Comparing land area to IP address assignments is one of the sillier visualizations I've ever seen. I can't imagine what this is intending to convey. Should Siberia have more IP addresses than all of Europe?
Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but I don't see what's interesting about it at all. Visualizing IPv4 against population (or maybe GDP) would have been far more illuminating.
> Go is kind of a terrible language for a container runtime
I love Go and use it for everything I can but will absolutely concede this point. It's clearly possible to write the most successful container runtimes on earth in Go, but you absolutely have to fight the language/runtime sometimes. Since containers are based on processes, handing off a container spec to a minimal rust runtime seems like what we should all be doing by now. crun has just proven good enough that AFAIK no one has RIIR.
The weird thing about this product is that its biggest competitor is "an old ipad." I feel like most of their target customer base already has an old ipad that's better suited for what this does in every way. Old ipads:
1. Have a battery so you're not tied to a cord. Even old poor batteries are better than no battery.
2. Have apps! How does this not support apps?!
3. Have a huge range of 3rd party products and hacks and 3D models to wall mount it or stands for it
4. Are kitchen-safe (splatter proof, far fewer holes than this product, movable out of the way)
5. Also support siri and facetime and everything this device does AFAICT
I'm guessing they realized this and made sure it's priced lower than the cheapest new iPad, but it will be interesting to see if the price difference can compete with the old iPads most of their customers have in drawers or already on walls.
Maybe the purpose-built nature will be a reasonable enough differentiator, but I'm not sure it's focused enough for that. It's both a passive information station and for calls? It's for recipes which implies you put it in the kitchen, but it looks like a nightmare to clean with all those holes? It's also a very small screen when you have to read the recipe from a distance because it has no battery. I can't move my stove to it, and I definitely don't want it too near a stove or sink!
The multiple users feature is a really neat trick, but I would kill to have this for all Apple devices. Let me hand my kid my phone and it automatically switches to kid mode!
Please Apple don't lock multiple users to stationary devices like HomeView!
I can’t believe nobody’s brought this up yet, but the HomeView fundementally exists for one reason: to be a Matter hub for smarthome stuff. No iPad – or any portable Apple device - can be configured as a home hub for managing Matter-protocol devices. There’s no significant advantage to a HomeView over an iPad if you don’t have any Matter devices.
That’s why this device has multi-user support: you’re only supposed to have one of them, which everyone uses. The Apple TV also has good multi-user support, because Apple doesn’t expect you to connect one Apple TV per user to your television.
But if you already owned an apple tv or home pod, then they already double as a matter and thread hub and you can manage all of apple home from your phone or ipad. Is this being marketed to a family with absolutely no other apple devices?
It’s an alternative to a HomePod mini, adding a display with touch screen. It’s for people who like that (like people who buy the equivalent Google and Amazon devices), regardless of whether they already own or don’t own a Home Hub device (also taking into consideration that existing ones don’t support Siri AI).
How many people are in the market for that is a good question.
Well then, that settles it, someone call up Ternus and tell him to cancel it, layer8 doesn't have a use for it. Pack it in folks. It's dead! Dumb product! Useless!
Well, I'm a big Apple fan and and also have an iPhone and a home (and various cameras in it) and I am not even considering getting this device. I am considering dropping 9x as much on a new iPhone, on the other hand...
> The market is: people with homes and an iPhones. That is to say, a fair number of people.
The point of comments like mine and @layer8's is that the market is actually much smaller than this. The fact that you are considering one does not mean the market is any category that includes you. It means that it is some category that includes you (and excludes me and @layer8). We don't know how big that market is, but if longtime Apple fans are not even considering the device, then probably it is not "all people with iPhones and homes". It could still be a big market, but it's glib to say that it's so large.
Ok now take all of your arguments and reverse them. Two random people on the Internet claiming they aren’t considering a purchase is completely meaningless and has no bearing or relationship to the market opportunity for this or other products. Software engineers, particular on this forum, are very often and usually wrong precisely because what they consider in products isn’t what others care about.
That's now how the logic works. If someone asserts "the market is XYZ" then they have to show that actually is the market. When people say "I'm in XYZ and I'm definitely not the market", that shows that the hypothesis is wrong. When someone else says "I'm XYZ and I'm in the market", that is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Sure it is. You’re familiar with anecdotal evidence, right?
When someone says market size they don’t mean 100% of people fitting some characteristic must purchase some product. Please stop mindlessly arguing about dumb things.
