> the rest of the market wasn't interested enough to pay the price premium.
Would love a Toyota EV but usually for significantly less I can get a Toyota hybrid with more space. Both my partner's and my vehicles are Toyota hybrid crossovers but we looked for an EV first and realized we simply couldn't justify the extreme price difference for how little our cars are driven. Really hoping when our time for a new vehicle comes we can trade in both for one reasonably priced EV crossover - so hopefully the rest of the planet can continue pushing the EV market forward while the US lags way behind.
Yeah Toyota's PHEVs are quite nice, but the price premium is too much. It basically makes no sense unless you can charge for free at work, and even then you'd have to drive 50,000 miles before it pays off. If you're like most of us and you pay for electricity at home, the inflection point is even further out. How many people even keep cars for that long anymore?
Personally I think people should start taking them personally to court via class action lawsuits. Prison would be a bonus, but crushing them financially would be the most effective.
There really is a limit to what smart devices a house "needs" vs what is absolutely unnecessary. Fridges, washers, dryers and stoves absolutely do not need to be smart. Smart lights, smart locks, smart garage doors and security systems (if those can be considered smart in this context) are all chill in my opinion, but the rest I simply don't understand the "why" of the product. Smart tvs were a decent idea, but that clearly went to shit quickly and now dumb tvs aren't even available anymore in styles like OLED - which is extremely frustrating.
There are definitely some uses for a washer and drier with "smart" capabilities. Just alerting me when the program is done so I can put the next load is great. The cycles are not "fixed time" anymore, they all weigh the load and end up variable.
I could do without them, and it's not the end of the world if the laundry stayed 20m or 1h longer in the drum. It's practical, and hopefully not a critical feature of the internal board. One could argue if alerting is really a "smart" feature either.
I don't want any of those except security. Especially not the updating lightbulbs. Even security has its problems, but at least there's a need for it to be smart.
Smart lights are pretty darn nice. Having all exterior lights come on every sunset and turn off every sunrise is stellar - and that's not even getting into the great setup I have indoors.
So far after using agents and having built an agent, the "AI will destroy humanity" argument seems to be a marketing ploy so these companies that lied about LLM's capabilities and received billions in investments can artificially "slow down progress" after running into some serious limitations. I'm not expert and won't claim to be, but that just sounds like the reality at the moment. Will AI cause some serious harm to the job market and cause more wealth disparity though? So far all signs point to yes.
Or is it to lobby for restrictive rules on AI research that only the largest firms can hope to comply with? And "only coincidentally" ends up outlawing open source / open weight / import of overseas AI models?
What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
Old reddit is still around but reddit's leadership made statements lately suggesting we should expect old reddit to start sunsetting. For me, old reddit constantly flips to the crappy new reddit and within the 10-20 minutes/2-3 days I spend looking at it I have to manually revert my preference back to see old reddit maybe twice a week - despite old reddit already being set as the preference. To me, that signals they want users on new reddit, which I dislike, so I'd actually just leave the site entirely without old reddit. It's already gone severely down hill in the last 5 or so years to the point I barely use it.
New Reddit is literally unusable for me. And I mean actually literal.
Anytime an image is opened in new Reddit I have a 50% chance of not being able to back out of the page without it immediately redirecting back to the image and then locking the whole tab. I’m not even able to enter a different site into the url bar, I have to kill the tab and open a new one.
Even logged in old.reddit is worse than logged out as it recalculates the post order after hitting back from a post instead of just giving me the same fucking page I was on.
I don’t know what Reddit plan is, or their business model going forward if users can’t actually use it.
Although I did notice today they’ve added games so I guess they might be going for ad revenue on that like news sites have done in recent years.
Hyperbole is Apple’s favorite communication style, but at this point it’s so overused that it’s just a meaningless meme. Apple’s wearable competitors blow the Apple Watch’s battery life out of the water and it’s not even close. Hyperbole is all Apple has in this race.
I’ve had a previous Apple Watch Ultra, it was nice but after playing with it for a while I used it for notifications and working out. I have a Garmin Epix Pro Gen 2 51mm that will do 31 days of being just a smartwatch and can track my multi day cycling trips. The real killer feature I didn’t know I needed until I had it is a proper led torch on my watch, the light up screen on the Apple Watch doesn’t compare.
I need to see receipts on this claim. 31 days as just a smartwatch would be a stretch. Tracking activities also during that time, based on my experience with many, many Garmin watches, would be a bridge too far. My EpixG2 will last 7-10 days, with 1.5-2 hours of daily workouts during that span. I have most power hungry features turned off, like always on display, pulseox monitor etc.
In any case, it’s longer than the AWU by a long way.
Blows them away? I haven't seen anything that is not just one or two features that other watches don't have. But all the.features require the watch to be on.
Data accuracy most certainly is not in relation to GPS which often cuts distances on the Apple Watch.
To be pedantic it's not just GPS anymore. Newer smartwatches from Apple and competitors generally support multiple GNSS constellations including GPS (USA), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), Beidou (China), and QZSS (Japan). Some devices also support multi-band GPS which further increases accuracy in areas with degraded satellite signals, although at the cost of higher power usage.
Tracking performance on the previous Apple Watch Ultra 3 was "solid" in an independent test. A little worse than competitors in some activities, a little better in others.
