sevenfeet

Strange....I have an old iPhone 6s I use for testing and it still says 14.7 is the version for it.  Everything else is updating.

genovelle said:

rcfa said:

Most people never heard of lossless? Really?

Anyone who’s ever heard of these silver discs calls “CD”s has heard of lossless.

Only Napster, music piracy in conjunction with slow internet, metered cellular data and expensive flash memory brought us the “blessings” of lossy audio compression algorithms.

So, no, lossless isn’t “niche”, it was and should always be the normal case, lossy compression should be the exception.

CDs are not lossless. They are limited to 16 bits and 44.1 kHz while lossless is at least 24 bits and 96 kHz. Every record theses days is recorded well above CD quality. 

CDs are lossless. They do not use a compression technology that throws away data like MP3 or AAC. That is the meaning of "lossless". Do not confuse that with the sampling and bit rates, which certainly do make a difference to the overall sound profile.

As for what Eddy Cue said, yes Spatial Audio will probably make a bigger difference to most listeners than lossless.  Most people get their music from their phones now and since lossless Bluetooth isn't a thing, Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos makes more sense because it can be implemented with what most listeners already have.

That being said, I'm in the minority of users who does have the ability to easily show the difference between lossy AAC and lossless and especially HiRes audio. I have a dedicated 2 channel listening room, a smaller 5.1 home theater listening room and a larger 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos home theater. I spent some of today listening to the Atmos tracks in the Atmos theater and it sounded nice....not unlike the similar content on Tidal (which I also subscribe to mainly since I use the Roon player). I've been waiting for Apple to go lossless for a LONG time, and we got the added bonus of HiRes lossless which I wasn't expecting.

The problem for me now is that Roon has made it really easy to pipe my lossless and HiRes music to wherever I am in the house at the best possible quality. Apple Music and Airplay can't do that right now which makes using it for day to day listening a lot harder. Airplay can do straight 16 bit/44.1 CD quality lossless right now (it's been part of the standard since Airplay 1 was invented two decades ago). But I usually try to listen to HiRes audio these days if I can and that's going to be hard to feed my DACs which already connected to Roon.

Could these drivers be used for eGPUs? Sure. But the real story as mentioned in the article is for Mac Pro users. Right now, the best graphics they can get are Vega IIs. Even though we know that Intel machines are dead technology walking, people (mostly businesses) purchased this machine to do real work over a multi-year period (3-5 years or longer). Even if Apple comes out with an M-powered Mac Pro that dusts the Intel version for performance and especially performance/watt, that doesn't change the fact that thousands of them are in the field doing real work right now. And when you ship an expensive machine with PCI slots and you control the graphics driver situation as tightly as you do, you (Apple) are the ones responsible to make sure these machines continue to have an upgrade path in their lifecycle.

chadbag said:

Anyone have any idea what this means?  

“ ambient clinical intelligence for healthcare providers.”

What is “ambient clinical intelligence?”   

I work for a healthcare tech provider and am trying to understand that MS is saying.  

Probably that they take a total view of clinical intelligence.  Substitute a buzz word like "360" and you've got the basic meaning.

While this is interesting from an Apple standpoint, the deal really isn’t about Apple.  Two thirds of Nuance’s revenue comes from health care applications of its speech and supporting AI software. This is really about Microsoft expanding into the healthcare space and perhaps using Nuance’s AI software more broadly in other applications.