I am aware that anecdotes are not as good as large-scale evidence. That does not defeat the point that you are confusing necessary and sufficient conditions, rendering your own anecdotes even more useless than mine and @layer8.
Really weird that you keep insisting that you're right here. Some guy on the internet made a conjecture, other people disagreed with him, and you feel the need to keep boosting his claim. Yet every argument you make equally damages your own side, rather than showing that your side is stronger. Really weird approach.
It’s only weird because you’re doubling down on being wrong instead of just accepting that just because you won’t consider the product doesn’t mean the TAM isn’t something like “people with iPhones”.
Let’s step back. Remove your anecdote because it is completely irrelevant. Now describe how the proposed market size is “wrong” as you are asserting.
How so? A Matter controller just needs to be powered on and exist somewhere on the [wireless] LAN to do its job.
An old iPad on a stand on the table in the breakfast nook is conceptually fine as a Matter controller until someone picks it up and leaves with it, or unplugs it and lets it run out of battery.
Apple forbids this kind of use because it defiles the majesty of their garden and its walls (or something), but that's just Apple doing Apple things.
Expectation of usage. An iPad designer assumes it will be taken all around, leave the house, put in a book bag, etc.
While an old iPad being used as an entertainment management surface won’t, that’s not the prime use case intended for iPad.
Apple decided to focus on products whose primary purpose is a stationary device, like a speaker or a TV-attached device. Sure, you can move them place to place, but most won’t.
The problem with repurposing these devices as perma-plugged-in hubs is they have a battery that could eventually swell from staying plugged in 24/7. You have reports here and there from people whose tablet-on-a-wall (not necessarily iPad) swelled up and bulged against the wall.
Even if the iPad recognizes it's always plugged in and discharges from 100 to 80 occasionally, it's still a use case that increases the chance of battery swelling.
I don't mean this as "Apple knows best, psh, silly customer" but a bit of "that's one reason this exists" and a bit of being annoyed that you can't run tablets battery-less off AC to prevent it.
Yeah, it's kinda sad or at least annoying to me when Apple creates the problem and then "solves" it for me by taking away functionality. They essentially invented the no-user-serviceable-battery concept, or at least proved its tolerability by the masses.
It would pretty obviously be easy to add a wizard that prepares the iPad to be repurposed as a stationary home hub, setting the battery to be held at 50% and neither charged nor discharged, sending a notification to your phone if it's unplugged, choosing a slideshow to double as a digital frame, etc. But to be fair to Apple, no other companies would build such a thing either, it's just the consumption oriented system we live in.
AppleTV does support multiple users, but it’s terrible.
I have an AppleTV on the main television, with Apple accounts set up for each member of my family. It makes almost no difference which user you have selected.
Now, maybe I just haven’t spent enough time trying to set this up, and I’d be delighted to be wrong, but AFAICT:
All users share the same Home Screen layout
All users share the same screen saver
Third party apps have zero integration with the AppleTV accounts. This means I have 4 users on the AppleTV, then 3-5 users on every single app installed on the Apple TV, and any AppleTV user can use any app user.
All together this means the AppleTV users are useless to me. They don’t help me with parental controls. They don’t help me switch between personalized content collections. They don’t even help me log into third party apps!
That is because even though multi-user support exists, the third-party apps with content don't care. They do not map Apple Accounts to their own profiles, or persist profile selection against an active user account.
But many also haven't updated their custom input code to support the current remote design either.
>No iPad – or any portable Apple device - can be configured as a home hub for managing Matter-protocol devices.
hasn't apple been shipping thread radios in devices for a few years now, with no actual use for them? the only thing blocking iPads from being a home hub for managing matter protocol devices is that apple hasn't turned that feature on.
But I have a HomePod mini that I use for all of my Matter devices, why would I need a massive device with a screen just for that?
The only difference I can see is multiuser support of which Siri works just fine for me controlling the matter devices in the house that are on my partners Apple account. I can't justify buying a product just for multi user support and have another bulky device sitting in the house.
Apple would've been better off putting a FaceID camera in a Homepod mini or Homepod to get the same functionality.
It has camera access. Voice for most other things. Without a touchscreen, it would be annoying (to me) to use the remote to move around multiple rooms and devices.
The "Apple TV" is not a television set; it's a small always-on computer that sits near one. The newer ones include a Thread radio and serve as a border router / gateway for IoT devices to be controlled and automated through Apple Home (usually managed via a user's phone or tablet).
