alt Hacker NewsBy 2021, we'll have completely abandoned light switches. We'll just use an app on our phones to turn off the light in the bedroom, or perhaps request out loud for Alexa to do so. The future is the Internet of Things.
I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.
I've been using Siri (via homekit) to turn all my lights on and off for about 3 years now. It's steadily getting worse and worse as somehow, Siri is becoming less accurate and Apple is failing to adopt this new technology in a timely fashion.
I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light".
Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.