Image from http://inhabitat.com/

Now there are exceptions to this of course, but when I tell people that in five years they will no longer need a new car, I get a look like I’m nuts.  But once I explain that you are getting a new(ish) car and its a ‘need’ not want, then they are a little less skeptical.  However, once I give the full explanation, as I’m about to here, gentle readers, you will agree with me and start telling your friends the same thing just to get that ‘your crazy’ look from them.

First, the caveats.  There are people who buy vehicles for work or hobby.  Truck, Van, taxicab or RV for example.  Then there are those that WANT to buy a new car because its a part of their identity, or love high performance, or have that classic that they love to drive.  Then there are those who live near the edge or off the grid with poor or dirt roads.

OK, now that we have the exceptions out of the way, lets talk about your typical citizen living in a urban environment. In five years, that will be the last time you need to buy a new or newish car. How does that figure?  3 things are going to start happening in 5 years and be complete in 15.

In 5 years we will have our first autonomous vehicles on the road. FULLY autonomous meaning we have the legal issues sorted out that these little Google panda cars driving around my neighborhood will no longer need a driver.  This will be huge. The idea that I can use my phone to have a car pick me up and take me where I need to go will be just as convenient as taking my own car. To make this work, there needs to be a lot of these little buggers running around such that I can have a car at my door in 3 min or less.  Assuming Uber has not been sued out of existence, they will be first in line to try and make that happen.  Watch for them to partner with google and some car maker.

In 5 years the price of these little bugs will be 1/10 the cost of a normal car.  They will be fully electric with no frills.  There will be competitors (Apple, Tesla and later other car makers) that will focus on higher end self driving cars, but those will be seen more as luxury than a necessity. The simple ‘autono-cabs’ will be simple, and thus inexpensive such that there will be many of them. So many that in 15 years many of the next generation will question why they need to ever buy a car or even get a drivers license. (By the way, when that happens we will need a new form of ID.)

Parking space, who needs a parking space?  If you live in San Francisco you know parking is a pain. Worse when you are coming home tired and the last thing you want to is run circles around the blocks trying to find a place to park.  That goes away.  Worried about finding parking when you go somewhere?  Don’t worry about it anymore.  The autono-cab will pick you up at your door and drop you off at your location. Suddenly, parking anywhere will be easier and cheaper because of the reduction of demand.  Going to the game? Or big event?  Not only will you not worry about parking, there will be special lanes for electric autono-cabs so you will get there faster then driving?  Why will this happen?  People who run events and the cities authorities where the event takes place does not want traffic anymore then you do.  They want people in and out quickly, without accidents and drunk drivers making a mess of things.  Win.

Range?  Got that covered. I looked into buying a leaf and decided not to.  If I wanted to take a day trip from mountain view to say Napa, or halfmoon bay, or Oakland (hey its kick’en over there) or even SF I could not be sure I would get back unless I was positive I could find a charging station and have the car there long enough to get a charge.  Our little cabs?  Well, being smaller, lighter and battery tech about to double the range of current car battery packs, we only need to go one way.  Odds are these little guys will have a 60-75 mile range, more then enough for a one way trip anywhere in the bay area.

Now, back to the 5 years thing.  So its 2015 (at least at the time of this writing). I just bought a 2013 PIP Prius although once the new Tesla comes out I will sell the Prius and get that.  But lets say I keep it for 5 years and buy a 2018 Tesla. (I almost never buy new). That takes us to 2020.  Many people believe, as I do, that we should start seeing autonomous cars on the road in 2020. I live in Mountain View, which is not ‘Big city’ but dense enough that the first wave of autonomous cars will reach me.  Odds are, like bike sharing, there will be a monthly or yearly fee you can pay for near unlimited rides.  So that means my Tesla stays in the garage unless I need to go somewhere outside of my local area or I want to go for a fun drive. So now that 2018 is taking on less miles and holding onto more value.  So instead of getting a new car in 2025 I can wait until 2030 or longer depending on how often I drive it.

So now we are at 2025. Battery tech will have doubled again (conservatively) making autono-cabs to more specialized public cars cheaper to make.  The autono-cab is mostly a giant tablet now with multiple screens.  Averts help reduce the costs even more. Choice increases as well as we see Apple cars, luxury Lexus and turbo Tesla’s available via an app. My 2018 Tesla is sitting in the garage most of the time and my wife got a new’ish’ car in 2015, so we have two cars that we really do not drive.  It does not make any sense to have 2 cars now, so we will sell one of them.  Now we just need to stretch the remaining car to 2030, which will be easy because again, we do not drive it much.