This is not about controlling your smart home. You can do that from your phone, tablet, computer, specific devices like thermostats and switches, voice via Siri, etc.
This is about being able to act as a Matter/Thread hub, which the Apple TV can do regardless of the control mechanism.
Old iPads are better than this in every way except for the way that matters most in a shared family device, then? I'd love for Apple to add multi-user support to iPadOS and think it's way past time they did, but it's not going to be a simple software update. This device has on-chip support for multiple FaceID accounts so it can distinguish them securely.
Apple has multi user support for iPads, but only if you’re a school.
Normal users should accept that if they let their kid play Angry Birds they’re risking an accident with all their other apps getting mucked with, and if they don’t like it they can buy five iPads.
I believe the idiomatic solution for “handing your child an iDevice but only letting them touch one app” is Guided Access mode.
It’s only when you want to let them jump in and out of multiple apps (e.g. pick what game they want to play on their own) that you start having a problem.
(And the not-idiomatic-but-people-do-it-anyway solution for that, from what I’ve seen, is buying one extra iPad, and creating a special whole-family Apple account for it, to effectively serve as a game console for the kids.)
Multi-user "Handoff" seems interesting as well. The implications from a lot of the descriptions is that this HomeView is designed from the perspective that every user also has a primary iPhone or iPad and HomeView coordinates data sync across a number of apps from that primary device. (Several features mention that they only work with that user's iPhone or iPad on the same Wifi network.)
> To unlock a full, personalized experience on HomeView, users need an Apple Account, a compatible iPhone or iPad, and to be added as a member of the shared home in the Home app.
Agree this should just be a dock/charger for iPads.
Though the sheer fact that in 2026 it's driven by Siri who is not a conversationalist AI, but still the same frustrating voice technology from 2011 is confusing they would even bother releasing this.
Sooner or later their lack of innovating themselves and just copying is going to make them what the Blackberry was when iPhone was released.
> Though the sheer fact that in 2026 it's driven by Siri who is not a conversationalist AI, but still the same frustrating voice technology from 2011 is confusing they would even bother releasing this.
This is no longer the case. Siri as of iOS 27 is a gemini-based LLM system. It has a chatbot app and everything.
Really? On my iPhone 15 Pro Max (older iphone) each time i want to have a complete conversation with it I have to constantly prompt it with Hey Siri then say next thing in conversation. Is that your experience?
I use and have used chatGPT voice while driving for awhile ... here's a very silly example https://www.instagram.com/p/DecaL9Gx6li/ . Besides that silly example im in school now and give chatGPT all my notes to create interact multiple choice questions i take while driving. Overall love hearing how other people are using chatGPT voice and or any other AI voice conversationalist tech.
Have you actually tried using the new Siri conversationally? Because I have tried and tried on my 18 Pro and it is the most frustrating experience ever. The conversation window (time wise) is extremely tiny, she's basically only able to answer a single question and there is no real follow up.
I've tried conversing with it while driving and it is just useless.
Trying to converse with it sitting down and with all the time in the world just doesn't work either.
My choices are basically: use the worst AI assistant in the world, use ChatGPT, or just google it myfuckingself. Siri will never win this one.
E: an example of a frustrating experience making it useless: I was browsing marketplace for used Mac minis and found one pretty cheap. I ask Siri, hey siri tell me about this Mac mini. It identified the model via the model number, but when I asked it for the baseline specs for that model it just kept regurgitating the information listed on the screen. The reason I was asking was because the listing didn't list the amount of RAM, so Siri was just unable to tell me, no matter how I phrased it.
Agreed especially if like me you have used chatGPT voice for awhile. Apple is so behind and Siri is so slow and times out while GPT on my iPhone works 9.5 out of 10 times. Almost 10 out of 10 when driving but while Im hiking with friends and we are talking / brining GPT into our conversations during our hikes it does lose connection (hopefully Starlink Mobile solves this in a year or few).
iPhone 16 Pro Max but it's supported from the 15 Pro and up.
Right now it's only supported in English, and your phone language/locale also has to be in English. Then you go into Siri settings and make sure it doesn't say it still needs to download Siri AI.
Also it's not supported for EU users (however Apple determines that) since Apple won't follow the DMA.
Not when driving and an on my 15 Pro Max I constantly have to say hey siri after each time it responds vs. conversing with chatGPT throughout much my drives. Also, Siri is super slow and I still get "Something went wrong, please try again," 4 out of 10 times.
