When Apple introduced its HomePod, I was not impressed. I thought Apple had a flop on its hand because I did not think anyone would part with $350 for a smart speaker with great sound when Amazon & Google smart speakers - with "good enough" sound can be had for less than a quarter of that price. I certainly wouldn't.
But I caved. While purchasing some Apple stuff to give as gifts for an upcoming China trip, I began thinking:
"...the speakers on our TV are crap and we could really need a sound bar - and the HomePod could serve as that when watching stuff through our Apple TV streamer!"
and:
"... it sure is a pain to have to find my phone or iPod to invoke some home automation function! The HomePod is supposed to have great microphones that can pick up your commands from anywhere!"
and, finally:
"...in order for you to invoke home automation when away from the house, you need to designate a device a 'hub' and it needs to be always on. The iPad that had been fulfilling that duty had already run out of juice a couple times, keeping me from turning on the lights before I got home! HomePod can be a 'hub'!"
Well, you get the idea. Before I knew it, there was a HomePod in the bag along with the other stuff we actually came to the Apple Store for.
So how do I like it?
Well, I do love it and don't regret my purchase: the sound that comes out of this little (very elegant) cylinder is simply amazing; it's also freaky how quietly you can give a Siri command even while music is blasting away and HomePod still 'hears' you; equally disquieting is that the speakers are so good/sensitive, it often hears/responds-to me while I'm in another room trying to ask my iPhone's Siri a question (and there's also some team work going on here - no matter what, when I do 'Hey Siri' and both my phone and HomePod hear it, only the HomePod answers.) Integration with my limited home automation (a couple lights and a door lock) is fantastic and so is Siri's accuracy in understanding my commands.
There are some niggles: there are still a couple bugs with AirPlay (when using it as a soundbar, my Apple TV needs to send the sound to the HomePod via AirPlay - it works well at first. But if I pause the movie I'm watching, once I begin playing again, the HomePod no longer outputs the sound :-( Also, if I am to enjoy the HomePod as a sound bar, I really need a second one to get stereo sound. While sound coming out of it is much better than the TV speakers, having everything emirate from the right of the TV isn't a great experience. But another HomePod is another $350! And, besides, for this to work requires AirPlay 2, which isn't ready yet. The HomePod updates by itself, so it's just a matter of waiting.
While Siri is very accurate at understanding my requests, its ability to answer them is more limited than it ought to be. This is well documented: Apple, which used to be the clear leader in voice assistants, has fallen behind Alexa and Google Assistant. Don't get me wrong: Siri is getting better with every release of iOS - just not as quickly as the competition. Apple seems to have realized this (rather belatedly if you ask me) and recently gone on a hiring spree for AI talent. Hopefully something will come of it. Siri could be much more useful than she currently is on HomePod.
So I love it. But it's the first Apple device I've owned for which I paid more money than I thought its functionality warranted. Unlike my iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch, iPad, Apple TV, and laptop, the HomePod is a luxury rather than a necessity. I would not (yet) miss it, if it disappeared tomorrow. But I'm confident this will change as the software evolves - and Siri improves.
I don't think HomePod will be a flop. There simply are too many well-heeled Apple fans out there for whom $350 is an 'impulse purchase' and it is a typical Apple device with its elegant design and quality hardware. Why not? But I also don't think it will be anywhere near as big a deal as the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or even AirPods (which I think is the best, most magical Apple product in years - and flying kind of under the radar.)
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Sunday, April 15, 2018
2018 China Vacation
We’re on our return voyage from the annual 2-week China trip. Unlike previous visits, this time we spend the entire time in Suzhou (where Yiqing’s family lives). I now have 20+ hours to kill, so I decided to write a quick summary of the trip followed by some hopefully interesting factoids.
Most of our stay was spent within walking distance of Lake Taihu, China’s 3rd largest lake (think Great Lakes in size). Our first night we decompressed at a fancy Holiday Inn (much more luxurious here in China than what we’re used to in the US) followed by a week in a “hotel” that was basically just apartments in a high rise being rented out. It was just a few minutes walk to Yiqing’s mom’s apartment.
Then Yiqing’s sister arranged for a couple nights at a nearby resort which was really lovely. Surrounded by bamboo forest, the place had dozens of geothermal outdoor pools, each with different herbs/aromas with different supposed medicinal purposes. Don’t know if those herbs do what the folks think they do, but the baths sure are relaxing :-). The resort also had a driving range - hitting about 500 balls over 2 days, I went from zero skills to pretty good (at least in my mind :-)
The remainder of our vacation was spent at a youth hostel within a few hundred feet of Lake Taihu. Most of the hostel is shared rooms, but we got a private one with its own bath. Very clean - very different from the youth hostels I experienced in Europe in the 70s and 80s. Highly recommended for folks on a budget.
