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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty easy to do Zoom on an ipad, and you can do other things with it. So a dedicated zoom device seems like a complete waste.

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My brother's an attorney. He's not tech savvy at all. A device that does Zoom conferencing only and does it well would be perfect for him. I think there are a lot of people in that category.

Especially when the company picks up the tab.

A company that picks up the tab would have to compare the cost to the IT guys they already have to help users.

ipad doesn't have 27" screen, 3 cameras and as good mics. This is a dedicated device, so you set it and forget it.

How do you know if the cameras/microphone are active when you're not using it? You don't.

How do you know that on an iPad? Or any other device in your home?

I admit this sounds kind of dumb, but... Apple versus some relatively obscure company I just heard about?

To clarify, is Zoom or DTEN the company you are referring to?

DTEN: the lesser known between the two, and the one making the hardware.

Camera and microphone indicators have been added to iOS 14: https://9to5mac.com/2020/07/07/ios-14-what-do-the-orange-and...

Right... but I mean they choose whether or not to show those indicators... so why do you trust them to do that?

Seeing as it only has one purpose, you could unplug it when its not in use.

It's nicely specced, but the fact that it's limited to a single service, Zoom, makes it unappealing to me, especially since I almost never use Zoom (we did some family virtual gatherings over Zoom for my kids' birthday and another family virtual happy hour). School meetings have all been Google hangouts (which we ended up moving to an old MacBook so we could use a Chrome plugin to get grid view instead of the default Google setup) and work meetings have all been WebEx with the only video being when someone shares their screens (I moved to a new team on June and I have no idea what any of my team members look like except for one person who put their picture in their WebEx profile so her face pops up when she speaks in a meeting when no one is sharing their screen).

> "makes it unappealing to me"

and to most of us, but i imagine that most people aren't in the target market. My university outfitted all new lecture halls built in the last ~20 years with professional grade video recording equipment, most likely for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. By comparison, $599 for professors giving lectures via zoom seems like a bargain if the sound and video quality are substantially better than an ipad.

For the rest of us, we'll most likely continue with our phones, laptops, cheap webcams and ipads.

I'm guessing that there are a lot of people who will angrily return this when they realize that Zoom is only Zoom and they won't be able to use it for all the other videoconferencing stuff that they think of as "zoom" even though it's not.

... and throw it away, like one of those "skype phones" when it will get obsolete

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