Also, my silly video shows just how far away chatGPT voice is where you can tell it to say things using different tones of voices. Funny one I tested this evening was having it deliver that silly 8th grade english to french translation in a Titantic the movie, "I'm the king of the world," expressive tone ha.
No I don't think they've ever tried. I have the same experience, constantly needing to say hey siri with every single sentence, and then it just isn't great at answering to the point that it's just useless. Given the choice of Siri, ChatGPT live, or just waiting until I can Google it myself, Siri is functionally useless even today.
iPadOS specifically supports multiple users, including partitioning the total available disk space and sharing a slice to each of the accounts. Only possible for devices added in Apple Business Manager and managed in a supervised state with an MDM solution under Apple Device Enrollment (ADE) with a 'shared iPad' enrollment profile. You can even integrate Entra ID (Microsoft 365) for handling the login process on shared iPads, or use federated Managed Apple Accounts.
It's not intended for home users of course, because that could jeopardise sales in families.
That is fascinating and funny! There is always a Linux guy ready to explain why UX/UI doesn't matter because they can technically solve the problem in 17 complicated steps.
Sam Altman "joking" at our expense? The resentment is well earned, and the fact HN users keep bringing it up to this day means the 2018 article was not unhinged enough.
Dang also echoes the main points of the article, albeit in a much less combatively cathartic manner:
> He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed.
> The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007
I recently talked about how I got an old iPod 5.5 off eBay because it fit all my usability needs. Celebrity linux hacker unsarcastically told me I should have built my own MP3 player with ESP32, an audio codec board, and micropython.
Thank you for asking, and thank you to the two people who responded to you (within a minute of each other!). I was unaware of this "infamous" comment, but it's interesting to see how it's aged over the past 19 years. Times sure have changed.
It's really common to see integrated iPads in all sort of kiosk/control panel applications. Afaik iPad has a dedicated kiosk mode which doesn't allow you to exit the running app. Android tablets too.
Also: there aren't any really old iPads: Apple forces obsolescence. They could unlock the old devices and let users run whatever on there, but they prefer the ewaste route. Also because fuck you give us more money.
This device is neither iPadOS nor iOS, it's a bit like that one iPod Nano generation with touch -- an amalgamation of iOS and extremely closed apps: it doesn't have an App Store, the multiple users extends to just Apple apps and data it pulls off your (nearby) iPhone, and the extent of its extensibility is streaming CarPlay interfaces for some audio & video apps.
I think the real issue is that this is "competing" with 7 year old Google Home and Alexa show devices. Devices that were $50 for a lot of their useful life (Now they have of course, become more expensive, and worse.)
Basically, people use them for photos, kitchen timers, quick recipe lookups, quick questions, and "can a dog eat the thing I just dropped".
A lot of those cons are advantages for at least one target market, the elderly. It's much better for them if the device can't move and can't install new software.
Every 65+ person I know has one of those alexa-speaker things. Nobody I know under 65 has one. I wonder if there's just some generational expectation for a fixed household object, like phones and televisions were for people in the twentieth century.
I still have them. I use them for kitchen timers, alarm clocks, a quick weather forecast, random maths and unit conversions, and whatever I want to activate with Home Assistant. There's one on the night stand with a clock on the front that I never need to set, that adjusts its brightness automatically based on ambient light, and which gets used as a Bluetooth speaker for the tablet that I watch dumb shit on YouTube with sometimes.
So, like: The light switch in the garage is very inconveniently-located, and it's dark AF in there both at night and when I walk in from a bright sunny day. The lights can be activated by voice and that's pretty nice to have.
They're also good when I want background music that's actually-in-the-background: I've got some very nice audio systems for when I want focus on listening to music, but they are much more successful at being involving than at being being ignored. The kinda-meh-sounding Alexa-type widget on the table over there does a better job for background noise.
I'm not anywhere near 60 yet. I just find that stuff like this is useful.
(Yeah, yeah. I could build or buy voice-controlled speaker-widgets that integrate with Home Assistant in an open-source way, and even use them with a local LLM if I wanted to. I'm disinterested in that kind of effort at this time.)
Getting wakeword stuff to work 1. reliably and 2. very low latency has been what has held back local fixed point hardware assistants. I've taken a couple stabs at this myself but custom wakeword is a weirdly hard nut to crack for the open source community.
