Wait a minute… there’s a useless piece of food gadget kitsch that Frauenfelder actually doesn’t like? Wow.
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“Meet Smalt, the world’s first interactive centerpiece that enhance your dining experience.”
They couldn’t even nail the first sentence.
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When hackers use this to DDoS the world you can’t even be mad, it is after all a salt dispenser…
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Does it also project a gif of a mime fellating a huge johnson?
Well, if they really want to get more money for the Smalt they better start appealing to people’s schmaltz.
I’m like a cave man over here with one of those disposable Morton salt shakers.
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It’s like something a Star Wars prop designer would make. I could imagine it on Aunt Beru’s dining table.
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On the plus side, knowing that your civilization has voluntarily turned astonishing technological capabilities into artifacts like this really puts the threat of nuclear war in perspective. It probably feels like expiation.
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That seems to be the question noone bothered to ponder with 99% of these “internet of things” and smart wearables products. Noone seems to want that shit. Like the whole smart watch thing. You had your little niche of people who are all over it because “Technology! The Future!”. The Apple watch was briefly a trend, because Apple. But once those people were satisfied, or realized there wasn’t much utility there. Well the whole market on that seemed to collapse.
I mean I’m not even sure how successful Amazon’s Alexa devices are. There are estimates out there claim 10 million + sold. But I’ve yet to see one in person anywhere out in the wild. I know noone who owns one or would own one. And there’s some base utility there. Its a blue tooth speaker with voice commands, and a direct pipe to the interwebs (or Amazon’s bit of the interwebs). Even the smart phone “assistants” it evolved from don’t seem to be much of thing any more. The last place I heard Siri taken seriously as a thing was a shit radio ad. And the last time I saw someone use it earnestly in public. Well an entire room of hip, tech savvy, social mediaing millennials turned at looked at the dude like he was some kind of monster.
Most of these things don’t actually seem to provide even that level of functionality. They actually need much more effort to do the thing they claim to make simple. Just complicating and blue tooth connecting things that are common precisely because they are simple and utilitarian.
Like a salt shaker. If you need a better salt shaker get yourself a salt cellar or salt pig. Or a fucking mason jar.
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I’m shocked that they missed out on measured pouches of salt that not only come with DRM to ensure you only use approved sodium chloride, but which have unfeasibly short shelf lives ‘to improve your salt consumption experience’.
Overall, a disappointing effort to reach peak twat.
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They totally missed the opportunity to make it a salt dispensing mini-drone that hovers over your plate.
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“You can track and monitor your sodium”
No, you can’t, unless it comes some kind of probe you can insert into your body. I mean, anywhere in your body.
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Siri is really quite useful for things like setting timers, reminders, calendar events, getting directions, and so on. It sucks for asking it random shit. Basically it’s reasonably good as a hands free alternative for various on-phone functionality, but the moment you start asking it to deal with the outside world outside of a few very narrowly defined things like weather and sports, forget it.
However, because of privacy, you aren’t going to see people using it in public much at all, and that’s the case for every voice assistant out there - shoulder surfing is a lot easier to guard against than being overheard as you talk to your pocket computer.
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oh but that’s pepper. Totally Different
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Apple watch serves some function(s), though. I have zero interest, but it does things for people. A really awkward salt shaker that is unnecessarily also a speaker combines two useful objects in a way that degrades the utility of both.
Yeah, but that’s dinner theater - totally different!
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Which ones? It’s mostly a fitness tracker that moves some smart phone notifications to your wrist.
It’s jewelry with a techy veneer. There is nothing the the apple watch does that is not more easily or cheaply accomplished without the apple watch. Which is the exact dynamic thats the problem with this whole category. At best you get a flashier more expensive luxury version of a thing that already exists. At worst you get a blue tooth salt shaker.
But it’s all pitched as revolutionary innovation. And it seldom clear that many people even want any of these things.
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Hipster trendoid.
We have a block of salt in the middle of our table. Eat a spoonful of soup, then get up and take a lick.
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Bah. In my day, we had to go outside and walk to the ocean and get a spoonful of sea water after having a spoonful of soup. A family down the street had the height of luxury - a strainer to get the sand out of the seawater.
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I don’t know what the watch even does, but I know people who use it, and they seem to think it’s a useful extension of the functionality of the phone, so…
