Samsung may have screwed up but:
> So, Samsung has a power-hog design/OS, and as a result, has had to put in nearly double the battery as the iPhone.
This is asinine.
Really?
According to Ars, the GN7 only gets about 6% extra battery life than the iPhone 7 in one test (and pretty much equal in the other), and a little LESS than the iPhone 7 plus; yet according to Samsung's specs and Apple's, the GN7's battery is nearly TWICE the capacity of the iPhone 7s.
That extra capacity isn't buying TWICE the battery-life; so, all things being equal, the Sammy HAS to be suckin' down the current at nearly TWICE the rate of the iPhone 7.
No idea. Not that it is difficult to drill a small hole in the case over the battery and then jab a needle into it to set it off. With a few trial-runs you may even be able to make sure the evidence burns up completely.
Except each "Trial Run" costs about $900, and produces a paper trail in the form of CC receipts, activations, etc.
The phone was putting out a goodly amount of smoke, the smell of which would have to be professionally cleaned from the whole plane or most of the people in the SEALED CABIN would have gotten really sick from it.
Anyone who has ever been in presence of burning electronics knows how incredibly acrid it is, and often toxic, besides.
Do YOU know what the combustion byproducts are of a Li-ion/Li-Po battery, and the rest of the components around it are? I don't; but I can tell you with 100% certainty that I wouldn't want to breathe them for 10 minutes, let alone a couple of hours!
If you manage to kill your BT headphones, unplug the phone & switch to wired for a while. You’ll get another 20+ hours of music, especially with the cell radio turned off. Charge your headphones while you’re doing that.
In fact, according to the specs, the iPhone 7 lasts 40 hours just listening to music (I assume "local" music and with wired headphones), and the 7 plus lasts 60 hours (!!!)
So, unless you are on a moon-shuttle, you're probably covered.
Trump was mentioned nowhere. It was an attempt at humorous presentation of a concept triggering a subconscious thought that repeats in the head, leading to a proverbial begging for assistance in making it stop (see: someone sang a few words and a song gets stuck in your head).
Joke's on him, as airplane travel is one of the times I need both the headphone jack and charge port at the same time. When you have nothing better to do but play with your phone and listen to music for several hours straight, you're going to need to charge.
I vaguely recall a Samsung ad about how useful replaceable batteries are in that scenario as well, but they seem to have forgotten about that...
Joke's on you mindless AC. Do some research first, next time.
Here's One of the MANY options for wireless charging while headphoning with standard headphones for Lightning-equipped devices. Here's another one for $11 (I'm sure it's not MFi-certified like the Belkin is; but hey...).
Oh, and that search took 1 second on Google, and 2 seconds and one scroll-wheel-flick on Amazon.
The phone had been turned off, and the plane hadn't departed yet. Also, the user had only used wireless charging previously (per the article).
Ah! The Samsung TV commercials crow about "FAST, wireless charging".
They are pushing it to charge that nearly 4,000 mAh-battery in the same roughly 2 hours that iPhones charge their little over 2,000 mAh one. As a result, my iPhone 6 plus barely breaks a sweat while charging (except on my damn car charger!), while I bet the Samsung is almost too hot to touch. Add to that the heat from the eddy-currents from the wireless charger itself (can't remember the name of that effect, but it's the same thing that makes induction cooktops work), and...
So, Samsung has a power-hog design/OS, and as a result, has had to put in nearly double the battery as the iPhone. But the marketing people didn't want to advertise a FOUR-HOUR charge-cycle, and so told the engineering team "Damn the torpedos! Full Charge Ahead!"
Except your explanation doesn't deal with basic physics, it deals with quality control. If you were discussing impact of pressure on heat generated by battery due to formulation or heat generated by chipsets during operation due to resistance, ect that would be basic physics. I doubt this falls into that category, more likely there is a contaminant in the battery that increases the internal resistance that is causing the issue, once again an issue of quality control.
But in any event, the temp sensor should be monitoring the battery temp, and reducing/stopping the charge cycle as the battery temp increases.
Never were tested for operation at full power running multiple things in fast-changing environments where the signals keep changing rapidly.
Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Basic physics. Or at least it was during my Engineering Physics courses this year.
Wow! You oughta start working for Samsung's PR department with that much spin-ability.
Funny that no one else's phones burst into flames with frightning regularity.
Oh, and what about all the sea-level (or at least not at cabin-pressure) examples? What's your excuse for them?
Bottom line: Samsung seems to be valuing quick charge time (which they probably felt they have to to with their massive battery) over safety, and THOUGHT they could get away with higher battery temps during charging. That, or something is radically-wrong with their batteries or their built-in temp. sensors (or the software/hardware that is monitoring them).
This is the second time I've heard of a supposedly "Fixed" Samsung phone going all explodio; so now what?
Since Apple is rumored to be working on a home server like this, with their wanting to do more things like speech recognition and "local" queries and commands "on-device", would you feel more secure with a home server that would not/could not send audio to the mothership at any time for doing speech to text?
Home server... Whoa. Deja vu moment. Now I keep thinking about a politician. It won't go away. Make it stop!!!
I feel this is some sort of Trump reference; but I'm not sure... Please explain.
Even the 1/4 inch plugs used in professionalequipment are a common failure point, it can only get worse as the size decreases.
As a former professional musician and sound engineer, how well I know!
What used to amuse me, is all the guitarists that would purchase expensive cables with "MIL-Spec" 1/4" plugs on them. Too bad those "military-grade" plugs were made of corrosion-prone BRASS, and had a "bulbous" tip-end that reamed-out the "non-MIL-Spec" Jacks even more, making the whole thing even MORE intermittent. And as a bonus, the layer of corrosion on the brass sometimes formed a kind of semiconductor junction, turning your guitar rig into a "wonderful" 100W AM crystal radio (usually right in the middle of a performance!) In fact, you can see this demonstrated in the "This is Spinal Tap" movie, when Spinal Tap plays a gig at an Air Force base, and Nigel's(?) guitar rig starts picking up some 2-way radio calls, causing him to throw down his guitar and stomp off stage (yes, I know that might also have been his VHF wireless rig; but the effect is the same!)
No, he isn't, but he certainly represents the majority. This claim that headphone jacks are terribly unreliable came straight out of the Apple Users Cult, not from your boy Phil Schiller.
Anybody who HASN'T had to do the "Spinna-Spinna, Jiggle-Jiggle, Remove-Reinsert, Remove-Wipe-Reinsert" dance with a 3.5 mm jack/plug combo in an (usually unsuccessful) attempt to cure intermittent channel-cutout, should count themselves extremely lucky. In fact, 1/4" "guitar" plugs and jacks have the same problem. It's just the nature of the beast. Has been that way for DECADES. There was just wasn't anything better. And in fact, only time will tell if the Lightning an USB-C connectors fare any better in this application. But the 95% of people who have had some sort of problem with headphone jacks already know what DOESN'T stand the test of time, reliability-wise. But, just like hitting-yourself-over-the-head classes, some people just seem to enjoy the same abuse, over and over and...
It has NOTHING to do with fanboy-ism, Hater. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that 3.5 mm jacks, while unarguably being quite common, are simply NOT VERY RELIABLE over time. Period. It's an inherent design flaw, mostly on the "jack" (female) side, but I have never seen one that doesn't eventually (sometimes over a long time) fall prey to intermittent operation. We don't live in clean rooms, and have a tendency to occasionally exert lateral forces on the plug/cable, and both of those things make the life of a headphone jack a fairly hard one for such a small, cheap connector.
I am curious if the sapphire layer/coating for the lens is done by Apple, or by someone else. Because there is the distinct chance that Apple is using a vendor's tech that they bankrupted to deliver a product that people don't understand and are complaining about.
GTAT and Apple parted ways, and Apple is simply not using their "tech", partially because GTAT never delivered said "tech". In fact, that was what caused them to file bankruptcy: GTAT failed to meet Apple's deadline, and so Apple withheld a $140 million payment. GTAT is not out of business, but they are out of the 'Apple' business.
However, as reported by DigiTimes last year, Apple’s now sourcing sapphire displays from three overseas suppliers: South Korea’s Hansol Technics, China’s Harbin Aurora Optoelectronics Technology, and Russia’s Monocrystal.
