There were plenty of concerns which the leadership ignored "together".

Only if a "quality ombudsman" had power of veto over the C-suite's decision-making would this calm the customer base.

My suspension on purchasing more Sonos products remains unchanged on this news. I still can't search my music library for music: that's an automatic no-go, and worse: that functionality appears to be forever blocked given Sonos' switch to the cloud.

The problem is that some fundamental features were lost and still not recovered.

Probably the most egregious is that when the new app came out, local music libraries — the original bread & butter of Sonos, the feature that many homes built out their entire speaker system for — dropped out of sight for many people, without warning.

Even today, three months after release, you can't search your local libraries!

And that's just one problem, but it established the impression that Sonos was quietly about to change completely, truly make a break with the past.

For a company with the continuity reputation of Sonos, this must've particularly shocked the customers who had built whole-home systems with their products. After all what makes Sonos special if they could change their entire strategy on a whim?

That makes them no different from Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., and that revelation has apparently iced new product purchases.

The change has to come from the top. There's a limit to what you can accomplish from below, as far as quality-related metrics go.

The reason this case is interesting to me is that Apple is just a poster child for what all companies do: protect their IP.

So I'm hoping it has widespread implications, but I keep worrying the hypocrisy is going to sink the suit anyway.

For example, to take your points one-by-one:

- Applications don't have to talk to each other. Can WhatsApp send a text message?

- While I was also amused that the EU spent that much effort only to realize Apple was already well on its way to switching to USB-C anyway, the fact remains that I as an Apple user am now having to deal with yet another accessory system change. I imagine that was the overriding consideration at Apple for deliberately transitioning to USB-C, not sticking it up to Android users. You think MagSafe, Lightning, etc not being available to Android users is bad ... think about Lightning devices not being available to Apple users anymore. (Dongle doesn't count, because ... come on). And MagSafe is now available as Qi2 anyway.

- The success of Airpods Pro tells me its features and sound quality achieved what Apple intended: wide adoption despite sound quality that, admittedly subjectively, was not technically "audiophile". Even my higher-quality Audio-Technica headset are now USB anyway, because they work far more consistently and with fewer accessories than via 3.5mm jacks. Maybe podcasters will forever hate Apple — although the ATH-M50xSTS is pretty damned good — but consumers are hardly being forced to use Bluetooth headsets: they clearly prefer it. In the meantime, one less hole to get lint into.

I love that Apple is slowly being forced to open their standards, but I wonder whether criticizing it for creating walled gardens won't have ironic consequences as less-popular competitors realize they're doing the same thing to others as well ....

Scientists had to change the names of genes in order for Excel not to convert them to dates by default. SCIENTISTS.

Why is Facebook and Microsoft surprised they have to wait for Apple to decide whether they want to allow 3rd-party gaming platforms on iOS?

The fact Facebook even attempted to quote statistics ("95% of activity involves watching streams") despite the obvious intent of the app's name ("Facebook Gaming") just indicates they know exactly what's going on but are telling their PR to say something else.

So I give zero fracks what FB and MS are whining about. I imagine Apple gives less than zero fracks, if that were possible.

While it's true that we are likely under surveillance by someone's camera, we have a patchwork of hardware and software, at least in the US.

It's not like in the UK where the word "CCTV" universally implies centralized police surveillance of the public.

However, Amazon's Ring cameras may be the first to gain widespread popularity to the point it does indeed become the "CCTV" of the US. And then all of a sudden the fact the data is owned by an opaque private company and not by the public (even in limited capacity by law enforcement) becomes a serious issue. ...

There is a big difference between regulating experimental emergent technology and trying to turn the clock back. Most of us clearly have no problem with the former. We must be vigilant about the latter.

> Because you want to copyright it and protect your IP. Just in case.

I assume by "IP" you mean "inner planets"?

Yes, I definitely agree that it wasn't "political" on the parents' part. To have described it so is a real slant at the genuine troubles parents of young children would have faced in terms of their own livelihoods had the new startup times gone into effect.

Rather, it became political by definition at the very *beginning* when Boston told MIT they wanted to reduce costs and have a later start basically just for the high schools — in particular, the highly desirous Boston Latin school.

Backing up: Boston is one of the rare (or maybe only?) school districts forced by law to desegregate their schools by randomizing school assignments. Recent reports show it is *dramatically* failing even so, mostly because the lottery system was so stressful for parents that many (mostly white) families ended up moving out of Boston or putting their kids in parochial schools.

Many of these same families then send their kids to Boston Latin exam school (if they get in), sometimes by "re-establishing residence" in Boston. Consequently, these families only care about the Boston public school system for its high schools, which are consequently far more wealthy and white than the lower grades.

So you see: Boston never asked MIT to see what they could have done better with the *existing* budget. They didn't ask MIT to watch out for parents' work schedules when daycare figured heavily into their children's lives — when so much of the student population are from low-income families.

They basically only listened to a certain slice of taxpayers (I speak euphemistically). It was political from the start, in the worst possible way.

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Part of the reason the lottery was stressful — the other is rank racism — is because a bus route could theoretically put a young child on a 1hr+ bus ride to the other side of town. To make randomized school assignment work requires dedicated bus lanes and a lot more buses and drivers. So we should not only be spending MORE money on busing, but we should be MORE EFFICIENT with the money we have allocated to it.

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Final word: it's perhaps a perfect stereotype that MIT engineers were oblivious to the human element. They did have the sincerity and grace of accepting that they missed that crucial aspect in their calculations. They made a terrible mistake (by not seeing the basic flaw in their results without having it pointed out to them), but they didn't become defensive. Rather, I feel the city itself failed its people.

"37 Swedish Women Learn About Statistics For The First Time".

I once had a friend and colleague who would point out the window and ask "does *that* look like 30% chance of rain to you?!" Not sure whether he ever planned to start a family or not, but my guess is he's ripe for an "accident".

Just as Apple's indirect presence at CES was never relevant, so is anyone else's. For example, I still have yet to encounter someone who uses voice control as the dominant control for *any* activity. I know many people who own Echos, Echo Dots, Ecobee with Alexa, Sonos One, etc yet none of them have admitted using Alexa other than for amusement purposes, and then only if they're situationally forced to (e.g. calling someone in a car).

Similarly, the vast majority of Apple users I know don't use any accessories on a mandatory basis except for cases and apps. Neither of those are very interesting anymore, although they remain dominant members of the Apple ecosystem.

That ghostly sound you might hear is just the volume of the crowd trying to hawk their wares. Pay them as much or as little mind as you like — just like you might have in the past.

The Russians are total amateurs. This is how you do world-class incompetence.

Yes, if you got REALLY lucky, you might save money in the long term.

The history of government technology overhauls should indicate quite vividly that you not only spend tear-jerking amounts of money to upgrade your systems, you also spend a lot of time thereafter fixing it or throwing it all away and starting over again.

So I can't decide whether Mr. "The Cybers" man doesn't understand anything about technology, or he understands it so well that he is willing to lie to the American taxpayer about savings when what he actually means is to pump money into the (already wildly successful) technology sector. Either way, I wonder what his blue-collar supporters think about that ....

Why is it being reported as news now?

I dare say the ones who fall hardest for this scam are the ones who definitely don't have an accountant. Don't be ludicrous.

> Even worse, the tool claimed to not store the passwords, but an acute observer found they were actually being inputted into a Google Docs spreadsheet.

I dunno, I thought he was kind of ugly.

Ohhhh, you mean *obtuse*? Sorry.