tell it to add Stuff to your shopping list and Stuff is added to the shopping list on your phone

This is the killer feature* for our house, since our shopping list is also synced across mine and Mrs Tortoise’s phones.

*possibly a slight exaggeration. Just

But you have to have the skill loaded.

It does quite a bit of stuff out of the box without additional skills. You don’t need a weather skill for it to tell you the local weather for instance, nor a radio skill for it to play the radio.

:lol: I knew I shouldn’t have brought e-bikes into it #ShouldHaveKnownBetter

Very simply Alexa allows us to ask for something to be done instead of having to physically do it. Having stood at the sink washing up (and hence having wet hands), being able to ask what the weather’s doing tomorrow, or put the radio on, or play some music or turn the lights on/up/blue is hugely more convenient and – dare I say it – more natural than drying my hands and pressing some buttons somewhere. Alexa is catering for very natural human conversational instincts. I would urge everyone to at least try one in their house for a few days.

… but I wasn’t sold.

I think these Echo devices are a bit like e-bikes. People don’t get them and aren’t sold on them, then they try them and love them.

(tenuous comparison, I know)

The music playback requires Prime, or something.

Prime (or Amazon Music Unlimited as I think it’s called) or Spotify are currently supported by Alexa…

BUT

…if you have bought music (CDs, vinyl, MP3s) from Amazon it can also be played via Alexa. Note it’s also a bluetooth speaker, so in a very roundabout way you could control your Apple Music library via Siri on your iPhone, but get it playing via the Echo speaker. I can vouch for that not being terribly effective or convenient though :lol:

I recently bought an Echo and use it to:

1. Turn on the radio (just by asking)
2. Check the weather forecast (just by asking)
3. Add stuff to my shopping list (just by asking)
4. Play stuff from my music library (just by asking)

If that’s all it did I’d be happy at the £99 I paid for a “smart speaker”, but the fact it will soon allow making/receiving of calls and messages (just by asking) makes it a bargain. I was surprised by how much I (still) love it.

I’d be asking myself whether the need for faster broadband now is worth the additional cost, as opposed to waiting. For example, if you work at home and are regularly struggling with poor internet speed, it might be worth taking the hit to escape your current contract. If this is just so that you can stream 4K TV instead of “just” SD, it’s perhaps a luxury you can wait for.

Kids get bored of stuff

You could be right. Interestingly, our boys will sit quite captivated by The Adventures of Abney & Teal if it comes on, even if they don’t actively go looking to watch it. There’s something pleasantly calming about it.

There’s some interesting ideas in this thread. I sometimes wonder why my boys stopped enjoying watching (and listening to the soundtrack of) Frozen. They used to love it. I can’t see how Mrs Stilltortoise and I influenced them into not liking it (we quite enjoy it!), but at some stage they decided it was “not cool”. I’d put money on that coming from their peers at school. Is that a boy/girl thing or is it simply that “Frozen is for kids”.

Had mixed experiences with Do Not Disturb whilst driving. It seems to disable some of Siri’s interactions. For instance I can still invoke Siri and say “navigate home”, but the map doesn’t open. To use the map you have to unlock the phone and do it all manually, which seems to defeat the purpose of DND whilst driving. Need to experiment some more. Might be doing something wrong. I like the idea.

Nice little feature is the ability to take a screenshot (not new), but then immediately be able to annotate, edit and mark it up (new). Might be helpful for explaining “how to” on here ;-)

Well, bugger me. I don’t know whether Apple are now Apple to do “over the air” patches, but my Airplay devices have magically reappeared, including the Airport Express that went missing immediately after the iOS11 update. I’ve not touched my iPhone or fiddled with my network since talking to Apple about this, but somehow it’s working again. That’s weird. Good, but weird.

Please keep updated

Been in touch with Apple. Despite being very helpful, they couldn’t resolve it and it’s gone to the engineering team. During the troubleshooting process I’ve lost Airplay facility to ALL my devices, as opposed to just the Airport Express, so even less happy now :-( My phone doesn’t even see my Apple TV now or my hi-fi, never mind the Airport Express!

On a positive note, their support is very good and I hadn’t expected this much attention from them.

Mini PSA: crappy iOS 11 “feature”

Since upgrading to iOS 11 I can’t Airplay to my Airport Express (hooked up to some speakers via 3.5mm jack). This is a big hairy PITA. What little I can find on the internet suggest AirPlay 2 is not supported in Apple hardware like the Airport Express. Hope I’m wrong.
:evil:

Just upgraded. Work Office 365 looks to be working OK (I can forward and reply) and I have all the new goodies on the Notes app referred to above. I’m on an iPhone 6.