Factoids:
As always, the food here is incredibly varied and delicious. Every time I visit China, I get to eat at least a dozen dishes I’ve never tasted before. This was my 10th trip, but with a 5000+ year old culture, I look forward to many more surprises. I realize am very privileged in this regard: without Yiqing and relatives, I would never have the opportunity (or guts) to try so many different foods.
Infrastructure throughout China is much more modern and vastly better maintained than in the US. Roads are always smooth, all traffic lights have large countdown timers so you can plan to stop or go. Busses are cheap, frequent, and on-time: a 30 minute ride to town on a cushioned bus was 33 cents. A subway ride (the subway was new with new lines being added all the time) across town was 80 cents and a 30 minute Didi (Uber equivalent) ride was $7.
Why is this? The US once prided itself on being the most advanced country on earth: now just about everybody is passing us. My sister from Germany recently visited and commented that infrastructure and some buildings reminded her of Eastern European villages just after the Soviet Union collapsed - dilapidated :-(.
I don’t know the answer but suspect that most Americans don’t realize how third-world their infrastructure (and K-12 education) has become - because our leaders are telling us otherwise and keep telling us that we must spend ever increasing percentages of our taxes on our military instead of on our citizens (how many more aircraft carriers do we need when we already have more than the whole rest of the world combined???). Those TRILLIONS would be much more productively spent on infrastructure that helps us compete globally!
Now back to my trip report :-) Traffic here is terrible - not only are there loads of cars and even more mopeds (90+% of which are electric now - on my first trip in 2005, it was probably the reverse!), but nobody obeys traffic laws. My sister-in-law once stopped in the left lane of a divided, 60mph highway to search for directions on her phone! My heart nearly stopped. When I asked her how she could do that, her matter-of-fact response was that there was nobody behind her when she stopped! :-( Being a German, I would suffer road rage in no time if I had to drive here.
Living expenses: surprisingly, single family homes are much more expensive than equivalent sized homes in the US. (but more solidly built from concrete). E.g. a house that might go for $800k in the US costs around $2 million in Suzhou (Shanghai would be way more expensive still). Condo apartments I’m guessing are similar to US prices. On the flip side, there are no property taxes (yet) in China.
Food used to be much cheaper here than in the US, but is now just a little less. Clothing can be much cheaper, but if you want name brands you’d recognize as a Westerner, you’ll pay about the same or slightly more.
Electronics are much cheaper unless, again, you want name brands. E.g. Apple products are ~20% more expensive here than in the US. Electric mopeds, scooters, bikes are less than half what they’d cost in the US. We’ll try and buy an electric bicycle and have it shipped here and use it for our commute to work. We didn’t dare try to buy one and hope to get it on the plane - big lithium batteries are frowned on by the airlines :-(
Internet: while speed is good everywhere, as a Westerner you’ll go crazy with all the blocked sites. No google for crying out loud! And the Western search engines that are allowed - I used bing/yahoo - are heavily censored - ie many links simply don’t connect or lead to an unauthorized warning. I use an RSS reader called Feedly. Tapping on any news headline coming from NYT or Bloomberg or Reuters are blocked; BBC seems to be blocked sometimes, while The Guardian, CNN, USA Today always worked for me - at least when I clicked on stories not involving “China”. As a news junky, needless to say I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms by now. There’s lots of free wifi around here - but most require you to provide a token sent to you via SMS before you can use it. In the past, we typically didn’t have cellular while in China and were, thus, out of luck. This time we borrowed a relative’s phone and it helped on several occasions. In any event, if you don’t read Chinese, none of this matters - you won’t know what buttons to press to get to the free wifi - but I have the wife to depend on :-)
Speaking of phones: they’re used for *everything* here! I didn’t see anyone even use a credit card, much less cash. Everything seems to be done via direct debit using the phone and QR codes. Through WeChat (China’s FB+Paypal+CraigsList+...), I think. People actually looked at us as if we were dinosaurs when we tried to use cash!
Most of our stay was spent within walking distance of Lake Taihu, China’s 3rd largest lake (think Great Lakes in size). Our first night we decompressed at a fancy Holiday Inn (much more luxurious here in China than what we’re used to in the US) followed by a week in a “hotel” that was basically just apartments in a high rise being rented out. It was just a few minutes walk to Yiqing’s mom’s apartment.
