I’m excited the HomePod is finally shipping, but it must sting for Apple to ship without AirPlay 2–the feature rumored to delay the HomePod into 2018 in the first place. I’m looking forward to the reviews and am particularly excited to see Siri and HomeKit integration in action.

HomePod delivers stunning audio quality wherever it’s placed — in any room in the house, playing any style of music. Using just your voice, it’s easy and fun to use, and works together with an Apple Music subscription for a breakthrough music experience, providing access to one of the world’s largest cloud music libraries. Siri, now actively used on over half a billion devices, has developed a deep knowledge of music and understands your preferences and tastes. And with Siri, HomePod can send a message, set a timer, play a podcast, check the news, sports, traffic and weather, and even control a wide range of HomeKit smart home accessories.

I was actually working on updating a workflow to post to my blog when this news broke. Workflow is a super smart app that lets you chain together iOS apps to do some pretty amazing automation. It will be really interesting to see what the team can do if some if it’s feature become integrated into iOS in the future.

Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.

Really great overview of Apple’s organizational structure from Ben Thompson at Stratechery covering how Apple has managed to become one of the largest companies in the world and uniquely maintain its functional organizational structure. More importantly, however, is that if Apple plans to take its services business seriously and use services as a way to generate significant revenue from existing customers; they will almost certainly have to make changes to the organization and stop tying to run services in the same way they manage hardware and software products.

Apple will not fix the services it already has, or deliver on the promise of the services its hardware might yet enable, unless a new kind of organization is built around these services that has a fundamentally different structure, different incentives, and different rhythms from Apple’s device teams. You don’t make great products because you want to make great products; you make great products by creating the conditions where great products can be produced.

Ben Thompson has the best overview I’ve read from both perspective about whats going on with Apple’s resistance over unlocking an iPhone for the FBI.

The dispute between Apple and the FBI is a much closer question than it is being framed as in most of the tech press. In large part this is because the dispute itself is being serially mischaracterized by both Apple supporters and detractors.

Apple also posted a FAQ page that outlines what exactly has been asked of them from their point of view.

I’m actually fairly surprised with the number of places accepting ApplePay in Dallas and I do find myself purposely shopping at places that accept it like Whole Food and Walgreens. But I agree that I’m looking forward to the day where I can use ApplePay without having to think about it every time I checkout.

I’m also looking forward to more apps and online services. accepting ApplePay. Only updating your credit card number in one place for online purchases when your bank sends you (another) new card sure is nice.

Nevertheless, there are very few locations where I can use Apple Pay to buy stuff. This is probably more an indictment of alternative payment methods in general in America then Apple Pay itself but, nevertheless, it’s disappointing that this technology is now several years old and the only places I routinely shop that accept Apple Pay are a hipster super-market and the Apple Store.