From www.fastcodesign.com

By 2030 the autonomous car is ubiquitous. There will still be manual cars out there but even they will have ‘safety’ overrides. The number of car accidents plummets, car insurance goes up for some, and no longer exists for others. There are gas stations, but they are also charging station for the autono-cabs.  Owning a car repair shops goes they way of the local newspaper. Traffic actually goes down instead of up even as population increases. There are more people on the road, but traffic is more efficient, almost no accidents to cause backups, no rubber necking and very few breakdowns since the cars know when they need attention and can drive themselves for service. Places like LA see a marked reduction in pollution.  And one of the biggest win IMHO, drop in drunk driving. Buying a car in 2030 does not make much sense.

Now there will be losers in this grand future I’m painting.  Vehicle drivers; cab, truck, bus will be losing their jobs. Mechanics, we will not need as many.  Oil?  Do not need as much of that either. Car insurance, car dealerships, towing services; not a growth industry.  Municipalities will need new revenue (most likely they will tax the cabs per mile). Traffic tickets?  Kiss those dollars goodbye. Toll takers?  That is already disappearing.

So lets recap.  I said that in 5 years, that will be the last time you ‘need’ to buy a new car.  Math review time!  Buy car latest in 2020.  Good for 5+ years.  We should see the first deployments of self driving public cars in 2020.  By 2022, they should cover most urban and sub-urban areas. Since you are driving your car less, you can hang on to it for another 8 years easy which brings us to 2030.  Not so crazy sounding anymore right?  1) So start telling your friends.  2) Make money bets before you explain.  3) Profit!

P.S.  I started telling people this back in May, and started writing this post in June.  So no, I’m not following the crowd, just talking WAY to long to write my posts now-a-days.

Last year we heard that Apple was moving away from its licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance and building its own team to create a neural-net deep learning system as used by Google and Microsoft.  To date I have not heard any big announcement on how far they have progressed, but they may want to push down on the gas if they do not want to see users leaving Siri and moving to Cortana. Although Siri was a great feature when it was first released, the addition of voice actuated watches, TV, cares and more IoT voice enabled objects coming on the scene, intelligent voice assistant technology supported across multiple devices will become highly desired to expected functionality in the near future.  And right now Siri is not meeting the new coming standard, but they may not be too worried.   Mature Google Voice has been on iOS for more than a year and I have not heard anyone who had dropped Siri for Now, not because Siri is better, but because they are used to it and its a default voice system. However, given a significantly better system, that could change.

Now what can we learn here?  That there are a lot of people willing to spends LOTS of money on a watch?  No.  What we are seeing is lots of people with money buying a “luxury” item. What exactly the watch will or will not do is not quite important.  Since the watch is from Apple it is already assumed to have to best build quality, the best user experience and work the best with the iPhone.  (cough..  with 1 day battery life.. cough cough) But then that does not really matter.  There are watches out there, regular watches, that sell in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, so why not the Apple watch?  When the Apple watch was first released many of the adverts talked about form and function, same when the Apple watch was shown on stage by Tim Cook.  However, as time when on it really seem more about buying a piece of well crafted jewelry than meanly a list of feature and function.

Now I do not know if this was planned all along, or they released after the first reviews that matching heartbeats were not a big deal, but someone somewhere made the call, the right call, that this is going to be a high end luxury item.  And from the impression of how fast the gold Apple Watch Edition sold out they got it right.

Now what does that mean for everyone else?

Remember those numbers we talked about?  There are over 60 millions iPhone users out there and Apple thinks they are going to sell around 10 to 20 million watches.  So lets just go with 10 million units.  1 in 6 iPhone users will get the Apple watch, but 5 in 6 will not.

That means there are still plenty of iPhone users out there that are getting tired of pulling their phones out of their pockets and watch a smart watch, just not something as expensive as what Apple offers. The starter ‘sport’ watch is only $349, which is not too bad, but you can get a Pebble smart watch for half that price.  Also Google is working on extending its Wear system to work with Apple as well.  Once that is does I’m sure there will be plenty of very nice watches for around $200 coming on the scene.

But unless you are a high end designer, I’m afraid the high end smart watch marker for Apple users are basically wrapped up… At least for now.

I read when jailbreak 8.0 came out and it came without Cydia but with a host of issues.  A few updates took care of that.  Again, DO NOT UPDATE to iOS8.1.1.  The patches the hack.

