177: ‘Surface Curious’ With Rene Ritchie

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Rene Ritchie returns to the show. Topics include Siri vs. Alexa, and whether Wynn Las Vegas’s announcement that they’re putting Amazon Echos into their 4,700+ guest rooms is a sign that Amazon is building a meaningful long-term lead in the nascent voice assistant market; Mark Gurman’s week-ago piece for Bloomberg, “How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists”; Consumer Reports’s bizarre but widely-publicized battery test results for the new MacBook Pros; and a brief year in review look at our favorite new Apple products from 2016.

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Links:

• Super Mario Run only needs to be purchased once per iTunes account for use on multiple devices, but can only be played on one device (per iTunes account) at a time.
• Wynn Las Vegas is going to put Amazon Echos in its 4,700+ hotel rooms.
• Wynn has not one but two resorts in Macau — Wynn Macau and Wynn Palace — neither of which can use Amazon Echo until Amazon adds support for Chinese.
• Digital Trends: “A Holographic Virtual Girl Lives Inside Japan’s Answer to the Amazon Echo.
• Tim Cook, in a company-wide Q&A: “Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”
• Bret Victor: Touch Bar development started at Apple eight years ago. Follow-up tweets here, here, and here.
• Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg: “How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists”.
• Consumer Reports: “New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation”
• Me: “That’s absolutely bonkers.”
• Rene Ritchie: “Consumer Reports Fails to Earn MacBook Pro Credibility”.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.