Same here. Recently, if it's anything that's health related, I absolutely avoid Amazon because of the mass of fake products out there. I needed some vitamins recently and my first thought was that I'm better off paying CVS or Walgreens prices and being practically guaranteed that the product is legit, versus trying to weed through the fake reviews and counterfeit products on Amazon.
That thought has occurred with increasing frequency over the past few years as Amazon continues to completely ignore the issue.
Do be aware that CVS and Walgreens stock homeopathic garbage for any symptom that doesn't have a good OTC remedy, and aside from a little fine print and weird units on the "active ingredients" the packaging is identical to real medicine.
Alas, it's actually using the U1 ultra-wideband chip for position finding. That means this only works on the iPhone 11 and above. My guess is that bluetooth signal strength just isn't accurate enough.
You can see that this documented [1] in a footnote [2].
The sound quality is way beyond anything Google or Amazon offer.
If you have other Apple devices, it works just like Siri on your phone. I've got one in my kitchen and it can hear me anywhere in my 3 bedroom house. It's pretty impressive from an audio recognition standpoint.
Amazon and Google both have much better home assistants built in.
Have you tried the echo studio, probably not. If you are streaming music, I wonder if you could tell the different between the echo studio and the homepod in terms of price. They don't sound the same, but the quality is very good for those not looking for an audiophile setup. The studio is a lot of speaker for the money and offers better voice assistant. Apple made a nice thing in the home pod, but it isn't any special...yet
...with the additional downside that it's from Google, and Google projects and devices have a tendency to be abandoned pretty quickly whenever their interest turns to something else.
I mean they've been doing the physical incarnation of Google Assistant for a while now; it predates Homepod by more than a year. There's no arguing that Google is anything but capricious and loaded with privacy issues, but I think it's safe to assume at this point that they're not going to be dropping the hardware any time soon. The original Google Home is still getting feature updates and I doubt that's going to change even with a replacement coming out.
But I agree with you.. they're generally better about hardware support than software.
The "Nest" rebrand of the Google Home devices to me signifies that they're really investing in this consumer IoT product line. That and they're (arguably) the dominant player in the space.
Well, sure. Look at the Pixel phones: the Pixel 1 was released Oct 2016 and support ended Dec 2019, and the Pixel 2 was released Oct 2017 and they'll be dropping support this year after updating to Android 11.
Even with Nest specifically they dropped Works With Nest support last year, effectively killing off the many integrations that had been built since 2014 in favor of their newer Works with Google Assistant program.
Obviously it will be hard for a phone with 1/10th the z index to fit the same optics that a DSLR came.
But I work in video production and I can tell you that for 99% of people, there is absolutely no reason to buy a separate camera.
What Apple and other smartphone makers have managed to achieve in such small and (relatively, compared to a full frame DSLR) inexpensive items is pretty amazing.
They have such good quality that when I need to grab a quick pickup shot, I can easily use my phone's camera and drop the footage in with a pro cine-style camera. There are tons of apps that will let you shoot with full manual control or even flat color profiles.
People have shot entire, commercially released movies on their smartphones. Once you get to a certain image quality, it's not about the image quality but the artistic content/merit of said image.
I’ve never understood this type of “gotcha!” that always gets trotted out when a company uses another company’s product to develop their own.
If all of the debugging, testing and factory management tools are standardized on Windows - why rewrite them if you don’t need to? It seems like a waste of resources.
(This isn’t limited to Apple or even technology companies. It applies to tons of businesses.)
There's no way that $200 million is break even for that movie.
The budget alone was $200 million, which doesn't factor in marketing...which will probably be higher than normal since they had to run a marketing campaign multiple times as it was pushed back throughout the months. Often times that alone can be as much as the movie budget.
But the marketing isn’t done by the studio, it’s undertaken by the distributor. Different pockets, right? You can’t reconcile line items across different accounts (although I hear Hollywood is very creative with accounting).
Then we should work to change that. As a society, we should find this kind of stuff unacceptable. There should be some baseline level of transparency and dignity employees are treated with.
