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  • HomePod on My Desk – First Look

    You know that I have a lot of gadgets at my house. So many, that at times Grace gets frustrated with all the home automation stuff. When we have our dog sitter come to stay Grace doesn’t even tell her how to talk to Siri or Alexa. Nevertheless, I have both of those assistants hanging out in my house listening to my every word.

    I grabbed one of the first HomePods that we received and set it up in my office at my house. I will definitely be bringing it back to Vermont with me. The HomePod is the best yet both in terms of the sound quality and the integration with my home. I had also tried a Google Home unit some time ago but it was so bad that I sold it on eBay.

    Let’s talk music first. I have a lot of ways to interact with my music. I have Sonos everywhere including the Alexa-enabled Play One and with their voice interface with Amazon Alexa it is easy to request music from a variety of sources. In terms of content, at this point I think that Amazon/Sonos has the broadest selection. I can get songs from Pandora, Apple Music or Spotify. I can also get content from Audible and Tune-in.

    But I have a pretty large music collection after spending hours/days digitizing all my CDs and spending a lot of money buying from the iTunes store. I also subscribe to Apple Music so I literally have access to more music than I could listen to in my life. So, what sounds the best? HomePod! It is clear to me that the HomePod has better sound quality, deeper bass and clearer sound than the Sonos Play One by a hair and it is not even close when comparing the sound to the tinny Amazon Echo. It is reggae Thursday at my office every Thursday and I just say “Hey Siri, play me some reggae” and she says “sure thing, here’s some reggae just for you”. The play list that results is tailored to me by learning what I like. I can say, “Siri, I really like this song” and she says “okay, I got it” and that helps to fine tune the music the HomePod plays for me. You can even add songs to a playlist or create a playlist by interacting with Siri.

    I can tell Siri to pause or stop if I can a call and it is instantaneous which is handy because it is not always party time at the office.

    So, with all the technology I have, when I am listening to music in my office it is HomePod now. It is not quite up to the Sonos Play 5s in my bedroom but the sound fills my office perfectly as it automatically adjusts to my room to provide me with optimal sound.

    For music I give the nod to HomePod based upon sound quality, intelligence and ease of use. I give the nod to Sonos/Amazon for the breadth of content.

    HomePod also serves as your HomeKit server. When I activated my HomePod and got it on my network, I literally had to do nothing to make it take over the HomeKit tasks. It was automatic. While I will probably still keep my AppleTV powered up you do not need an AppleTV or iPad to have remote access to your HomeKit devices.

    The integration with HomeKit makes it simple to use. I can simply say “ Hey Siri, turn on the office lights” and she does it. I can also ask her to turn the thermostat up, lock the doors or do any of the tasks that are HomeKit compatible. I also have scenes that mostly work. I say mostly because as a security feature Siri will not unlock your doors so my “good morning” scene requires my iPhone but that security feature is appreciated. I can probably figure out a workaround but I like the security. My other most used scene is “good night”. When I say “hey Siri, good night” she turns off all the lights except the one next to my bed, turns down the thermostat and locks all three doors. She then says “on it!”. I have to say that Siri’s responses are friendlier and hipper than Alexa.

    Of course, you can do much of this with Amazon Alexa but it would take multiple commands and Alexa just seems a lot finickier with names of devices. Because HomePod is connected to my network, I can also unlock (with iPhone) and lock my house in Vermont remotely.

    Getting information from Siri is pretty much the same as using Siri on your other devices. I find her answers to be more complete than Alexa but again there is more breadth to Alexa’s database. I have heard that Apple has made a bunch of new hires for Siri and I fully expect that Apple is working hard to show Alexa that she is just as smart. Artificial intelligence is just in its infancy and it is pretty exciting to see what it can do. A bit scary, too but unless we start making Terminators we should be okay.

    Later this year as Apple continues development of the HomePod you will be able to add a second HomePod to create stereo sound or use Airplay 2 to play the same music (or different music) is separate rooms. This will give Sonos a bit of competition.

    HomePod has some other tricks, too. You can receive a call on your iPhone and hand it off to the HomePod for a conference call —we might have to use HomePod in our conference room. When you receive a text, Siri can read it to you on HomePod. You can tell Siri to send texts, make shopping lists, add stuff to your calendar and I am sure this is just the start of Siri’s skills.

    After a few weeks with HomePod I can give it my full endorsement. If I had to have just one music device I would choose HomePod for its versatility, sound quality and because of how seamlessly it integrates with my other Apple devices.

  • Dear Friends,

    It’s mud season in Vermont. If you haven’t lived there on a dirt road you just won’t get it. I have seen some pictures that show roads gobbling up even the most powerful 4WD vehicles. April in Vermont is a good reason for me to stay in Key West awhile longer.

    On the other hand, friends are posting photos of crocus blooming and the daffodils won’t be far behind. There are also reports that the bears have awoken from hibernation and are once again on the search for food. Spring is in the air!

