177: ‘Surface Curious’ With Rene Ritchie

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.