Slashdot Mirror
Apple Announces Its 'Next Breakthrough' Product: the HomePod (techcrunch.com)
Apple unveiled its home speaker during WWDC 2017 on Monday. The device, called HomePod, will go toe-to-toe with existing competitors such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Apple said it wanted to combine good speakers with smart speakers you can talk to, referencing Sonos and Amazon Alexa. It said the speaker "needs to rock the house" free from distortion. It also needs to have "spatial awareness" to make the music sound good no matter the room size. It also needs to be fun to use, Apple said, adding that the HomePod does all of this with a customer's privacy in mind. From a report: The device is a pill-shaped circular speaker. It has 7 beam-forming tweeter array. It has a custom-made woofer and an Apple A8 chip. It has multi-channel echo cancellation, real-time acoustic modeling and more. The HomePod can scan the space around it to optimize audio accordingly. Schiller spent a lot of time talking about how good it sounds. Of course the speaker works well with Apple Music. You can talk to the speaker to play anything in your Apple Music library and more. You can say "play more songs like that," or "I like this song." [...] It's going to cost $349. It comes in white and space grey. It starts shipping in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Other countries will get HomePods next year.
That does actually sound like some interesting tech.
I didn't want the Echo. I didn't want the Home. I don't want this, either.
In fact, I'm not exactly sure why anyone would want something like this. I really don't want something in my home that's always listening and potentially sending my speech out to computers that I don't control.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
and I have to buy & participate in Apple's closed, expensive ecosystem just to run it?
No thanks
Funny what a quick Google search turns up...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keecker/keecker-the-worlds-first-homepod
Really not worth it
copying Amazon?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have a Rythmik F15 sub with a 15" driver.
I can't imagine listening to bass on a wimpy 4" driver. You want at _least_ a 10" driver for music, bigger for movies.
Who is this targeted at? All the iHipsters who thinks Beats headphones sound good??
Looks like a skein of yarn. Something that the cat would tuck away behind the houseplants.
Why is that Bullshit? They're pretty much the only one of the big tech companies that are promising privacy. If they were caught not honoring that at this point, they'd lose everything. It seems a pretty good bet that they're serious.
Note the phrasing -- "keeping the customer's privacy in mind" could simply mean "taking extra pains to treat the customer's privacy as an obstacle to be removed."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
At least in the Keynote, they mentioned that all information sent over the internet (Siri context search) uses an anonymous "siri ID" instead of your name/login/userid. And encrypted end-to-end.
Nonsense. Apple is making/selling these so I'm buying 12. I am lining up outside the store now.
That's what I was thinking when I read this. Speaker selection is very personal for those that care, so why up the price of the device by trying to put good sound in? Better to just get an old laptop with Kodi on it and put it on the stereo you like, or Squeezebox (Logitech Mediaserver) is great for music. I'm a little confused though why you would expect Apple to work with Sonos devices, both seem to have their own proprietary walled gardens. If you want things to work together you have to go open-source.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I want Nintendo to make a home speaker, and I want them to call it the HomeBoy, and I want Flavor Flav to star in the commercials. And, it would be cool, because it would know what TIME it is.
sig: sauer
Three Apple stories because WWDC 2017 just happened. Try to keep up.
#DeleteFacebook
It just seems a massive strategic oversight that this isn't going to be ready until December. Most of the world will probably be waiting till this time next year to get their hands on the units. Any hype they hoped to generated with the announcement will have been long forgotten by December, and the delay will give Google/Amazon plenty of time to develop a game plan to disrupt their launch. I mean, what is the point of keeping it secret if you're going to make everyone wait 7 months before they can get it?
I remember Jobs once pointed out that one of the most important sentences Apple included in their keynotes was 'ships now'. He was right. Since the whole airpod delays I thought they would have got this stuff under control.
Can i use it without any form of internet connection to Apple, and without it sending any data outside my local network?
If not, it was not created to honor my privacy.
n/t
At $50....how can I not be happy? And if I want better sound, it has a 3.5mm jack (because Amazon doesn't have the "courage" to remove it) and bluetooth.....hell for $350....I can put one in every room in my house.
Do you have a server farm that can do near instantaneous interpretation of natural language speech? That's really a prerequisite for any of these devices to work locally.
This is an approximate rendition of what it would be like.
Agreed. Further, their business model is very pro-consumer, because the majority of their revenue comes from their end consumers. They're the one tech company that is treating mere moral consumers as their customer, instead of their product.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
> Can i use it without any form of internet connection to Apple
Can you use the remote voice processing device that streams stuff from the internet without sending data outside your local network? I mean, I expect not.
There is a legitimate need for a solution that is like: the "smart speaker" talks over wifi to your desktop, which acts as a server and processes the voice, then searches the locally built index of your locally built library. I suspect this would be a possible thing to build, but much harder for a company to sell it to you like that.