I can't update my apps. Right now I have about 10 apps that need updating but each one of them wants a whole bunch more permissions. It is getting stupid - I don't think a weather app needs access to my identity or my contact list. Why can't we get a decent OS and proper applications for these powerful smart-phones? I would pay money for that.
Buy an iPhone, and gain control over your Apps. Seriously, that shit just doesn't happen on iOS.
Homekit do not offer a home server just yet; at this time, what Apple and Google offer is not Home Automation but merely remote control. Also, note what GP wrote:
- Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind
(Emphasis mine)
That's the weakness of Apple's (and many others') HA offering: they are not designed for easy interoperability. Apple do not even allow bridging to non-HomeKit equipment if it communicates by WiFi, they want to force you to do buy equipment supporting their own stack. That device for reading Dutch smart power meters? Can't use it. That weird WiFi enabled thermostat for your jacuzzi? Can't use it. Go pester the manufacturer for a HomeKit version. Contrast that with a HA platform like Vera; whatever its other shortcomings, it was designed for interoperability, and writing plugins for equipment is easy and encouraged.
If you want to be considered to be "serious about home automation", at the very least you need to have a HA server in your lineup, and design for interoperability. Because I can pretty much guarantee that no stack will support every device that a typical user will want to control when they move beyond simply remotely controlling their lights.
I agree with everything you said. I just hope Apple starts putting some real effort into doing those things. Since they appear to be interested in a Home Server, I can only hope that they follow the Vera model, and provide a plugin architecture for protocol-drivers. As you said, (lack of) interoperability has been THE issue with HA for DECADES, and it just has to stop. In a lot of ways, Echelon had the right idea back in the early 1990s; but they just wanted too much for development systems ($25k IIRC, when I went to their seminar) and licensing. I do see, however, that they are still around; so maybe they found their niche in large-building automation. But some sort of "General MIDI" type of agreed-upon messages and "known nodes and variables", like Echelon came up with, is desparately needed!
Another thing that needs to be seriously addressed (no pun) is SECURITY. None of the HA protocols have any real security at all, and that is something that puts off many who are intelligent enough to want HA in the first place. For example, that is what made me opt for a dumb thermostat last fall, when my old thermostat keeled-over one day and had to be replaced. Fortunately, Apple is spectactular at that subject; so here's to hoping...
I admit I haven't had time to look deeply into HomeKit. Did Apple Open Source it, like they did with HealthKit?
No it is also a multi media player and has positioned itself as such. I just don't want to have to carry a 3rd/4th piece of equipment with me to utilize the basic functions. The phone, headphones, a charger, and now a hub to just listen to music or watch video. I suppose I could get a dual headed USB dongle that would solve the problem of watching and charging at the same time.
Other than 2 channel analog audio from a 3.5 mm Jack, to get off of the device itself, any of the other functions are going to require either wireless comm. (and something on the other end like a set-top-box to deal with it), or some sort of converter/adapter widget. So, by dragging in the "multi-media" phrase into it (rather than just sticking to analog audio), your argument actually becomes self-defeating.
I never needed water-resistance either, until I chanced to dash about 20 feet to my car in a light rain, with my iPhone with top-mounted headphone jack in my top shirt-pocket. One. Frickin'. Raindrop. One!
My £40 Alcatel, which certainly isn't rated any level of waterproof, I sometimes bring out in light rain. A couple of times when it's been very wet, it's soaked through my pocket to the phone. Sometimes I bring it into the bath with me - I certainly don't submerge it, but it's very humid in there and can get splashed. Ofc, if I can see it's got wet, I can pop out the battery asap and have it dry out with the back off. None of this surprises me: a few splashes of water on any half-decent case shouldn't get inside.
So, I gotta ask - what is so fragile about old iPhones? Are they built in some weird tight-tolerance way that means they were unusually likely to get damaged with a drop of water? I read they had a humidity sensor (why?! do they distrust their customers that much?) that'd get triggered even in very humid climates - it just seems ridiculous.
