I'm certain that I've stayed in an AirBnB or two that had a rule book and chores, but I never read them. I'm a fairly tidy person and generally clean as I go, but I don't go out of my way to clean dishes or take out the trash unless it really needs it. I also don't leave reviews of places I stay, nor do I read the reviews left for me.
Long distance heavy transport was solved in the US centuries ago using the incredible network of navigable waterways. Unfortunately the Jones Act makes it not as viable as it could be. Dredging is cheap compared to the payoff — shipping by water is 1% the cost of shipping overland.
I have a few of the older ones in this series. They’re nice for letting me experience music without having to have my phone with me. It’s basically stock android, which is fine, I just don’t like having my main Google account on it because that would require me to put a passcode, which breaks the “music device” unitasker use case.
The alleged hardware advances have left the audible range some decades ago, but it’s still fun to read what they do with the components.
I have found the body fat estimator on the Withings mid-tier to be ludicrously off. I’m not convinced these scales offer much more than just the weight number itself, which isn’t very useful after a certain point.
Japan is a totalitarian state where the enforcers are the citizens. This is great for tourists, who are happy to stick out like sore thumbs for the novelty of it and Japanese are all to happy to oblige in limited circumstances. Make no mistake, though, if you are not 100% Japanese, born in Japan, you will never be Japanese. You will never be accepted fully. You will always be excluded or out right discriminated against, and it’s legal.
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
Amazon chased away users like me because their needs and my needs weren't aligned. All I wanted was a little device that could tell me the weather, play music, set timers, and a few other basic things. They wanted an Amazon store cash register in my kitchen that I would use to buy things.
The "by the way..." nags irritated us so much we got rid of our two Echos and replaced them with a Sonos speaker and a Homepod Mini.
And Amazon have effectively left it because they couldn't work out a way to turn all those purchases into a stream of shopping purchases on Amazon.com. And in the intervening years they've enshittified those devices by becoming increasingly intrusive with adds and "did you know..." interjections to try and squeeze whatever engagement they can.
Apple doesn't typically have the same incentives. It could turn out to be the perfect timing to fill the vacuum Amazon is leaving.
That's because it's a couple years late due to Siri. Rumor says they've had this ready to go, but weren't going to ship it until they had a Siri that was half functional.
One would assume, they haven't announced (that I can see) which A-chip they put in here but rumors said it would be the A18 (2024 chip). Which seems like it would have to be updated since if this was ready 1-2 years ago they would have designed it with an even older chip (their HomePods have used multiple generation old chips, which, to be fair, is reasonable).
I am unsure what Apple's core differentiator is intended to be for this product. "I wanted an Alexa but it wasn't personal enough" perhaps? It just feels like the fad for replacing the family computer with a kitchen appliance came and went.
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