I'd be sending a bunch of Apple techs from Cupertino to SF to fix your devices ASAP!

None of the vaunted reviews I read mentioned any of these problems. They all sounded like they'd been cut and pasted from Apple Media Relations. I'm capable of following directions. It can't be WiFi, because I just live in a little studio apartment.

It was an Apple iphone.

I do not have one of these phones for one reason: I do not want one nor do I need one!

If I care to listen to music I have a working assortment of tapes decks, CD players, boomboxes and a huge stereo system c. 1980 and an assortment of radios.

Why would I want one of these things?

I have a telephone. If someone cares to speak with me, they can pick of the phone!

I wouldn't waste any more of my time with this device and I would also DEMAND a refund for ALL of them!!!

I'm sorry yours sucked. I do listen to music on it, but that isn't my main use.

one playing a different song it had picked out of my library. Imagine turning up the volume on that and turning it into my own Experiment in Terror. Maybe I got the ones that were supposed to be sent to Guantanamo by mistake.

Have you seen what they do to your bandwidth usage? I thought they'd be great to play pink noise/sleep sounds in mine and my kids' room. Then they started pausing the music to say "One moment, I'm working on that" randomly at 4 AM or such. If the wifi blinks off, we get another message.

I don't use them anymore, but my kid still likes theirs and doesn't mind the hiccups.

I've no experience with these devices, but the specs say it uses both WiFi and Bluetooth. I'll go out on a limb and guess that your small apartment in San Francisco is inundated with your neighbors' wireless signals and the devices are getting confused.

That error from Siri is pretty typical of what I'd expect if Siri isn't able to "phone home" and communicate with the AI-engine/database at Apple.

So you say you have "excellent fiber internet and wifi" ... well no, I suspect not. I think you've got excellent fiber but am guessing that your WiFi radio bands are seriously saturated and full of delays and dropped packets that are just not noticeable in normal usage.

You *might* have some luck if you poke at your WiFi base station and reconfigure it to have your home WiFi network use a different set of radio frequencies (bands). But success is far from certain, and requires your neighbors to not also move to the new bands.

Really sad that the software in these things doesn't have a better failure mode so it can tell you why it's screwing up so badly under conditions like yours.