Ultimately, most of these "it just works (assuming you have an internet connection)" type products are all over the place because they sell, and the extra work to get a language processor and something to categorize your MP3s in a way that doesn't require a bunch of tech support would be more expensive and have fewer takers- they wouldn't really sell, I don't think.
When Apple says "something something privacy", they normally mean: you can use local features without any remote drama, and remote features won't be tied to your username or real name or sold or whatever. Sometimes they mean more than that. But at the end of the day, if you don't trust Apple with your voice requests if it sends the data to a remote server, then you shouldn't be trusting Apple (or ANY) company with your voice requests, and you should be doing it all locally in Linux or BSD or whatevs.
c'est exact, and in three years we'll be reading how they invented the category, and probably right here. -j/k
- js.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All jokes about Apple and replaceable batteries aside, there's no way that thing would run on less than a spare diesel locomotive. Do you see the picture in the article? Must be a good 25 feet tall next to the guy on stage. And people complained the Infinity RS-1's were big.
Well, you have you remember they didn't have much time to get a better name.
When you innovate by chasing ambulances you don't have time to polish the turd..
Come an Apple, don't your cult members deserve better than another me too product to empty their wallets and put them for under your control?
This doesn't connect with friends or post on the Internet. I hope that was a copy and paste job, otherwise it's a big waste of time and pointless.
it's a big waste of time and pointless.
Gee, I hope it didn't take you so long to read it that it cut into your valuable Facebook time or something. Or are you still on myspace??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The Apple HomePod can do most of what Alexa can do, and it only costs twice as much.
I'm getting a huge kick out of reading all the critiques of this device...considering that nobody who loves or hates it has ever seen one in person.
How about this, guys...let's actually wait until they start selling them to decide how much they rock/suck balls? You know, just an idea...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
1. it's only listening for "Hey Siri", until then there's no IO from the mic subsystem
2. it only talks over the network when you make a request
3. communicatons to/from the server are anonymized and encrypted
There's not a lot of tech detail there, but they did talk about it and Apple business model is clearly based on user privacy (not sure what rock you've been living under).
Excellent! Another Apple product not to buy. As always: Fuck Apple
Well, I guess it really is true. Apple has become too big to be innovative anymore. The Woz quote:
Interestingly enough, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes that Apple’s time as an innovative company may be coming to an end.
If they don't care at all then why do they need a decent speaker?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
https://media.giphy.com/media/...
This will go over like a fart through a keg of nails.
I like how Apple calls it a breakthrough even though they're the 4th company to offer one of these.
but they popularized it with the Apple I/II. On the Smart Phone front they broke the stranglehold that the cell companies had that had stagnated technology in the West. They brought Unix to the desktop without having to fight with your wi-fi. Heck the whole Personal Digital Assistant thing was theirs (Siri).
They've done cutting edge before. This isn't it. And that's kinda telling. At the moment their following, not leading.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well at least there wasn't anyone trying to make people rap this year.
#DeleteFacebook
I suppose they would've used 'iHome' if that weren't already a brand name of electronics. If they're targeting the "high-end Bluetooth speaker" market, that happens to be able to tie in to the connected iDevice's OS, that angle could work. People are used to shitty $10 Bluetooth speakers, and if the speakers are really as great as they say, it should be a big improvement over the competition, particularly if the comparison is Google Home type devices. I wonder how sales will compare to the Apple Watch; I see some people wear them but noone talks about them anymore.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Sure, someone could tell it was coming from your IP (though I'm guessing you use a VPN). But they can't do voice print analysis on an encrypted data stream, so they've got no actual information about you to tie to that IP address. Or am I misunderstanding?
YES YOU ARE! you see, APPLE STILL SURE AS FUCK does get your queries along with your ip address and possibly some other id data(to ensure it's a legit search and not a dos and so forth).
that's the whole point.. apple gets the data.
furthermore, a lot of the queries have to be matched with your apple id or whatever anyways to be useful.
anyways.. they said the privacy was in mind. that doesn't actually mean anything. it literally means nothing concrete.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No desire to ever have one of these dumb squawk boxes lying around. A parrot has a better understanding of language.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I wouldn't call them small, but at five feet tall, I think the Fulton J Modular speakers that I had the pleasure of growing up with had them beat.
There is a legitimate need for a solution that is like: the "smart speaker" talks over wifi to your desktop, which acts as a server and processes the voice, then searches the locally built index of your locally built library. I suspect this would be a possible thing to build, but much harder for a company to sell it to you like that.
They have such things - or at least, dictation software that processes locally and doesn't use a cloud-based server for its library. They suck.
I mean, really, have you notice how good dictation has gotten in just the past couple years? That's a result of Google and others using machine learning on the inputs from millions of users. Even just 5 years ago, people were still using Dragon Dictation and the like and having to spend hours reading sample paragraphs and training the thing, just to have it say "Eat up, Martha.".
You could probably do a similar locally-processed home automation system, but it would take hours of training and still suck.