Files app is underwhelming, but probably because I already had the (old) iCloud app that did a very similar thing.

What other stuff should I be getting excited about? :-)

In terms of sound quality, it’s not quite as rich and deep a sound as the £99 Sony dock speaker it has replaced in my kitchen, but that was a very basic speaker dock and nowt else. The Echo is “good enough” for kitchen duty and has all the Smart stuff too. For that reason I think £99 is good value.

[edit] – it goes surprisingly loud for little device, but it’s not a full nor deep sound; physics doesn’t allow that. I still think Apple have a niche to fill with a high(er) quality smart speaker for those with deep pockets.

Picked up my Echo last night so have had a bit of a play. Overall, I love it (as do the kids). I learnt some (good) stuff I wasn’t expecting, so let me share. Apologies if you know all of this.

– It plays music that I’ve purchased over the years from Amazon. Might sound obvious, but I had assumed I’d need an Amazon Music subscription to do this. OK, so it’s hardly 40 million songs, but it’s all the CDs and MP3s i’ve bought from my pre-streaming days. Bonus :-)

– Coming into the kitchen in the morning and saying “Alexa, play Radio 2” will save me – literally – minutes every week compared to the old way I did it with iPhones, bluetooth speakers etc. You’ll be surprised how such a small thing makes me a happier person :lol:

– It’s a bluetooth speaker. Again, probably obvious to most. One of the reasons I’ve hesitated buying an Echo is that I subscribe to Apple Music and it has no integration with that. I can, however, Bluetooth Apple Music from my Apple devices, so it’s not as bad as I thought.

– £99 is a bargain for a smart bluetooth speaker

On the downsides, the default TuneIn radio app drops the audio far too often. It did that on my iPhone too, and it seems a common problem with TuneIn rather than the Echo.

“What does that skinny road bike have that I don’t? :cry: ”

Thanks Drac. I’ve cancelled my order and ordered it from Argos instead. Picking it up later :-)

death of vinyl

Someone tell HMV; they seem to be filling their display racks back up with vinyl

Call me judgemental, but I think someone who chucks out a perfectly good <insert object that relies on consumerism to sell> that works fine and does everything they need, then spanks the best part of a grand on a new one, purely because they want everyone to notice, is a pretty awful human being. is pretty fundamental to consumerism.

FTFY

Or a really nice one with money to spare.

^this. Why don’t we assume the best about people first, rather than assume the worst?

if I get a new phone I don’t want to have to explain to everyone that I have – they should know by looking at it.

I know some of us scoffed at this comment, but it’s a fair one. Loads of us – right here on this thread – are largely underwhelmed and unexcited by this new iPhone. As a few have said, most of us are more than happy with what our phones do nowadays. If you’re happy with the function of your current phone, what else could persuade you to upgrade?

The look and design of the phone.

Apple keep releasing a new phone that looks just like the old one. That’s a huge reason *not* to upgrade. If you spent £4000 on your latest Santa Cruz you’d want it to look different from your old one, no?

People are shallow. People want their new toys to look like new toys, not look like the old toy they’ve just replaced. This stinks of Tim Cook focusing too much on manufacturing economies of scale and basically selling the same physical form factor at different price points.

(Yes, I realise the iPhone X looks different, but the point is valid for the 8 )

Good tip thanks Graham^

Only 13 for me, and only one of those might cause me a problem; the rest are all games I rarely, if ever, play. Be good to have an excuse to delete them ;-)

@doris5000 – check out Yoink on the Mac app store. It’s a great (free) little app that makes dragging and dropping files around really easy. It would have helped in the scenario above because you would not have had to drop the file on the desktop and then delete it after.

You can tell Apple are gearing up to sell us some new stuff, cos all my old stuff starts playing up :?

– Headphone jack playing up? Check
– iMac on a general go-slow? Check
– iPhone on a general go-slow? Check
– AirDrop not working? Check (although to be fair, I’ve never got this working)

Apple. It just works. Until it doesn’t.

I know the whole (lack of) headphone-jack thing has been done to death, but it continues to surprise me that some people can’t accept that it is a problem for many others. #FirstWorldProblem, granted, but the point is it’s an introduced inconvenience that wasn’t there before. They can be the most irritating of all.