From Redmond Pie

UPDATE: Team Pangu has released a tool to jailbreak iOS 8 to iOS 8.1 untethered on iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 5s, 5c, 5, 4s, all iPads, and iPod touch 5. You can read more about it all, along with jailbreaking instructions, download link and more for new jailbreak in our dedicated articles given below.

iOS 8 – iOS 8.1 Jailbreak (Tutorials):

• How To Jailbreak iOS 8.1 Untethered Using Pangu8 [Windows Tutorial]
• How To Jailbreak iOS 8.1 Using Pangu For Mac OS X [Guide] [Mac OS X Tutorial]

For iOS 8 / 8.1 compatible tweaks, check out:

• iOS 8 / 8.1 Compatible Cydia Jailbreak Tweaks [LIST]

Update x2: Pangu version 1.2.1 is out. Download it from here.

If you are already jailbroken using Pangu8, make sure you update the latest untether package to get all the bug fixes. A guide on how to update to latest untether package for already jailbroken devices can be found here.

So with NewsSnacker, on an iOS device, go to Settings and then scroll down to Pebble near the bottom.  Click on Pebble and then look for Developer mode.  Turn this on.   Now you can load apps directly.   So with NewsSnacker, ( Download NewsSnacker here ) and it will ask what application you want to use to upload it.  Select Pebble and it should install the app.  And that’s it!

Enjoy!

Photo taken from kimberlyk1018’s eBay listing

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Image Courtesy NN Group

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IMAGE: CHRISTINA ASCANI/MASHABLE

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First, the watch is beautiful.  This was fully expected from Apple and they did not disappoint.  But its not stunning.  Its not gorgeous. The Moto360, although weak from almost all other measures, is stunning. The Samsung Gear S is beautiful and ground breaking with a curved screen, but held back by a horrible band.  This is Apple’s first version, so I would not be surprised to see it get thinner and thinner as time goes on.  I do not love this watch, but give Apple a few more versions and they will have something that matches the rhetoric I heard at the presentation.

The UI is fantastic, again what we expect from Apple and they delivered. There is much the other watch makers can learn from Apple and I fully expect much of what we saw to show up in Samsung and Google’s efforts.  Watch for a spin dial selector to show up on other watches in 9 to 12 months.  Same with payment options.

Of course the watch is locked to Apple just like Google’s is locked to Android and some of the Samsung devices are locked to Tizen, Samsung’s new OS.  Almost all my iPhone friends who did not get Pebbles have been waiting for Apple, and I have yet to hear any one of my friends who are Android users say they are willing to leave Android for Apple for this watch.

As a Pebble user and Android user, I paid great attention to the Apple announcement and as a past iOS user, I have no problem switching back if I thought the watch was going to give me something that I cannot get from Google or Android.  However after doing more reading on it and carefully considering where Apple is and how long would it take for Google or Samsung to catch up, it is just not there yet.  Its close, VERY close, but not quite there yet.  It needs to be thinner.  I need to know I can go 2+ days on a charge.  I need to know the watch SDK will allow innovative apps to be developed for the Apple watch.

One of the most important things for me is battery life and appearance.  Despite being the first watch on the scene, I still reach for my Pebble before I reach for my LG.  I do this because the watch is small and looks good. No its not stunning in ANY respect, but it looks like it fits on my wrist, not bulky.  I like that I can go almost a week on 1 charge.  I like that does exactly what I want my watch to do.  Let me know when I need to get my phone out of my pocket or ignore it.  The Pebble does this.  I do like the voice support on the LG, the one thing on the Pebble I miss.  I also like the Google cards, but I can get this on the Pebble as well in a limited manner.  I know Apple copied that with Apple glance, but this is new for Apple where Google has been refining cards for a number of years.

So what is my conclusion?  I’m not ready to pay the money it will take to move back to Apple and the cost of the watch.  However, the Apple watch is clearly the current measure of what a smart watch can be.  But just like all the others… its not quite there yet.  No one is quite there yet.  So I continue to wait and watch.  Whomever can create a watch that is beautiful, well designed UI and a 3 day battery like, will win me over.  Google, Apple, Samsung, it does not matter to me.  Basically all the phones are so similar enough that I am more the willing to switch.  However, for now, I’m staying with Android.

Its also safe to say many iOS users are not happy about this.  Many people by iPhone’s because its suppose to be more secure. However, its seems this is a case of users falling for a phishing scam so its not a ‘hack’ into Apple or your phone.  Yet one more reminder to NEVER give your password over email…. EVER!

As of this writing, still no answer from Apple on how to deal with this short of taking your phone to the Apple store.