Being an embedded developer, but not an iOS developer, I might venture a guess that it had something to do with the "button-reading" feature for the headsets, that was built into some sort of hardware/software combination that ultimately hooked directly into the headphone jack. I think the little water-shorts in the wetted Jack ended up kind of simulating some rapidly-changing and likely "illegal" button-presses, and it sort of DDOSed the OS, of at least some parts of it that were involved in the overall UI code, thus making the phone seem "crazy". Of it could have just been a plain-old-fashioned event-queue overflow, as the OS fell behind as it chased all those simulated button-presses around.
So it isn't a matter of being a "fragile" design, per se; but rather one that probably just hadn't been tested for that particular type of data-flood. Meh. Happens.
Not really convinced this is a "serious" platform for home automation - turning on Hue lights or playing music via voice command is hipster cool, but where is the deep support for real physical infrastructure:
- X10 and Zwave lighting
- Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind
- Infrared, with support for both regular home theatre gear AND wall mounted air conditioners.
- Curtain / blind controllers and aircon zone controllers
- Relay contact outputs
- Energy monitoring and trending
Then, what about all of the rules that make Home Automation automated?
Some of that is available already with Apple HomeKit-compatible devices.
Since Apple is rumored to be working on a home server like this, with their wanting to do more things like speech recognition and "local" queries and commands "on-device", would you feel more secure with a home server that would not/could not send audio to the mothership at any time for doing speech to text?
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny how Apple fanbois genuinely think Apple invented everything and support Apple's idiotic notion that everybody is copying them
THIS is what we were talking about. As you can plainly see, it is just a BIT more than a single feature or two.
Now STFU.
Samsung may have screwed up but: > So, Samsung has a power-hog design/OS, and as a result, has had to put in nearly double the battery as the iPhone.
This is asinine.
Really?
According to Ars, the GN7 only gets about 6% extra battery life than the iPhone 7 in one test (and pretty much equal in the other), and a little LESS than the iPhone 7 plus; yet according to Samsung's specs and Apple's, the GN7's battery is nearly TWICE the capacity of the iPhone 7s.
That extra capacity isn't buying TWICE the battery-life; so, all things being equal, the Sammy HAS to be suckin' down the current at nearly TWICE the rate of the iPhone 7.
No idea. Not that it is difficult to drill a small hole in the case over the battery and then jab a needle into it to set it off. With a few trial-runs you may even be able to make sure the evidence burns up completely.
Except each "Trial Run" costs about $900, and produces a paper trail in the form of CC receipts, activations, etc.
Get real.
do people have cameras ready
They do if they're not already on fire...
Overreaction is a key component
I set a fire in the backseat of your car, I dare you to drive ten more miles without "overreacting" to the smoke filling the car and getting out...
You mean more like ONE more mile...
The phone was putting out a goodly amount of smoke, the smell of which would have to be professionally cleaned from the whole plane or most of the people in the SEALED CABIN would have gotten really sick from it.
Anyone who has ever been in presence of burning electronics knows how incredibly acrid it is, and often toxic, besides.
Do YOU know what the combustion byproducts are of a Li-ion/Li-Po battery, and the rest of the components around it are? I don't; but I can tell you with 100% certainty that I wouldn't want to breathe them for 10 minutes, let alone a couple of hours!
If you manage to kill your BT headphones, unplug the phone & switch to wired for a while. You’ll get another 20+ hours of music, especially with the cell radio turned off. Charge your headphones while you’re doing that.
In fact, according to the specs, the iPhone 7 lasts 40 hours just listening to music (I assume "local" music and with wired headphones), and the 7 plus lasts 60 hours (!!!)
So, unless you are on a moon-shuttle, you're probably covered.
Trump was mentioned nowhere. It was an attempt at humorous presentation of a concept triggering a subconscious thought that repeats in the head, leading to a proverbial begging for assistance in making it stop (see: someone sang a few words and a song gets stuck in your head).
Reference in this case for Hillary: home server.
Do you have Asperger's? Heh.
Oh, yeah. Hillary! Duh!!!! (facepalm)
Joke's on him, as airplane travel is one of the times I need both the headphone jack and charge port at the same time. When you have nothing better to do but play with your phone and listen to music for several hours straight, you're going to need to charge.