Fair but I also know plenty of people who give their elderly folks their old iPads. If you fit all the important apps on the home screen and tweak a couple things, I can't imagine the UX could be any more complex than for this device. Mobility and screen size is even more important for the elderly. They don't want to stand in their kitchen staring down at a little computer to talk to their grandchild on a tiny screen.
And finally, when they do have issues and ask you questions: now it's questions about an unfamiliar device you may not own yourself!
Old iPad still seems optimal for this demographic.
Screen size is a good point. For the other things, I suppose I was thinking of my own grandparents, who had memory issues and would've benefited from a device that can't be misplaced.
iPad OS still has a zillion failure modes for the elderly. Long press, split screen and the other multitasking paradigms, multi-finger gestures, touch id, background audio from some tab in Safari... there's just no end of features that can throw them off. And it isn't multi-user.
Not sure if HomeView is the answer, but some aspects of the video were interesting. eg super-fast user switching with no explicit login; and how it puts Siri forward as the primary UI in a way that the iPad doesn't, even if the iPad technically has the same capabilities.
That they drilled a hole through the kitchen island table top for the power cord was hilarious. Exactly zero people in the real world are going to do that.
You are wrong! I was redoing my kitchen recently and there’s a huge variety of accessories that kitchen worktop suppliers offer that have to do with using electronics on a worktop. A round hole with a lid to thread the power cable through is a very common thing that kitchen planner software includes nowadays, especially for kitchen islands. You can even have a completely flush wireless charging pad on your kitchen worktop if you want.
The screen is too small for the elderly. You're not going to get much information on there if you have to show large text, assuming that's even possible.
I think the idea is in the ballpark but the form factor is not ideal. The screen should be much bigger so notes can be left for others - maybe from scribbles rather than voice - and calendars and shopping lists can be seen from across the room.
This looks like someone at Apple took a recent Alexa and said "We should do one of those" instead of something more adventurous.
That depends on what they want to use it for, but we got an Echo Show 8 for my elderly mother in law years ago for video conferencing and she loves it. Other than video conferencing she mostly uses for voice tasks like checking the weather, setting a timer or playing music so the screen doesn't need to display any text.
If not for the need for video conferencing, she'd have been fine with an audio only device.
The last base iPad still supported on the current OS must be the 2020 version. There was a blip in the corona years, but since the iPad sales have been declining, so the amount of devices still up to date aren't that many.
Not quite, surely. It seems to have a pretty solid speaker, which an iPad can't really compare to. I've also struggled to work out how to get an old iPad to work the way my old decrepit Google Home does: digital photo frame until I interact with it, then it resets back to photo frame by itself. There are plenty of iPad photo frame apps but they're not able to automatically reset device state.
I've had a 12" iPad Pro (M1) that I am replacing with the HomeView.
After a couple years of use of trying to use the iPad exactly as you stated here (it's lived 24/7 on my kitchen island, I've realized iPadOS is not that great to use in this way).
I'll be happy to have a "dumbed down" stationary device that serves no purpose but exactly what it's intended for.
That's just me, though; I get why many others may disagree. This is just my experience of actually using it in the way in which I will be replacing it for.
Multi-user personalization is a disaster on iPadOS. Google Home basically nails it but has a lot of edge case shortcomings in that last 20%. Hopefully Apple is laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive approach.
I would love an iPad that magnetically attached over the top of this thing and immediately gave me the same multi-user OS interaction of HomeView and the bigger screen of the iPad. Which I could then take with me as needed. Seems like a few magnets and a screen-sharing function away.
But also, why in the God's hell does this thing not have wireless charging and a battery? Who in the hell has a 30W USB-C riser coming up out of the middle of their kitchen island? A) has kitchen B) has kitchen island C) has kitchen island with power D) has kitchen island with concealed power amenable to random chargers. This seems like a very bespoke audience.
Looking forward to version 3, shortly after Apple Vision Pro version 2.
I think the main thing that this does better than an ipad is voice control. Maybe you can buy an iPad dock with a speaker and a good microphone that would obviate this concern (happy to take correction if so), but if you're in the kitchen it's often nice to be able to ask it to play music or if carrots are safe for dogs to eat or whatever. It's nice not to have to use your hands when they are covered in chicken juice or whathaveyou.
The average age for first phone in the US at least is now around 8.5yrs. The kids who are capable of independently deciding to call a friend or grandma already likely have a phone.
