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Thursday, December 27, 2018

A Bad Sign For AAPL

We have an Amazon Echo, aka Alexa. In fact, we have two of them. My elderly mother has one. We gave one to each of our kids last Christmas. We use it all the time.

Alexa was created by Amazon, not Apple. In the past, wildly successful new devices with innovative features that made you slap your forehead and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" were what defined Apple. The GUI, the mouse, the smartphone, the tablet, the iPod for music, they were all ground-breaking even if they were somewhat derivative from others' inventions. Apple pushed them to market successfully and profited handsomely.

Alexa is huge. I've got friends at work who use it to control heating, lights, blinds and more. I don't, but I'm a lazy curmudgeon, so I'm not a good test case for stuff like that. Still, this lazy curmudgeon loves Alexa. It's changed the way we entertain ourselves, making all kinds of things obsolete. Apple was nowhere to be seen.
"Alexa, has Apple lost it's mojo?"
"I can't find any information about that."
"Well, I didn't say you were perfect."
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2 comments:

  1. Foxfier12:27 PM

    Use to be, Apple was really good at popularizing stuff. (In part, I think, because they did the awesome step of donating so many computers to schools-- which meant that people learned computers on Apple devices. Up until the iTunes era, that credit even paid off with me!)

    I am the kind of person who, if forced to have a smart speaker in the house, would name it "wiretap" or something, but it's still pretty cool. ^.^

    Incidentally, I am betting on Walmart beingthe next big "smart" device company, and I'm glad Amazon has the competition even though I LIKE Amazon better.

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  2. Mostly Nothing6:28 PM

    We use ours all the time too. Games, music, daily briefing. I have a couple lights. And we have a harmony hub to turn on and off the TV. Programming it is a little problematic. It doesn't handle slingtv well.

    My MacBook Pro is getting very old. But I am unwilling to give Apple anymore money, since everything to they do now is take away useful features and owner rights for new shiny things that Apple fanboys convince themselves they have to have. Only to find it is mostly useless.

    On the other hand, there is the horror of using Windows. I get enough of that at work.

    Hence, a 9 year old laptop with a dead battery.

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