I vaguely recall a Samsung ad about how useful replaceable batteries are in that scenario as well, but they seem to have forgotten about that...
Joke's on you mindless AC. Do some research first, next time.
Here's One of the MANY options for wireless charging while headphoning with standard headphones for Lightning-equipped devices. Here's another one for $11 (I'm sure it's not MFi-certified like the Belkin is; but hey...).
Oh, and that search took 1 second on Google, and 2 seconds and one scroll-wheel-flick on Amazon.
Hatetard.
The phone had been turned off, and the plane hadn't departed yet. Also, the user had only used wireless charging previously (per the article).
Ah! The Samsung TV commercials crow about "FAST, wireless charging".
They are pushing it to charge that nearly 4,000 mAh-battery in the same roughly 2 hours that iPhones charge their little over 2,000 mAh one. As a result, my iPhone 6 plus barely breaks a sweat while charging (except on my damn car charger!), while I bet the Samsung is almost too hot to touch. Add to that the heat from the eddy-currents from the wireless charger itself (can't remember the name of that effect, but it's the same thing that makes induction cooktops work), and...
So, Samsung has a power-hog design/OS, and as a result, has had to put in nearly double the battery as the iPhone. But the marketing people didn't want to advertise a FOUR-HOUR charge-cycle, and so told the engineering team "Damn the torpedos! Full Charge Ahead!"
I will just BET that's what happened here.
Except your explanation doesn't deal with basic physics, it deals with quality control. If you were discussing impact of pressure on heat generated by battery due to formulation or heat generated by chipsets during operation due to resistance, ect that would be basic physics. I doubt this falls into that category, more likely there is a contaminant in the battery that increases the internal resistance that is causing the issue, once again an issue of quality control.
But in any event, the temp sensor should be monitoring the battery temp, and reducing/stopping the charge cycle as the battery temp increases.
But it is not.
Never were tested for operation at full power running multiple things in fast-changing environments where the signals keep changing rapidly.
Stresses the battery, which reacts differently due to the reduced cabin pressure at higher elevation.
Basic physics. Or at least it was during my Engineering Physics courses this year.
Wow! You oughta start working for Samsung's PR department with that much spin-ability.
Funny that no one else's phones burst into flames with frightning regularity.
Oh, and what about all the sea-level (or at least not at cabin-pressure) examples? What's your excuse for them?
Bottom line: Samsung seems to be valuing quick charge time (which they probably felt they have to to with their massive battery) over safety, and THOUGHT they could get away with higher battery temps during charging. That, or something is radically-wrong with their batteries or their built-in temp. sensors (or the software/hardware that is monitoring them).
This is the second time I've heard of a supposedly "Fixed" Samsung phone going all explodio; so now what?
If Jobs were still around and Apple CEO, he'd have gloated, "Serves you right for stealing our ideas."
LOL! Perfect!
Since Apple is rumored to be working on a home server like this, with their wanting to do more things like speech recognition and "local" queries and commands "on-device", would you feel more secure with a home server that would not/could not send audio to the mothership at any time for doing speech to text?
Home server... Whoa. Deja vu moment. Now I keep thinking about a politician. It won't go away. Make it stop!!!
I feel this is some sort of Trump reference; but I'm not sure... Please explain.
Even the 1/4 inch plugs used in professionalequipment are a common failure point, it can only get worse as the size decreases.
As a former professional musician and sound engineer, how well I know!
What used to amuse me, is all the guitarists that would purchase expensive cables with "MIL-Spec" 1/4" plugs on them. Too bad those "military-grade" plugs were made of corrosion-prone BRASS, and had a "bulbous" tip-end that reamed-out the "non-MIL-Spec" Jacks even more, making the whole thing even MORE intermittent. And as a bonus, the layer of corrosion on the brass sometimes formed a kind of semiconductor junction, turning your guitar rig into a "wonderful" 100W AM crystal radio (usually right in the middle of a performance!) In fact, you can see this demonstrated in the "This is Spinal Tap" movie, when Spinal Tap plays a gig at an Air Force base, and Nigel's(?) guitar rig starts picking up some 2-way radio calls, causing him to throw down his guitar and stomp off stage (yes, I know that might also have been his VHF wireless rig; but the effect is the same!)
