Xmas Open Forum: What was your favorite piece of tech from 2016?

This is an easy one, the Google Home.

Purchased the Echo when it launched and now had the Google Home for four weeks.

Basically the Echo you use commands where you talk to the Google Home naturally. The Echo will handle some fuzziness but fundamentally they are variations to commands instead of fundamentally understanding what you are saying.

So with the Echo you might do a quick Google search with a lyric to get a song name and then ask the Echo to play. With the Google Home you skip the Google search step.

I am starting to learn a shorter english as the inference is so incredible with the Google Home. So say "hey google play sting gwen bottle on tv". Google figures out that I want to watch a video of Gwen Stefani and Sting singing message in a bottle on my TV. It then turns the TV on, sets the proper input, and the video starts playing.

Our brains inference capabilities allow us to communicate with one another in a compressed manner. Information can be inferred versus being said. This is what Google is doing and for some (many?) things they can do better than a human.
Maybe it is because I have an engineering background but the Google Home from a technology standpoint and what Google is doing just blows me away.

The demo that most blows people away is the Google Photos with the Google Home. A bunch of people over for the holiday and someone asks how was your trip? You just say would you like to see a few pics? You just say "hey google show my photos of kenny in Maui". The TV turns itself on, input set, and photos of my son Kenny playing on the beach in Maui displays". Someone asks did you guys snorkel?

I simply ask Google to show photos of Molokini and then photos of us snorkeling at Molokini and unfortunately pics of where I forced the kids to Kayak to Molokini from the hotel. Wind changed, almost died, fantastic Coast Guard picked us up and took us back to the hotel where we were yelled at because suppose to check in once an hour. Just what happens when wife does not join me and the kids on vacation.

Then my oldest said I remember snorkeling there. Then you just say show Tommy snorkeling at Molokini. My wife had scanned and loaded 1000s of photos into Google Photos and to the shock of my oldest son photos both above and underwater display of him at Molokini.

This is simply off the charts incredible from a technology standpoint. Might be a bias for me but simply wow!
Basically one shutter click and nothing else and three months later you are in your family room without touching a single thing showing the photos. There is no more friction that can be removed.

This message brought to you by Google Home™.
 
PS4 VR is probably the least expensive way to get into VR gaming. It is also one of the more efficient since it uses the PS4 Camera/MOVE sticks to track the player. Thus far, the games on PS4VR look decent - if not just VR versions of stuff I've already played.

I prefer VIVE, but VIVE requires a very expensive computer which the average person can't afford and its sensors basically mean you need to devote an entire bedroom in your house to playing with it - unless your mom's basement is huge (LOL)
 
Watching flaming Samsung tard pads and Phones go up in smoke ☺

On a more personal note this new Haswell core i5 desktop PC w/SSD + HDD in here and the Sony XBR 4K HDR TV and 5.1 surround with Sony 7.1 ES AVR for the private man cave -office here
 
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Liked my new macbook. Has a battery life of about 8 hours so I can take it to mcdonald wifi since I moved out from my mom for now and the internet is expensive at a cheap hotel. Incredibly thin and lightweight. Might look for a place or move back. Like my 2017 subaru wrx since it has a lot of high tech in it. Didn't seem too expensive but then I paid $3000 tax.
 
Samsung TV. I upgraded from 5 years old LG TV. And the picture is all I ever wanted to be able to watch movies.
 
It's almost always the last piece of junk I bought.
Klipsch Reference Series R-14M speaks
 
Well - when you actually have $70,000 to spend on one, you can decide whether to buy it or not. Till then, I'll make the decisions - with my checkbook.
 
Macbook 2016 Model
Google Nexus 6p

The MacBook runs very very well, battery lasts all day, runs parallels beautifully and also windows 10 incredibly well via bootcamp
 
Some of the Samsung TV's are real decent ,My 4K HDR Sony XBR TV in here has a Samsung 3D 2160p VA Panel in it :)
I almost went with a sony something-930 tv earlier this year. But I didn't when I found out about its back light bleed issue. And then Samsung ks series prices dropped lowest they ve been this year, so I went with it, since r-tings.com rates them second best in the price range.
 
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