misa

bigmac2 said:

AppleInsider said:

"In the past, we have received feedback that consumers wanted the ability to customize the color setting of their Galaxy devices due to natural variations in displays"

Samsung got it all wrong, people doesn't wanted the ability to messed up with color settings, they want accurate color.  If Galaxy devices have "natural variation" inherent to OLED technologies, It is up to Samsung to calibrate their display during manufacturing process to fix it.

Giving the user the burden of calibrating their phone display is only an acknowledged from Samsung there is no color conformity across their products.

No monitor is ever calibrated from the factory. There are a few that are pre-calibrated to Adobe RGB for photoshop users, but everything else is supposed to "just work" at sRGB settings. Your lighting affects that calibration. The age of the backlight affects that calibration.

But there is no reason for Samsung to have released a product this much out of calibration. This sounds more like one batch of screens was released with the wrong driver (not software driver, but the actual screen hardware driver) and the work-around is to force the calibration to a level that makes it look more correct. You'll probably find that it has a reduced color gamut.

apple ][ said:

rogifan_new said:

Let me take a wild guess that had Hillary Clinton won Tim Cook wouldn't have wrote this letter. 

You make a good point.

I wonder what would have happened if Hillary had won.

I probably wouldn't be surprised if there was a banner or an announcement on the front page, the main page of Apple.com, congratulating the first female president, or some complete crap like that.

He probably wouldn't have written such a letter because Hillary didn't target Apple during the campaign.

But since Trump has won, that means Silicon valley is rightfully scared because they are not producers of just hardware that can be relocated at the whim of a politician. There is a lot of software developers that Apple will never get enough H1B's to get into the US now, and if a Republican-led government starts tearing up trade agreements left and right that is going to push the price of their hardware up beyond the reach of consumers, and they know it. Likewise all the competition will ALSO have to raise their prices beyond the point of affordability. Say good bye to cheap computers, period.

Lest ye forget, a $2000 computer pre-NAFTA was not top of the line, not at all. And in todays dollars that would be over $4300 for what we currently pay about $200 for. So that threat is very real, and very dangerous.

That said, much of what Trump has run his campaign on, is impossible and will not survive constitutional challenges. He can not unilaterally tear up trade agreements, the Republicans will not have any of that since it benefits their donors the most.  The TPP might die but that comes at the US's expense, as the US would have been the biggest beneficiary to it. NAFTA is unlikely to die or be gutted because that would force all the Canadian and Mexican outsourcing to come back to the US, and I hate to break it to you all, but nobody wants to buy a Ford or GM vehicle that costs more than a Hyundai (Korean) or Toyota (Japanese) that is also assembled in the US. If the rust belt thinks that this is going to bring jobs back, sorry, no, that's not going to happen. If anything we will see a rise in Uber-like services and a huge downtick in car ownership.

I have to wonder why MacBook users would use Windows on a laptop, that is a disaster in the waiting. I can understand the desktop due to the desire to not have to physically move machines around to use a new one, but on a laptop ... WHY are you using a laptop?

It's a lot like the problem with Linux users. They cry about lack of support from hardware vendors, and then when a hardware vendor decides to release something that works with their OS (eg Realtek drivers) they complain why the manufacturer didn't release the source code instead. The Manufacturer is then blamed for not adhering to whatever rubbish be it power management or fancy feature buttons that the Linux user expects instead of oh... maybe just running the damn OS the machine came with.

If you run Windows on a Mac Laptop, expect to have problems. Apple can not, and does not engineer their hardware to run Windows, it's engineered to run MacOS. If you can run Windows on it, fine, but you're going to lose power management and various other driver-specific tweaks that Apple made to the Apple driver on MacOS that don't exist in the generic driver Apple signed for use in Windows. Just be happy you can boot Windows at all.

djames4242 said:

I tend to use my laptops for six years before replacing them. My first-gen MBP is being used by my twelve-year-old for homework. A SSD has a limited lifespan. This is (sort-of) okay with a tablet or a phone, but I'm looking at spending over $3,000 on the new MacBook Pro early next year (to replace my early-2011). I'm highly unlikely to do spend that kind of cash on a machine that Apple is now considering disposable when a part wears out.

I used mine for 10. The GPU parts in a laptop are easily the first part that becomes intolerable, followed by the RAM if it wasn't maxed out at purchase. The hard drive in a laptop always needs to be replaced within the first 3 years, regardless of the technology. SSD's are far worse for wearing out, and I would never buy a laptop with the primary storage soldered to the motherboard.

macdarren said:

I have been trying to decide if I would go with a 2016 model, or a 2015 or wait for the 2017.  This would almost certainly rule out the 2016 for me.  I keep my MacBooks for about 5 years (my current one is an early 2011) and I have consistently upgraded all of them....I had almost talked myself into a 2016 despite the memory limits since 16GB has proven sufficient MOST of the time but both HD and Memory constraints plus port shortage is really making it hard to go with the 2016...maybe some of that will be redressed in the next iteration but not sure I can wait that long...maybe a 2015 will get me to 2018 or even 2020 for the next big revision...maybe there will be a 'real' Pro version in the interim.

