So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web

So Siri is mediocre at best, we also probably agree. Lots of things to complain about… how Siri works inconsistently across devices, punts most queries to a web search, etc. I appreciate that they aren’t overbuilding Siri though. Alexa (which recent experienced an unfortunate gutting vis layoffs) was amazons attempt to build a consumer ecosystem, which meant a lot of crappy features no one uses (notifications?). Siri feels like it definitively lives on that device and is just a fancy hands-free control. No extraneous feature creep in an attempt to build out a platform. Apple resisted a lot of opportunities to grow Siri while Alexa et al dramatically increased headcount and features, and it seems that voice assistants never really caught on as a general purpose tool. I imagine smarthome/weather/music still dominates all queries by a huge margin. I still don’t know why anyone would buy a $300 HomePod. As the owner of two original HomePods, they’re fine. This one looks like it has less speakers in it, but I assume it sounds comparably good. If you want good sound I assume you’d be buying a Sonos or something more versatile, but this is an equal but apple-loving choice. The real pro is that it sounds like it has a removable cable. I still want a screen-based apple smart speaker. Smart speaker+clock is a sweet spot in terms of usability, and the Google home I’ve been loving. It gets you some richer visual for that 1% of queries that benefit, and a glanceable clock for the rest of the time. I can’t imagine apple making a UI that is one-off though. Hopefully the iPad goes the way of the pixel tablet