It's an infinite game of whack-a-mole. BigCo can walk right up to the legal line and not cross it. Look at the factories of the early 20th century and it was the same. BigCo paid better (e.g. Ford's famous wage increases) and you had to put up with more crap (everything else Ford did). You can progressively tighten the law but in a democracy the law is always going to lag social norms and social norms are a reflection of what a society can afford. Not that we shouldn't talk about this stuff but a pro-worker special interest group getting some legislators in their pocket is no long term solution here.
The long term solution is of course a strong labor movement that can fight this shit every step of the way. There is no quick fix that solves everything.
Frankly I think you are just plain wrong. The "strong labor movement" you speak of simply doesn't exist in the parts of any given economic niche where these changes must first take root (because those parts are not trying to wring every cent out of their labor because they don't need to).
For any particular scrap of ground the "labor movement" (in italics because there is no such coordinated movement on the timeline and scale by which these things happen) wants to fight for the fight for that scrap ends at low margin BigCos like amazon who will not give it up until legislated (or until it looks like they might be and they can get brownie points by biting the bullet ahead of time). In unionized industries the BigCos are also the unionized workplaces where change happens at the glacial pace of contract negotiations. Changes come about in higher margin and smaller scale parts of the economy first. If you want Amazon and Walmart workers to have an hour break for lunch (or some other particular policy goal) then you are not going to get that until so long after the workers in the Coors warehouse and the McMaster warehouse have had it that the legislators can feel secure in legislating it.
Here's an example. Say the UAW manages to negotiate with GM that every third Friday should be pajama Friday. Farcical, right? Of course because it's not within the bounds of what we consider reasonable right now. It has to become reasonable first. If you want pajama Friday or any other specific policy goal it has to be within the bounds of what is reasonable. Before the UAW can even broach the subject there needs to be acceptance elsewhere. The UAW isn't gonna ask for pajama Friday at GM unless they think the policy is not crap and they're not gonna think that unless they've done that at the smaller Ford plant and they're not gonna do that until they've piloted it at the tiny Peterbilt factory where they have a better position in negotiations and can afford big reaches. And they're not gonna try it there unless they've seen the policy play out successfully somewhere else first, say the non-union Cat mining shovel plant down the road where they have the fat margins per worker to do that kind of thing. And the Cat plant isn't even gonna entertain the possibility (and the workers won't push for it) unless it's been proven to work in the even higher margin and smaller scale RV industry plant in the next state over.
I'm not going to repeat myself but if you wan workers to have a generous (by our current frame of reference) paid hour lunch break at Amazon's warehouses then the process by which the idea is normalized is basically the same. You can't change policy at BigCo or at the legislative level until you've made that policy = normal and reasonable by doing it other places first. The strength of the "labor movement" is completely and totally tangential to that process and a good argument (though I don't necessarily agree with it) could be made that strong labor institutions (unions) actually hinder the process because they reduce the agility with which decisions can be made by the bigger players.
So if you want pajama Friday at GM or you want a paid hour long lunch break legislated upon Amazon and Walmart, or any other change that looks to be big and unprecedented from our vantage point here today, then you're gonna need to plant the seeds of those changes in workplaces of a completely and totally different setting so that when the change does finally come to the GMs and Amazons of the world it comes at the end of a long bunch of incremental steps because that's the only way change comes to those big places that are deeply invested in and optimized for the status quo.
Costco, Ocean State Job Lot, and other small scraps of the consumer goods retail economy known for treating their workers well and proving you can make money doing so are doing far, far more for the future of workers in Amazon's warehouse than and "labor movement" can do because what those "generous" employers are doing today is what Amazon will be doing in time.
> Say the UAW manages to negotiate with GM that every third Friday should be pajama Friday. Farcical, right? Of course because it's not within the bounds of what we consider reasonable right now.
It's not as farcical as you think. I worked at a place in the 90s as an intern where the union negotiated "casual Fridays" where jeans and open toed shoes (how scandalous) as a work rule.
