canukstorm

citpeks said:

dysamoria said:

I’m surprised Lightning doesn’t carry digital audio. I wonder why I thought it did.

It does.  The Lightning to 3.5mm dongle is actually a DAC (and a good one, as well as one of the cheapest things Apple sells(!)), so it's receiving digital output from the port.  The constraint is either in the maximum bitrate it, or the APP's DAC supports.

Either Apple is being disingenuous with its statements, or there is some sloppy reporting occurring.  Maybe both.

"Is it still going to sound very good? Almost certainly. The AirPods Max sound exceptional — even with AAC over Bluetooth, and plugging in can make the experience richer. But if you’re a stickler for the technical details, this is why the AirPods Max can’t pull off lossless audio in the truest sense. It also leaves Apple in an awkward spot where other high-end headphones that do support digital audio when hard wired — over USB-C, for example — could deliver the full lossless audio that the AirPods Max can’t."

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/17/22440788/apple-airpods-max-lossless-music-explainer-spatial-audio

However, the electricity being transmitted to your phone isn’t perfectly clean or ideal. It generates some noise, which can interfere with other wireless devices. That’s why the FCC (and regulatory bodies in other countries) set strict limits on wireless emissions.

Noise from a single coil might not be a problem, but each charging coil generates a slightly different waveform. When those waves overlap, the constructive interference intensifies their strength. Just like when two ocean waves collide and combine their height, radio frequencies can combine their intensity as they interact.

Managing these overlapping harmonic frequencies is incredibly challenging, and gets harder the more coils that you are integrating. From patent filings, it looks like Apple’s ambitious plan was to use considerably more coils than other charging pads on the market.

Rumors speculated that Apple was considering up to 32 coils—up from the fifteen shown in their conceptual patent filing.

Other multi-device wireless chargers place two or three coils side-by-side, but require you to fiddle with your phone to find the “sweet spot” over one coil for it to start charging. With AirPower, Apple was trying to create one large charging surface using overlapping coils, allowing it to power multiple devices from anywhere on the mat. But that introduces multiple challenges.

We asked an engineer with experience building wireless charging systems what obstacles Apple was working to overcome. “Over time, these harmonics add up and they become really powerful signals in the air,” explains William Lumpkins, VP of Engineering at O & S Services. “And that can be difficult—that can stop someone’s pacemaker if it’s too high of a level. Or it could short circuit someone’s hearing aid.” If Apple’s multi-coil layout was spinning off harmonics left and right, it’s possible AirPower couldn’t pass muster with US or EU regulations."

https://ifixit.org/blog/14883/what-finally-killed-airpower/

macxpress said:

techprod1gy said:

That will be awesome for Apple to roll out new models 4 months after I invested in their below average iteration of the MacBookPro.

I wouldn't count on Apple updating the MacBook Pro anytime soon...what you see is what they'll offer for at least the next 6-8 months.


It also looks like the CPUs that could go in a MacBook Pro still do not support LPDDR4 RAM. They do appear to support DDR4 RAM, just not LPDDR4 RAM. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, no? If true, then Apple would absolutely not be updating the MacBook Pro, but instead waiting on a chipset that supports what they need unless they want to continue maxing the RAM out at 16GB total. 

It will be interesting to see what Apple does with these new chips. I hope they've had some prototypes in their hands so they could be developing new/updated Macs around them. 

tjwolf said:

Ok, I don’t get it.  I watched the keynote and could have sworn that I saw Parallels Desktop being run on their ARM Mac to show Linux running...or did I imagine that?

seankill said:

Not sure why this thing is worth $350

Better speakers out there for much less and Siri really isn’t that useful. 

lkrupp said:

Perception trumps reality. In these forums we are constantly assailed by the negative narrative that Apple’s QA is down the drain. Every itty bitty hiccup is trumpeted as a disaster, a black eye for Apple. And it’s baloney. There is little doubt that the vast majority of Apple’s customers are perfectly happy with their gear, experiencing little if any game stopping issues. If that were not true then Apple wouldn’t be raking in wheelbarrow loads of cash and would not have the market positions it does. Of course the negative narrative is that people are stupid and will buy anything Apple produces... even if it doesn’t work? Really?

Why do we not hear about the failings of other tech companies? Is it because their products are perfect and bug free? Hardly and we all know that. I read an article a few weeks ago that dealt with how hackers are making millions of dollars a year from Android malware. Android is ridiculously fragmented and many device owners can only dream about getting security and bug updates. But we never hear about any of this do we?

Finally, the author thinks that Apple’s hardware and software quality is at levels the industry has not seen before. I agree.

Exactly right. As it should be.

More to the point, this is the strategy that Microsoft needs to adopt for Windows. Again."

CiaranF said:

Apple mightn’t de done with 2022

But after last nights feeble attempts with “Dynamic Island” “I’m done with Apple. 

I wasn’t impressed. I was even more gutted when I saw their price for a base model iphone 14 pro in the EU. €1339 for a base model when last years 13 Pro was €1079. So after 14 years of accepting your feeble increments every year and putting up with your price increases I’ve decided that I can but an S22U with Watch Pro 5 for less and probably get the buds thrown in too for not much more. 

You’re ok if you’re in the US though. They haven’t increased their price. 

This is the last straw Apple. With your zero innovation and greedy money grabbing prices. 

Goodbye and good riddance. 

JWSC said:

gatorguy said:

Another software guy, former Google exec and current Apple AI and machine learning VP John Giannandrea, is overseeing the entire project while Lynch will handle day-to-day. So yeah, definitely no indication that they're focusing on hardware and building a car.  

Didn’t Jobs say in order to do great software you need your own hardware?  Paraphrasing, but it went something like that.

netrox said:

We need the courage to abandon x86 for good. The x86 is still plagued with backward compatibility legacy and technical issues while ARM has more possibilities. The BIG.little is a fine example - x86 cannot have cores that are of different speeds while ARM can. We need to change the technology where we can enable cores to support low speed for low priority tasks and high speed cores for demanding apps. It's called heterogeneous computing and that's how our computing should be. 

There is simply no economic benefit from having more cores of the same speed. Most applications don't need all cores at full speed. The OS and apps would benefit the most if each app is given low speed cores and apps given high speed cores when performance is demanded. 

Why would you want cores that have to be all of the same speed when you can easily have each low speed core to be dedicated for processing a certain task at a much lower clock speed? For example, if you build a core that is dedicated to processing a frame of a video and you decide that you only need say 500 Mhz per frame, it would be so much more economical to have 30 500Mhz cores along with a couple of 4GHz cores for tasks that require more complex calculations than to force all cores to have the same speed which actually degrade performance overall and not cost effective at all. 

tzeshan said:

elijahg said:

"External forces may push us around a bit, but we are not going to use them as an excuse," Cook wrote in the memo

Hold on didn't he say yesterday that China was the reason Apple's sales have declined? Seems like an excuse to me. That said, it's not exactly a disastrous decline, its certainly not great but even Apple sans Jobs needs a kick up its ass every now and then, to bring the execs back to planet Earth.

Yes, China hurts a lot. But iPhone sales in other countries like India did not improve I guess.