see they are fixing this for free. This is the type of problem you don’t expect from Apple products.
Touch ID isn’t a feature. It’s a solution to a problem that can potentially be solved in a variety of other ways. Including Face ID.
I have no doubt that Apple’s been working on an advanced Face ID system for many years. Clearly a 3D recognition system would be much better than what’s on the market now, but it would need to be as convenient and secure as Touch ID in order to work for the masses. If there’s ever a time that I need to type in my passcode because Face ID failed to recognize me in a low light or dark setting, it failed.
I’m not opposed to Face ID at all. I’m opposed to taking a step back. I hope that doesn’t happen.
After a month of working “crazy hours”, Mr. Rodrigues had come up with his first fully formed idea – a software system that allowed the user to control his or her mobile phone from their laptop.
Naming his company Soti, sales of the system started to grow slowly, until 12 months later Mr Rodrigues got a phone call out of the blue from one of the UK’s largest supermarket groups.
And:
“I don’t think they realised that they were talking to just one guy in a basement, so when the person asked to speak to someone in sales I came back on the phone with a slightly different tone.”
The little ruse worked, and the UK firm placed a “huge order” for 20,000 units.
This story is amazing to me, in how he got his start, in the fact that he built this mom and pop operation into a billion dollar enterprise, and in the stealth manner in which he did it. Impressive.
Tom Warren, The Verge, on being a teenage IT manager for his family:
All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.
All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.
And:
All of that tinkering and hacking things ended for me shortly after the iPhone arrived, and the closest I’ve come to it recently is playing around with a Raspberry Pi and Kodi.
And:
Apple’s App Store and the iPhone have altered computing massively, beyond my own examples. Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palm have all had their businesses disrupted by the iPhone. The iPhone’s impact has also shaped how we use PCs today, and our expectations of computing in general. Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.
Apple’s locked down and sandboxed environment for apps is a new model that has succeeded with consumers and security. Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.
This article resonates for me. I truly miss the days when I could tweak just about every aspect of my devices, from swapping out memory, drives, graphics cards, to building custom cables that enabled third party devices to interface with my rig.
The new reality, of our own making, is a constant state of siege, one that makes the Apple ecosystem a safe port in the constant storm. But I do miss the tweaks and the repairability.
Amazon has quietly been hiring an army of in-house gadget experts to offer free Alexa consultations as well as product installations for a fee inside customer homes, multiple sources told Recode, and job postings confirm.
The new offering, which has already rolled out in seven markets without much fanfare, is aimed at helping customers set up a “smart home” — the industry term used to describe household systems like heating and lighting that can be controlled via apps, and increasingly by voice.
While Amazon has a marketplace for third parties to offer home services like TV mounting and plumbing, these new smart-home-related services seem important enough to Amazon that it is hiring its own in-house experts.
Amazon is focused on expanding Alexa’s position as the number one home assistant, building out their ecosystem as much as possible before Google builds up any traction and before the real threat, Apple and HomePod, start their assault on Alexa’s market share.
Dolby announced today that its new technology, Dolby Atmos for Music will debut later this month at Sound-Bar, an upscale nightclub in Chicago.
Dolby Atmos takes music listening to the next level. It goes far beyond stereo and even surround sound, by allowing the music to move around you. I had a chance to get a demo of Atmos last year at Dolby’s San Francisco headquarters and it was pretty amazing. I can’t imagine what it’s going to sound like in 20,000 sq. foot Sound-Bar.
Here are a couple of points from the Dolby Atmos page:
Rather than being constrained to channels, sounds can be precisely placed and moved in three-dimensional space.
A new sensation of height immerses you in the action, creating a full audio atmosphere and realistically depicting objects moving overhead.
If you’re in Chicago, do yourself a favor and go give this a listen—you won’t be disappointed.