Be interesting if a similar thing happens tomorrow if/when they remove Touch ID on the new phones.

Interesting comments from oikeith which got me thinking. Apple has always had a “walled garden” approach to doing things. When I first climbed into Apple’s ecosystem – despite some initial learning pains – I found it absolutely brilliant. It “just worked” and the hardware was fab too.

Apple’s problem is that what people want and expect from their tech has moved on and Apple have not kept up. I find myself looking on enviably at the tech available outside Apple’s ecosystem. The HomePod will go some way to fill that big gap, but it’s an expensive solution to only part of the problem. I get closer every day to defecting to Spotify from Apple Music and buying myself an Echo.

This thread has started early. I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow evening ;-)

As always, I’m excited to see what they announce, but I’m not expecting any big surprises. The rumour-mill seems to be well on top of Apple’s plans these days. The biggest surprise will be if they *don’t* announce one of the rumoured new features. Tim Cook, tomorrow:

“I bet you thought we were bringing facial recognition to our best ever iPhone. WE’RE NOT! :-P ”

I get the impression – from dipping in and out of this thread – that some people aren’t taking this very seriously :lol:

If you’re planning on showing a 12 or 15 cert film to a bunch of 8 years olds, clear it with their parents first

Incredibly sensible advice there.

Hollinsclough is on my to do list…Can it be incorporated into a decent loop…?

Therein lies the problem and the simple answer is no. That’s not to say you shouldn’t get over there and have a go. The descents are tough, challenging and ultimately rewarding, but it’s not easy to create a classic loop out of them. Part of the problem is that there is such a high concentration of descents in a small area, so unless you session them, you end up riding/pushing up what would be a great descent to get to the next descent.

The VG White Peak guide has a reasonable loop but it has too much road and/or grassy slog. I recommend just having a play, push back up, have another play on another descent etc…

Bear in mind Swan Rake and Limer Rake – the two that end in the centre of the village – are officially closed.

Whatever pronunciation comes out of my mouth first. I’ve pronounced it both ways for as long as I can remember, for some odd reason.

Loads of good descents, all for different reasons. I really have no idea what my favourite is. I do prefer either fast, poppy and swoopy or proper-line-choice-is-essential descents, rather than loose and rocky, straight-line let-the-suspension-soak-it-up descents.

We watched The Little Prince on Netflix at the weekend. My boys are 3, 8 and 10. They all loved it. It’s quite a chilled film, so could be perfect for winding 11 8 year olds down instead of up.

Don’t know if someone has already mentioned these guys, but their “one bike” range looks very interesting…and expensive. Getting great reviews.

https://opencycle.com/up

On a serious note, this is one of those First World Problems that I struggle with more and more each year. It’s just such a waste in so many ways :-(

I’d gratefully receive experiences if someone must buy me a present, be that a meal out, some bike coaching, a track day to learn how to drift (hint hint) or even just some babysitting so the wife and I can go out. I don’t need more stuff though and, if I do, I’m pretty picky about what I want.

A few years previous I got a tacky revolving plastic chrome spice rack thing, I tried to ride it out, my mouth said “that’s lovely thank you” my face however said “HOW **** DARE YOU, I DO ALL THE COOKING IN THIS HOUSE BECAUSE NO OTHER **** WILL, IT’S NOT SOMETHING I ENJOY, IT’S A **** CHORE I COULD DO WITHOUT, IN FACT A MUCH BETTER GIFT WOULD BE SOMEONE, ANYONE, JUST ONCE, SAYING “DAD / HUSBAND – I KNOW YOU’RE KNACKERED FROM WORK AND YOU DO SO, SO MUCH FOR US, TONIGHT I’LL COOK, IT WON’T BE AS GOOD AS YOURS, BUT YOU’LL GET 30 MINS TO YOURSELF” JUST ONCE – I THINK I MAY WEEP WITH JOY AT THAT, BUT NO, YOU GET ME THiS SHITTY PLASTIC VERSION OF “TRY HARDER””.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

You will have a fab time mcnultycop. Ignore the miserable cynics :-)

Can’t hear that one ^^ as I’m at work, but for mixes of Primal Scream’s Loaded it will be going some (imho) to touch Terry Farley’s one

It was more the point that Loaded itself is a remix of Primal Scream’s earlier song, I’m Losing More Than I Ever Had

Best remix you say?