Then Yiqing’s sister arranged for a couple nights at a nearby resort which was really lovely. Surrounded by bamboo forest, the place had dozens of geothermal outdoor pools, each with different herbs/aromas with different supposed medicinal purposes. Don’t know if those herbs do what the folks think they do, but the baths sure are relaxing :-). The resort also had a driving range - hitting about 500 balls over 2 days, I went from zero skills to pretty good (at least in my mind :-)
The remainder of our vacation was spent at a youth hostel within a few hundred feet of Lake Taihu. Most of the hostel is shared rooms, but we got a private one with its own bath. Very clean - very different from the youth hostels I experienced in Europe in the 70s and 80s. Highly recommended for folks on a budget.
Factoids:
As always, the food here is incredibly varied and delicious. Every time I visit China, I get to eat at least a dozen dishes I’ve never tasted before. This was my 10th trip, but with a 5000+ year old culture, I look forward to many more surprises. I realize am very privileged in this regard: without Yiqing and relatives, I would never have the opportunity (or guts) to try so many different foods.
Infrastructure throughout China is much more modern and vastly better maintained than in the US. Roads are always smooth, all traffic lights have large countdown timers so you can plan to stop or go. Busses are cheap, frequent, and on-time: a 30 minute ride to town on a cushioned bus was 33 cents. A subway ride (the subway was new with new lines being added all the time) across town was 80 cents and a 30 minute Didi (Uber equivalent) ride was $7.
Why is this? The US once prided itself on being the most advanced country on earth: now just about everybody is passing us. My sister from Germany recently visited and commented that infrastructure and some buildings reminded her of Eastern European villages just after the Soviet Union collapsed - dilapidated :-(.
I don’t know the answer but suspect that most Americans don’t realize how third-world their infrastructure (and K-12 education) has become - because our leaders are telling us otherwise and keep telling us that we must spend ever increasing percentages of our taxes on our military instead of on our citizens (how many more aircraft carriers do we need when we already have more than the whole rest of the world combined???). Those TRILLIONS would be much more productively spent on infrastructure that helps us compete globally!
Now back to my trip report :-) Traffic here is terrible - not only are there loads of cars and even more mopeds (90+% of which are electric now - on my first trip in 2005, it was probably the reverse!), but nobody obeys traffic laws. My sister-in-law once stopped in the left lane of a divided, 60mph highway to search for directions on her phone! My heart nearly stopped. When I asked her how she could do that, her matter-of-fact response was that there was nobody behind her when she stopped! :-( Being a German, I would suffer road rage in no time if I had to drive here.
Living expenses: surprisingly, single family homes are much more expensive than equivalent sized homes in the US. (but more solidly built from concrete). E.g. a house that might go for $800k in the US costs around $2 million in Suzhou (Shanghai would be way more expensive still). Condo apartments I’m guessing are similar to US prices. On the flip side, there are no property taxes (yet) in China.
Food used to be much cheaper here than in the US, but is now just a little less. Clothing can be much cheaper, but if you want name brands you’d recognize as a Westerner, you’ll pay about the same or slightly more.
Electronics are much cheaper unless, again, you want name brands. E.g. Apple products are ~20% more expensive here than in the US. Electric mopeds, scooters, bikes are less than half what they’d cost in the US. We’ll try and buy an electric bicycle and have it shipped here and use it for our commute to work. We didn’t dare try to buy one and hope to get it on the plane - big lithium batteries are frowned on by the airlines :-(
Internet: while speed is good everywhere, as a Westerner you’ll go crazy with all the blocked sites. No google for crying out loud! And the Western search engines that are allowed - I used bing/yahoo - are heavily censored - ie many links simply don’t connect or lead to an unauthorized warning. I use an RSS reader called Feedly. Tapping on any news headline coming from NYT or Bloomberg or Reuters are blocked; BBC seems to be blocked sometimes, while The Guardian, CNN, USA Today always worked for me - at least when I clicked on stories not involving “China”. As a news junky, needless to say I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms by now. There’s lots of free wifi around here - but most require you to provide a token sent to you via SMS before you can use it. In the past, we typically didn’t have cellular while in China and were, thus, out of luck. This time we borrowed a relative’s phone and it helped on several occasions. In any event, if you don’t read Chinese, none of this matters - you won’t know what buttons to press to get to the free wifi - but I have the wife to depend on :-)
Speaking of phones: they’re used for *everything* here! I didn’t see anyone even use a credit card, much less cash. Everything seems to be done via direct debit using the phone and QR codes. Through WeChat (China’s FB+Paypal+CraigsList+...), I think. People actually looked at us as if we were dinosaurs when we tried to use cash!
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