This device screams "we came up with use cases in a conference room committee meeting" not "we're solving one problem everyone has in a new way".
First phone is very different than first touch/smart phone. Some folks just get away with a smartwatch with eSIM.
The device looks like an ipad merged with a homepod. It's not definitive, but the idea of mounting an ipad on a homepod does seem to exist in the 3D Printing world [1].
The negative effects of screen time on children's brain develop is being more and more intensely researched, and I suspect an adjustment is underway. Low-fi (LCD screens), etc can make a lot of sense.
indeed, i've had an 'old ipad' mounted to the underside of my kitchen cabinets for over a decade (I think we're on our third one) and the old ipad is pretty damn good as an airplay compatible music player, recipe lookup machine, screen for watching shows while cooking etc. Mounting it on arm is much better than having it sit on a counter.
Note amazon has a competitor to this that I tried out, the echo show. It's horrible as it just shovels advertisements at you all the time.
For the parents that are engaged with trying to solve a problem like this, it's not solved by an old iPad, because old enough iPads often can't run current apps.
I'm not sure if this is a kitchen device, maybe an edge of the kitchen device, where a desk or landline cordless phone used to be in some homes.
Apple moving into home is one thing, also people being uncertain about apple releasing new product categories is also not new.
Personally it feels like some of the features in this have been researched with the audience who will buy it (homeowners, parents, kids, etc) which are shown in the imaging as well. This can seem a little off because Apple is usually creating something for everyone and not just some.
The main thing about the screen being on a stand is a child can't be too tempted to walk aroudn with it, or touch it (guided access aside).
> it's not solved by an old iPad, because old enough iPads often can't run current apps
While I understand the sentiment, with all of the cloning using AI - it’s far more achievable to now back port an apps behavior to an older iOS version than ever before. I did this very thing for a WiFi fan app that didn’t provide an app which works on an older iOS. So I captured the API calls, grabbed some screen captures and within a few hours had a swift native app that looked and operated well enough on my old iPhone/ipad. Felt good to put some this drawer hardware back into use within the house.
I saw a post here a few weeks ago aout someone publishing a daily "newsletter" for their family of everyone's happenings and going ons.
I believe they were outputting a PDF, and my thought kind of went where yours did.
The PDF is pixels oriented for paper.. or a screen.
One way I see output is a screen is.. a screen, and there's many ways to make the pixels arrange as desired.
The thing I'd kind of still hold off on is this approach isn't for the many, which I believe Apple HomeView is. I could see sending one on a trop with kids, or putting it at family members houses just as a communicator.
Lots of ways to do it again, but it's not about that for most people. There's a reason apple sells so much, they look for creating beginners in the most approachable way possible. It's not the only, best, or exclusive way to do something, but they have an audience they serve.
I suppose there's a bit of irony here, because when the iPad was released people weren't sure what kind of niche it would fill. I mean, isn't a laptop more capable? Isn't a phone more portable?
So I don't want to rule out that it'll carve out its own niche. But I do think that they probably wanted this to be a $200 device and RAM prices prevented it. If this was cheap enough and customizable enough, it'd be...really nice to have this on the wall in the kids' bedrooms! They'd get a calendar, clock, intercom, access to music. That's actually a pretty compelling value proposition, but $300 is gonna be waaaaay outside of that for most people.
Given that even an AppleTV uses less power at maximum usage than an XBox does when it's asleep, I feel as though the power usage is not going to be too much of an issue.
It's a niche product and pretty cheap. Of course you can do everything and more on an ipad but I see this as basically a competitor to Alexa that sits on a kitchen counter and is occasionally useful. In that scenario never thinking about a battery is an advantage. I imagine you might leave this unlocked all the time and it is closer to a hands free device which is useful while cooking. The splatter thing is really only an issue if you place it like right next to your stovetop or sink. Even one foot away on a counter pretty much eliminates that issue.
It doesn't have to do a lot to be useful. If there are even a couple consistent daily use cases I can see this making sense for some people. Even if just means I don't need to go grab my iPad/iPhone from the couch to set a timer or ask a quick question.
Definitely not pretty cheap. We need to stop normalizing high prices just because we happen to be in the upper part of the k economy. It's an entire week's pay at minimum wage. To have a screen with a camera and speaker on a weighted base.
I did a very quick search for "kitchen smart hub" and a lot of the devices (including some by Amazon) were in the same price range. Even the Meta Portals were $199 to $349 when released.