    Down here spring means iguanas. With no natural predators, the invasive iguana likes the warm weather, and the local paper is full of comments from residents wanting the city to do something about the invasion. So far, I think my pups are keeping them at bay at my house (knocking heavily on wood) but they can be real pests.

    We have received our initial inventory of the new 9.7-inch iPad and the new spring colors for Apple Watch bands, too. We also have some inventory of Apple AirPods, but they are still very constrained and could be hard to get when we are sold out. I was amazed, while sitting in South Beach at a restaurant, how popular they are as many of the people were sporting AirPods.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is the Apple Factory Refurbished silver MacBook Pro 15-inch with Touch Bar. It has the 2.9 GHz Intel i7 processor, 16GB of ram, a 512GB SSD drive, and 4GB of video ram.This unit has a 1-year Apple Warranty but we are bundling it with AppleCare+ to extend that warranty to 3-years that will provide extended free Apple tech support and up to two incidents of accidental damage (after deductible). At Apple’s online store this identical bundle would cost you $2758.98 plus tax. This week’s special for Kibbles & Bytes readers, while supply lasts is $200 off at $2558.99!

  • Solid state, not as solid as it could be?

    It’s not like there’s a much better option at the moment, SSDs are crazy fast and getting faster every year. It turns out that flash-based memory, the storage that all modern machines are coming equipped with, has it’s drawbacks like anything else. Before you all riot, I will point out that Apple and drive manufacturers have worked really hard to find the best vNAND PCIe based storage. Just like they’ve have worked to get the most reliable RAM, to the point that it’s integrated into most MLBs these days. When it comes to building these chips there is still only so much that the industry is capable of.

    Don’t get me wrong! I love Solid State storage and it’s definitely the future of our hardware in so many ways, however, I have seen a few issues here and there specifically in regards to their longevity and consistency. Though these symptoms are also just indicative of drive failure in general, I’d like to point out that many conventional rotational Hard Disk Drives or even the older more hard-coded tape backups can last for many years without any power applied to them and left on a shelf to get dusty. If you did that to an SSD, even in the slim chance it powered on again, it likely would be corrupted and have no data to access or it would experience slowness and freezing. Even with their drawbacks, the future is SSD drives. They remain more reliable and significantly faster than spinning drives. They are the new standard for internal storage, just do not get comfy having anything stored on your internal drive by itself. You will always need to have a back up no matter how reliable to drive is boasted to be. Apple encourages iCloud backup and sync along with regular time machine backups for a reason, any drive has the ability to fail, no matter how solid it is claimed to be.

    When it comes to solid-state drives the manufacturers seem to be improving and learning from past mistakes over the years. Apple has worked to integrate the SSDs into the MLB of the 2016/2017 MacBook Pros equipped with the Touch Bar and four ThunderBolt 3 ports a lot more reliable, but please don’t forget to backup! Remember, we can never say it enough, your data is not safe in only one place. All storage can fail, and expect that to happen to you at some point. Preparing means that should your drive fail, you will significantly reduce your downtime.

  • Hello, Tech Tails readers!

    Happy first Tech Tails article of the spring season! As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, spring is my favorite of all seasons. The brisky mornings, afternoon sunshine, chilly evenings and the waning and waxing temperatures certainly keeps one on their toes. And that could not ring truer than it did this past weekend. In the Burlington area, we were just shy of a 60º day on Saturday afternoon- glorious! I could not have asked for a better weekend to relocate into a new apartment. And if I may subtly pitch some of our home automation products, I am beyond excited to get my new living space decked out in Homepod and some Philips Hue bulbs and strips, for starters. I highly recommend keeping the idea of home automation in the back of your mind while you conduct your seasonal spring cleaning this year. You’re never too late to hop on the evolving home automation market. Sometimes folks will ask me, “What’s so cool about home automation?” to which I respond, “You ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s like that only without the monkeys.” After that, it’s easy to venture down the rabbit-hole and demonstrate the wide-reaching and ever-expanding utility our home automation products have. Next time you’re in a Small Dog Electronics, tell a sales associate you want to see some of the cool features our home automation products have. You won’t be disappointed! Come to think of it, if you swing by our South Burlington store, there’s a very good chance our friend Erich Sullivan is already preaching the gospel of home automation by the time you get there.

    We have some good material for you in this edition of Tech Tails courtesy of myself and our friend and fellow technician, Moses Laporte. We hope you take something away from it. As always, we’re happy to answer any questions you may have.

    Stay groovy, Tech Tails readers!

    Connor “Keep calm and open the pod bay doors, HAL” McGinnis
    connormcginnis@smalldog.com

  • Grace and I are heading up to Miami for a couple of Cubs vs. Marlins games as baseball season gets underway. Us life-long Cubs fans are looking for another title this year. Meanwhile, even though the Boston Celtics are completely decimated by injuries, they just keep winning. It is going to be an interesting spring! If the Celtics are still in it on our way to Vermont we may just have to make a detour to Boston!