People like to complain about the GPS but I use it when running and it'll easily show me what side of the path I was on at any given point. And the path distance matches precisely with other sources of truth. Maybe there was a time when Garmin had an advantage on some of their watches but I am far from convinced that this has been true anytime in the past few years.
> With fast charging, battery life hasn't been an issue
I sold my 10 last year and haven’t missed it. You don’t have reasonable access to a charger during a marathon or a long hike, the latter of which needed me to charge my Apple Watch 3 times over the course of 12 hours of hiking.
I regularly do long races like marathons and 20 mile trail races and have never had to charge my watch during those events and I am often even streaming music/podcasts from the watch. With an Ultra you should be able to easily do a 12 hour hike.
Marathons and 20 mile trail races are not remotely long. A thru hiking day is usually about as long as the available daylight hours, so 16 hours in summer. A 100K race typically falls in the 10 to 20 hour range, depending on the terrain and the personal fitness. A 100 miler is usually over 30 hours for sub elites. An entry level Coros watch can handle all of these, there is no need to bring up premium priced Garmins, and certainly not much justification for the Apple Watch Ultra.
I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Despite tons of people buying outdoor watches, these people are minorities, so Apple shouldn't prioritize them? An $800 watch that does what an entry level watch is capable of is considered a technological feat? Apple just shouldn't put a bigger battery in normal Apple Watches, and people who want longer battery life should just spend twice as much to get an Ultra?
Apple doesn't generally make products that are for 100% of the market and focuses on specific market segments that it thinks it can make a compelling product. The $800 watch actually does more than what the $1200 Garmin does once you look at all the features available and has enough battery life to cover doing a 100-mile race.
In the end, what I am arguing is that Apple provides a different set of features and provides battery life in the Ultra that covers the needs of most people going outdoors for multiple days. For everyone else, there are plenty of other options available.
Meanwhile Coros Pace 4, a 200 dollar watch, has 40 hours of GPS tracking and offline map. I simply can not understand the pricing strategy of Apple. Do they really expect people who are serious about endurance sports and training to get their ridiculously expensive Ultra? Or they are just fine with Garmin taking the biggest chunk of this market?
The Garmin Forerunner 970 is only $50 cheaper than the Ultra. Then, the Garmin Fenix 9 is more expensive than the Ultra and doesn't have cellular and charges significantly extra for the satellite connectivity.
My Fenix 7 has ~12 days of life, while using it every day for fitness tracking, maps, the occasional LED flashlight, etc. It also is at least IME much more of a beast than an (admittedly older gen) Ultra. I charge before I leave, then spend a week or more living out of backpack and sleeping on the ground. I very much want to go back to Apple Watch but Garmin battery life and durability is just so much better for my use case.
Few people spend a week or more living out of a backpack. The ultra 4 is rated to do 84 hours in low power mode and 45 in workout mode. Few people are going to max that out and those people probably aren’t interested in an Apple Watch and have other priorities.
Funny this was downvoted: I was thinking the same as I was reading this thread.
True mass market means optimizing your product for the fat part of the population bell curve. This is some point or region in a space of { cost, features, use cases, durability }. The Apple Watch works for everyone from a stay at home parent, stocker at the supermarket, executive, and so on. If you work in a machine shop or spend a few hours every day working out it may not be for you.
There’s a marginal but valuable exception: think of prosumer cameras. There are indeed pros, and the feature set is good enough for some of them to shoot with a prosumer camera (any actual pro can shoot better photos with an instamatic than I can with a phone, much less an SLR). But most people buy the high end aspirationally. Why not? That penumbra pulls more people in who really need the plain old features.
And anyway once you really are at the high end your needs can be idiosyncratic.
Well no, they made the Ultra for very rich people who do long hikes or similar. For most of us, a smart watch isn't so important that the increase in price is worth it, even if we're annoyed by the battery life of the non-Ultra watch which is too poor for any kind of day-long activity.
No one that does this with any regularity or seriousness uses an Apple Watch, they go with Garmin or one of the real fitness watches that can claim battery life in weeks and even months. My Fenix 8 charges once every 26-29 days. I left Apple Watch and never looked back. It's just an inferior product in every possible way.
Guess it depends. I do trail races (usually 25k and 20-milers) and marathons regularly, and Apple Watch has worked just fine for me and has a lot of other features that I use regularly that are largely not available on Garmin. I also prefer the map app I use on my Apple Watch compared to what my partner uses on his Garmin.
I'm very close to selling my S10. I barely use it. All the features are sort of nice to have. The only one I really care about is heart rate monitoring during exercise and the AirPods Pro 3 do that.
Did a long bike ride recently and just used my iPhone to track the workout. Probably suboptimal, since it doesn't have all the heart rate stuff, but it gets the big picture (elevation gain, speed, distance).
Would love a Toyota EV but usually for significantly less I can get a Toyota hybrid with more space. Both my partner's and my vehicles are Toyota hybrid crossovers but we looked for an EV first and realized we simply couldn't justify the extreme price difference for how little our cars are driven. Really hoping when our time for a new vehicle comes we can trade in both for one reasonably priced EV crossover - so hopefully the rest of the planet can continue pushing the EV market forward while the US lags way behind.
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