Google's Nest Home is only $99, so that is likely the cheapest version from a big company.
It's not extremely cheap for an Apple product. It's the same price as all of their accessories. It's similar in price to the cheap phones they sell. Why are you trying to convince yourself this is cheap?
It's very obvious which comments are from those without kids and a busy kitchen. This hardware is built to sell apple family one subs. The multiuser is not a feature of the iPad, and this alone means an iPad can't replicate this.
As you get older you start to realise half of hot takes are a result of living in a different half of the economy which doesn't quite get things like the suburbs are appealing
As a busy person with kids and a kitchen that's always full of some "work in progress", I don't get the appeal of suburbs. Or SUVs. But that's probably because suburbanites driving with kids in their SUVs are a huge nuisance in the city proper.
The fact that people are (as you mentioned) repurposing old iPads - and Kindles - means there is demand for it.
And the real competition for these are things like the "Tuya WiFi Zigbee 8 inch Smart Home Central Control Knob Screen Zigbee Gateway Voice Switch Multi-function Light Control Panel" (yeah well at least it isn't a Sony code name I guess?)[1]
Isn’t there a safety hazard with battery swelling and such if it’s always connected to power? May be I have outdated information I unmounted the iPad after reading about it.
Limiting charging below 100% (which many tablets now support) helps, but the battery is still likely to be the component that fails before anything else.
That can be an issue with a device that is always plugged in. Or with a device that is always unplugged, resting in a drawer somewhere. Or with a device that gets used with normal charge and discharge cycles. Or with things that are carefully-managed. tl;dr, it can be an issue.
I'm still waiting for the 9.7" iPad Pro that I have to swell up. I got it used, but AFAICT the battery is 10 years old at this point. It has definitely been plugged in ~24/7 since I got it.
Sometimes, I notice that has decided it's time to discharge itself somewhat and then recharge again. I assume this is for BMS calibration or battery health or both; I just let it do its thing and it's been fine.
Meanwhile: A disused Samsung Galaxy S7's battery swelled up enough to split the case open while I had it sitting on a shelf, switched off. It was about 6 years old at that point, and I was careful to leave it at about a 60% SoC when I put it on that shelf.
I haven't had the battery well up in phone that sees daily use -- yet. I won't be surprised if/when it happens.
I’ve been through this thought process many times and I’m not comfortable leaving a device like an iPad permanently connected to AC with a battery that was never designed for that. I can just imagine ending up with a spicy pillow, except now it’s plugged into the wall all the time.
> The multiple users feature is a really neat trick, but I would kill to have this for all Apple devices. Let me hand my kid my phone and it automatically switches to kid mode!
I suspect the reason for this is that it’s not a mobile device and can afford to have the camera always on.
I wonder if the lack of apps right now is because they want their developers fully focussed on iPhone Duo support. Maybe next year they'll open up an SDK for HomeView?
The person in the TikTok put on their Scientist Halloween costume though so at least we’re getting good production value. Wouldn’t want to pour dangerous chemicals like corn syrup without gloves on!
Same timeline for me, but this was my 3rd or 4th attempt at switching. Not sure if something materially improved or maybe LLMs finally just got good enough at helping me convert.
The reason why this feature is particularly useful in vi-likes is because they are not IDEs. I hop in and out of vi all day long. Depending on the task I might create a new tab, run a command in vi, or exit vi to run it. Vi’s appeal is that it is “just” an editor and your terminal and workstation form your un-integrated development environment.
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
> I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.
i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!
Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.
Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
>everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file
Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...
FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!
>Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.
What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.
>For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.
Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
> Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup.
I am making a programming langauge and environment to address this. My target is to match the QBasic experience. A video screen capture of the old Paratrooper game running in the IDE..
We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install.
If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.
What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.
> account management is almost worse than something to install
True. Even as an adult it's tiring having to keep all my accounts sorted, and that's with a password manager.
There are a few websites that I can of off the top of my head that don't need an account or you can choose to log in through google/github: https://codepen.io, https://editor.p5js.org if that's of any use.
On a side note, in school I loved repl.it, supported ton of languages and worked despite all the blocks and filters on the school devices. Unfortunately, a few years ago they pivoted to I have no idea what, something to do with AI, but it's abysmal and such a loss. And I just found out glitch.com is also no longer a thing anymore either.
The only reason I got into programming was to cheat at video games to get a higher score than my brother. Self-motivated learning is always more impressive than mandated. Take pride in your tinkering!
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