sevenfeet

Back in 1992, I had the pleasure of eating dinner with the Bungie team at Macworld Boston. One of my questions for the team was who did a very memorable scream from the game. Sure enough, that scream came from the guy sitting next to me. Much laughter ensued.

”Thank God it’s you!!” <BOOM>  This was the OG of dirty tricks from a game designer in a 3D game. Man I miss the original Marathon.

My soon-to-be wife and I were living in the DC area when the Tyson's Corner store opened and while I wasn't planning on going that first day, we ended up at the Tyson Corner Mall that Saturday for other things and I was curious to see what the reaction to the opening of Apple's first retail store was. The line was out the door, down the concours, up the stairs and down another concours. There had to be at least 300 people waiting to get in. Keep in mind that these were the days where Apple only sold Macs. The iPod wouldn't debut until months later. Apple at that point relied on mom and pop computer stores (many that had been with Apple since the 70s and 80s), few regional chains and the one big national chain, CompUSA. Apple had little control of its retail experience and it was uncertain at the time whether the retail experiment would succeed.

anonymouse said:

So, HBO is one of the most recognized brand names in entertainment and they decided the best thing to do was delete that from their branding for streaming?

That would be like Apple renaming their service to just TV+

I agree. When this was first rumored, I said to myself "why on Earth would they abandon a well known and liked brand name that's been around since 1972 (over 50 years!)." I may have only taken a marketing course or two in school, but this makes no sense. The only thing left of "HBO" is in the logo, and that looks like it was done by amateurs.

Ecky-Thump said:

Still no return to having a dedicated digital audio output, so you need to use an HDMI breakout box.  And digital audio still limited to 48khz.

2 major fails.

Since the new Apple TV 4K is an HDMI 2.1 compliant device (with eARC), in theory the device would support HD audio up to 24/192 kHz or uncompressed audio. And Apple Music does have HD audio up to 24bit/192khz in the library. At this point, the problem would appear to be lack of support in tvOS. Hopefully this will be rectified at some point but we usually only see major feature upgrades in the fall of any given year.

For me, all my receivers/processors are HDMI 2.0 only so I would need upgrades if and when this feature ever saw the light of day.

The new Apple TV was a bit of a surprise since the refresh period for Apple TVs is usually three years and the 2nd gen 4K model just came out 18 months ago. And the entry level model is a recognition of the fact that many customers use it with Wifi only and would never use the wired Ethernet port. But the A15 is a sizable leap ahead of the A12, especially for gaming. But the thing that is intriguing for me is a possible bump of RAM for the new model. The existing A12 model is the same as the iPhone XR/XS with 3 gigs of RAM. The A15 which is in last year's iPhone 13 has 4 gigs of RAM. Of course Apple doesn't have to keep RAM consistent between products, but the increase of RAM may help some poorly written apps that don't deal with memory management well. I know of some apps that just love to crash even though the iOS version runs just fine. The difference is that iOS has virtual memory and tvOS doesn't, which means that tvOS apps have to really live within their means.