How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to just flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
I so sorely lost faith in Apple when they started serving ads in Maps. I know they're trying to be privacy preserving. But a compromised value isn't a value, it's a guideline.
The number of ads I have gotten lately about buying ads on Apple Maps has me glad I'm not using Apple Maps. It turns out they're just late to the ad game, not opposed to it.
Sadly in current year, whenever tech companies say they aren't going to do something that means they are going to do it in two different ways and try to hide them both.
"They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off." (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)
> record: to cause (sound, visual images, data, etc.) to be registered on something (such as a memory card, hard drive, or optical disc) in reproducible form
It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.
Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.
Thanks for letting us know that it's mainly the surveillance device. The advanced one.
How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to just flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
But ya, it's not that hard, the only place I've found a motion sensor to be useful was in the garage.
Unfortunately apple devices collect EXTREME amounts of telemetry, you are opted-in by default, and much of it is impossible to opt-out of.
"You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word." (https://leancrew.com/all-this/2026/09/new-apple-watches-have...)
via https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/record
Seems accurate if the audio captured isn't stored in a reproducible fashion.
Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.