No, he isn't, but he certainly represents the majority. This claim that headphone jacks are terribly unreliable came straight out of the Apple Users Cult, not from your boy Phil Schiller.
Anybody who HASN'T had to do the "Spinna-Spinna, Jiggle-Jiggle, Remove-Reinsert, Remove-Wipe-Reinsert" dance with a 3.5 mm jack/plug combo in an (usually unsuccessful) attempt to cure intermittent channel-cutout, should count themselves extremely lucky. In fact, 1/4" "guitar" plugs and jacks have the same problem. It's just the nature of the beast. Has been that way for DECADES. There was just wasn't anything better. And in fact, only time will tell if the Lightning an USB-C connectors fare any better in this application. But the 95% of people who have had some sort of problem with headphone jacks already know what DOESN'T stand the test of time, reliability-wise. But, just like hitting-yourself-over-the-head classes, some people just seem to enjoy the same abuse, over and over and ...
It has NOTHING to do with fanboy-ism, Hater. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that 3.5 mm jacks, while unarguably being quite common, are simply NOT VERY RELIABLE over time. Period. It's an inherent design flaw, mostly on the "jack" (female) side, but I have never seen one that doesn't eventually (sometimes over a long time) fall prey to intermittent operation. We don't live in clean rooms, and have a tendency to occasionally exert lateral forces on the plug/cable, and both of those things make the life of a headphone jack a fairly hard one for such a small, cheap connector.
I am curious if the sapphire layer/coating for the lens is done by Apple, or by someone else. Because there is the distinct chance that Apple is using a vendor's tech that they bankrupted to deliver a product that people don't understand and are complaining about.
GTAT and Apple parted ways, and Apple is simply not using their "tech", partially because GTAT never delivered said "tech". In fact, that was what caused them to file bankruptcy: GTAT failed to meet Apple's deadline, and so Apple withheld a $140 million payment. GTAT is not out of business, but they are out of the 'Apple' business.
However, as reported by DigiTimes last year, Apple’s now sourcing sapphire displays from three overseas suppliers: South Korea’s Hansol Technics, China’s Harbin Aurora Optoelectronics Technology, and Russia’s Monocrystal.
If they're claiming it's sapphire, and there's no sapphire in it, and it scratches just as easily as regular glass, that's called "false advertising".
From TFS:
/.; but not even bothering to read TFS?!?
"The underside of the lens contains less sapphire than the exposed part"
Now I understand not reading TFA before posting on
I can't update my apps. Right now I have about 10 apps that need updating but each one of them wants a whole bunch more permissions. It is getting stupid - I don't think a weather app needs access to my identity or my contact list. Why can't we get a decent OS and proper applications for these powerful smart-phones? I would pay money for that.
Buy an iPhone, and gain control over your Apps. Seriously, that shit just doesn't happen on iOS.
Hi Tim!
I think you have a more modern version of the old PEBKAC problem.
I have never had a headphone jack fail. Nor do I know anyone who has.
I gotta tell ya, obvious astroturfing shill is obvious.
And you obviously are the entire headphone-using population.
Homekit do not offer a home server just yet; at this time, what Apple and Google offer is not Home Automation but merely remote control. Also, note what GP wrote:
- Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind
(Emphasis mine) That's the weakness of Apple's (and many others') HA offering: they are not designed for easy interoperability. Apple do not even allow bridging to non-HomeKit equipment if it communicates by WiFi, they want to force you to do buy equipment supporting their own stack. That device for reading Dutch smart power meters? Can't use it. That weird WiFi enabled thermostat for your jacuzzi? Can't use it. Go pester the manufacturer for a HomeKit version. Contrast that with a HA platform like Vera; whatever its other shortcomings, it was designed for interoperability, and writing plugins for equipment is easy and encouraged. If you want to be considered to be "serious about home automation", at the very least you need to have a HA server in your lineup, and design for interoperability. Because I can pretty much guarantee that no stack will support every device that a typical user will want to control when they move beyond simply remotely controlling their lights.
