WTimberman

What I'd really like to do with HomePods, apart from playing music on them, is to use a pair of them as TV speakers for an Apple TV setup. It's always seemed a waste to me to need two sound systems in my living room, one for music playback, and one for the TV. I realize that for audiophiles, and for home cinema fans, having two speaker systems, whether or not they're fed from the same receiver/amp, is the way to go, but for ordinary mortals like me, having one reasonably high-quality speaker pair serving both use-cases would be pretty compelling.

I can understand Neil's dyspeptic stance in this review, and also his exasperated replies to commenters who can't seem to grasp what the problem is here. Whatever we geeks would like to think, these bugs are genuine showstoppers for what is now Apple's principal market, i.e. the non-tech-savvy consumer. On the other hand, I remember how long it took Microsoft to get a handle on the fact that the built-in insecurities in Windows XP threatened a predictable computing apocalypse.

The level of complexity in modern software, operating not only locally, but across the distributed computing environment of the modern Internet, is literally mind-boggling. In the future, AI may help keep the cart from outrunning the horse -- assuming we can effectively monitor what AI is up to with its self-governing heuristics -- but in the meantime, pieces like Neil's will help keep the major players' feet to the fire. The truth is, we're all in too deep to back out now, so getting it right is mission-critical for all of us, regardless of our level of tech-savvy.