    Everything seems to be growing faster as the temperatures are heating up down here. I have lemons and oranges on my trees. Of course, they will be ready when we are in VT. I might have to take a trip down just to harvest them!

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    Don & Emily

  • New iPads with Pencil Support and Better iWork, too!

    At a special education event on March 27th at a high school in Chicago, Apple introduced a new 9.7-inch iPad that offers faster performance, support for the Apple Pencil, and a few new camera-related features. The company also released new versions of the iWork apps—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—that let users draw, sketch, and write with the Apple Pencil.

    Sixth-generation iPad

    For the most part, the new sixth-generation iPad is the same as the fifth-generation model it replaces. Its physical dimensions are unchanged, so existing cases and accessories should continue to work. It comes in the same three colors: silver, gold, and space gray. Even the pricing and options remain the same, with a 32 GB model starting at $329—the jump to 128 GB adds $100, and cellular capabilities add another $130.

    What sets the sixth-generation iPad apart from its predecessor is its support for the Apple Pencil stylus, which was previously restricted to the iPad Pro line, which started at $649. Thanks to a high-resolution touch sensor in the iPad’s Retina screen and palm-rejection technology, you can now use the $99 Apple Pencil with compatible apps. As with the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil is sensitive to pressure and tilt so you can vary line weight and shading, much as with a traditional pencil.

    Also new in the sixth-generation iPad is Apple’s A10 Fusion chip, with its embedded M10 coprocessor. The company claims that the new processors provide up to 40-percent faster CPU and 50-percent faster graphics performance.

    The extra performance may also be related to the iPad’s new camera capabilities. Unlike the previous iPad, the sixth-generation iPad can take Live Photos and supports body detection in images along with the previously supported face detection. Also new is support for the Retina Flash feature that turns the screen into a giant flash when taking selfies.

    iWork with Apple Pencil Support

    If you haven’t been using Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on the iPad, the latest updates may encourage you to try Apple’s iWork apps—remember, they are available for free in the App Store. Notably, the three apps allow you to draw, sketch, and write directly within documents. Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s Smart Annotations feature, currently in beta. With it, your comments and proofing marks anchor dynamically to text, and stay with the text they were attached to even as the document changes.

    Smart Annotations are particularly welcome for those who take advantage of the real-time collaboration features built into the iWork apps. This was an education event, and it’s clear that Apple is building tools that will allow teachers to mark up and comment on student documents. But the same capabilities are equally as useful in the business world. For business users, Apple also announced that the real-time collaboration features in the iWork apps now work on documents stored in the Box file sharing service. Previously they were available only for documents stored in iCloud, which has little adoption in the enterprise.

    Finally, the iPad version of Pages gains features that help users create ebooks in EPUB format. Apple also added a new Presenter mode to Pages, which lets you turn your iPhone or iPad into a teleprompter for distraction-free reading.

    In the end, if you’re interested in using the Apple Pencil, the combination of the sixth-generation iPad and the updated iWork apps will let you do more for over $300 less than before with the iPad Pro.

  • Dear Friends,

    The road trip to New Orleans had its ups and downs but we loved the Big Easy and spent some time listening to great music and consuming adult beverages. The Celtics game was a bit of a disappointment as the injury-ravaged team lost that game before heading out on a 4-game win streak out west.

    The Apple announcements this week were great. I especially like all the software and tools that Apple has developed for educators. Education has long been a focus for Apple and lately they have been losing some ground to the Chrome books and their ilk. But, I really think that these new tools are compelling and that iPads, especially the new 6th Generation iPad with Pencil support, will be THE new tool in the best school districts.

    In addition to the new iPads Apple has also introduced the Space Gray versions of the Magic Mouse, Keyboard and Trackpad. They have also released some new colors on iPad cases and a slew of new spring colors for watch bands.

    I was so moved by the March for Our Lives and the incredibly articulate speeches given by high school students begging for our help. It really boils down to our children asking for our help to not get shot in school or on the street. Seems like a sorta reasonable request. These kids inspire me and I believe will change our world!

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive is a fantastic bundle! It starts out with the Apple Factory Refurbished MacBook Pro 13-inch w/Touch Bar 3.1GHz i5 Dual Core 8GB/512GB in Space Gray. This unit has a 1-year Apple Warranty but we are bundling it with AppleCare+ to extend that warranty to 3-years to provide extended free Apple tech support and up to two incidents of accidental damage (after deductible). To make this deal even better, while supplies last, we will include a pair of Apple’s wildly popular AirPods with each of these MacBook Pros. All this at a savings of $150 for Kibbles readers – your cost for this bundle is only $1977.77!