I agree with everything you said. I just hope Apple starts putting some real effort into doing those things. Since they appear to be interested in a Home Server, I can only hope that they follow the Vera model, and provide a plugin architecture for protocol-drivers. As you said, (lack of) interoperability has been THE issue with HA for DECADES, and it just has to stop. In a lot of ways, Echelon had the right idea back in the early 1990s; but they just wanted too much for development systems ($25k IIRC, when I went to their seminar) and licensing. I do see, however, that they are still around; so maybe they found their niche in large-building automation. But some sort of "General MIDI" type of agreed-upon messages and "known nodes and variables", like Echelon came up with, is desparately needed!
Another thing that needs to be seriously addressed (no pun) is SECURITY. None of the HA protocols have any real security at all, and that is something that puts off many who are intelligent enough to want HA in the first place. For example, that is what made me opt for a dumb thermostat last fall, when my old thermostat keeled-over one day and had to be replaced. Fortunately, Apple is spectactular at that subject; so here's to hoping... I admit I haven't had time to look deeply into HomeKit. Did Apple Open Source it, like they did with HealthKit?
No it is also a multi media player and has positioned itself as such. I just don't want to have to carry a 3rd/4th piece of equipment with me to utilize the basic functions. The phone, headphones, a charger, and now a hub to just listen to music or watch video. I suppose I could get a dual headed USB dongle that would solve the problem of watching and charging at the same time.
Other than 2 channel analog audio from a 3.5 mm Jack, to get off of the device itself, any of the other functions are going to require either wireless comm. (and something on the other end like a set-top-box to deal with it), or some sort of converter/adapter widget. So, by dragging in the "multi-media" phrase into it (rather than just sticking to analog audio), your argument actually becomes self-defeating.
I never needed water-resistance either, until I chanced to dash about 20 feet to my car in a light rain, with my iPhone with top-mounted headphone jack in my top shirt-pocket. One. Frickin'. Raindrop. One!
My £40 Alcatel, which certainly isn't rated any level of waterproof, I sometimes bring out in light rain. A couple of times when it's been very wet, it's soaked through my pocket to the phone. Sometimes I bring it into the bath with me - I certainly don't submerge it, but it's very humid in there and can get splashed. Ofc, if I can see it's got wet, I can pop out the battery asap and have it dry out with the back off. None of this surprises me: a few splashes of water on any half-decent case shouldn't get inside.
So, I gotta ask - what is so fragile about old iPhones? Are they built in some weird tight-tolerance way that means they were unusually likely to get damaged with a drop of water? I read they had a humidity sensor (why?! do they distrust their customers that much?) that'd get triggered even in very humid climates - it just seems ridiculous.
Being an embedded developer, but not an iOS developer, I might venture a guess that it had something to do with the "button-reading" feature for the headsets, that was built into some sort of hardware/software combination that ultimately hooked directly into the headphone jack. I think the little water-shorts in the wetted Jack ended up kind of simulating some rapidly-changing and likely "illegal" button-presses, and it sort of DDOSed the OS, of at least some parts of it that were involved in the overall UI code, thus making the phone seem "crazy". Of it could have just been a plain-old-fashioned event-queue overflow, as the OS fell behind as it chased all those simulated button-presses around.
So it isn't a matter of being a "fragile" design, per se; but rather one that probably just hadn't been tested for that particular type of data-flood. Meh. Happens.
But, but, but...
They've already BEEN compiling that data for YEARS; so I think they should have known to start with a stricter ruleset.
Not really convinced this is a "serious" platform for home automation - turning on Hue lights or playing music via voice command is hipster cool, but where is the deep support for real physical infrastructure:
- X10 and Zwave lighting - Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind - Infrared, with support for both regular home theatre gear AND wall mounted air conditioners. - Curtain / blind controllers and aircon zone controllers - Relay contact outputs - Energy monitoring and trending
Then, what about all of the rules that make Home Automation automated?
Some of that is available already with Apple HomeKit-compatible devices.
Since Apple is rumored to be working on a home server like this, with their wanting to do more things like speech recognition and "local" queries and commands "on-device", would you feel more secure with a home server that would not/could not send audio to the mothership at any time for doing speech to text?