I have a Droid so I don't have Siri, though I have Google Assistant. My only music subscription to a music stream service is Amazon Music Unlimited. I could have stuck with the lesser selections available with the Amazon Music that is free with Prime, but the first 2 albums I tried to call up require Unlimited. It's $8 a month. I can handle that. But yeah, I guess I cold have reached the same destination with just the phone, but not using my phone to play music allows me to use Waze for GPS as the same time. And there are more things I can do with an actual Alexa/Echo device that I may never do, but I can do them. I can "drop in" on home and talk to the dog if he's home alone, add to my shopping list if some thought pops into my cavernous head... It was only 26 bucks so WTH...

Also, when you use something like Spotify, you get one song by your artist and then they start deciding what I want to hear. No. If I say Todd Rundgren or Meatloaf or TOP, I want nothing but Todd Rundgren or Meatloaf or TOP.

Every day I think about one more aspect of what computers have brought us and I just smile. A lot of it may require extra hardware, but smart home technology is so cool. A lot of the OG types continue to grumble "I can change my own thermostat" and similar things but many of them likely still thing cars are a passing fad.

I remember a day back a good 25 years when my housemate at the time, one of those "my idea of a computer is for games and finding naked pictures of women" people who never really "got it" as far as what some of this stuff meant. He came home once and I was looking at a live camera from Mt Fuji and he didn't really grasp the majesty of the fact that I can see something from the other side of the world on my computer screen in real time. Totally over his head. When I got an ISDN modem and phone line he lost his mind (and never split the cost with me, BTW) because with that network at 128kbps and a download accelerator that found up to 7 hosts and downloaded a fraction of each file from each host and then reassembles the file he could cruise the Usenet groups for his pictures. Really old school networking with BNC connecters and all. Amazing to look back wat what we thought was good when compared to today's standards. I mean, we have a phone in our pockets that is also a computer, a TV receiver, a radio receiver, a music streaming device, a camera... The Jetsons and Dick Tracey came to life.

Last edited by eddie1261; 04/25/21 12:51 PM.