All the talk of pro apps needing more RAM has not really stood up for me (granted I am not an HD Video renderer or editor) but for me Virtual Machines is the ultimate RAM sucker.  If I need 2 VMs running (typically Linux and Windows and sometimes multiples of each) and each VM needs 4-8GB and I still want my Mac to operate in a reasonably normal fashion 16GB gets really tight.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to run a virtual machine on a laptop since that would force the laptop to run in the least efficient manner, even when the VM is idle.

That said, SSD's do not last very long, and this is very troubling. You might get, max, 2 years out of a SSD that is used in the manner a "Pro" might use it. If it's lightly used, you might get 4 or 5. 

It's almost as if some goverment regulation on the right to repair needs to exist, which would mandate that "wear" parts (eg hard drives, fans) be user-replaceable, like you would replace tires in a car. All Apple would have to do is make the SSD ejectable like a sd card.

I still think it was a foolish idea to remove the 3.5mm jack from the phone. It either should have been a second lightning connector or a USB-C, but as I stated in another thread, USB-C "digital audio" has not been defined, only analog. If the phone still contains an analog audio process (Eg for the wireless earpods) there is no reason not to.

However on the iPad, Macbook Air and MacBook Pro, removing the 3.5mm jack isn't quite as much of a loss as people typically don't use them in a portable manner (like an iPod) so people are generally sitting when they use these devices.  The iMac, MacMini and Mac Pro seem like the most obvious to replace the 3.5mm headphone/microphone jacks with USB-C.

The largest disappointment with lightning so far is that it doesn't support HDMI/Thunderbolt. The device sends a h264 video to the lightning connected device for HDMI which is not what "pro" users want. That makes me wonder if that's a lossless or a lossy audio output for lightning.

AppleInsider said:

For iOS devices, USB-C offers less of an attraction, given that they can't support Thunderbolt 3 connectivity (which requires an Intel processor) and don't need DisplayPort video output to external displays.

The fact that basic USB 3.0 connectivity can be supported on existing Lightning connectors and legacy USB ports suggests that iOS devices might not make the switch as quick, requiring a longer transition period of using adapters. At the same time, there's a lot you can now do wirelessly rather than needing to plug in a cable.

WiFi sync, AirDrop photo and file transfers and iCloud based sharing are all more convenient than plugging in a cable. That leaves power charging as the biggest reason for plugging a cable into an iOS device, and that issue may be solved by induction or truly wireless charging before USB-C becomes completely and universally adopted.

Whoa there.

I want to be able to connect my iPad and iPhone to a HDMI, Thunderbolt/DisplayPort or USB-C display without any ridiculous compression artifacts. An iOS device should be able to do this.

Likewise with wireless, nothing should be done "wirelessly" if you want to retain security and conserve power. Wireless networking, charging and audio is all good when you don't leave your home, but when you go outside, you are at the whim of all the other wireless junk out there. That Wireless access point that says it's AT&T, are you sure that's AT&T?, If you are listening to a phone call on your wireless headset, how do you know someone else isn't listening? Then there is wireless charging that is just a super-bad idea since it pushes the charging efficiency below 30%. You want the induction charging only for devices that are impractical to charge any other way. The Apple Watch is a great example of a product that is half baked, because charging it doesn't give you the battery life that anyone would reasonably use it.  This also applies to the iPhone, but at least the iPhone has the ability to be plugged into a battery pack. 

Now put this all together? Are we going to start having to lug around 8lb battery pack+USB-C hubs because our consumer electronics are trying to be cute and light, and useless for all day use.

therunningvm said:

 What most people don't understand is that a "pro" computer isn't defined by the hardware it has. Its defined based on your needs as a user.
Failing to satisfy those needs doesn't mean that it isn't "pro" for other uses.

It falls short of being "Pro" as in Professional, it's really just "Pro" the marketing alternative for "Premium" which means "Prosumer" not Professional.

A Pro device has to suit all Professional uses. Take a look at DSLR and Video cameras.

A Pro DSLR costs between $600 and $10,000. A Pro Video camera costs between $5000 and $60000. A "Professional" computer like the Mac Pro can be excused if it costs $10,000 fully kitted out for Photography, Video Production, or Audio production. But one configuration of Mac Pro would never one-size-fits-all all of them because the GPU parts don't need to be overkill for Photography or Video production, and can be repurposed as OpenCL DSP's in all non-3D production purposes, but if all you do is Photoshop and work with conventional film/non-DSLR photos, perhaps a fully kitted out MacMini is all you need. The current highest rated DSLR is the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV which costs $4500. It uses UHS-I SDXC cards, that is fine if you have a SDXC card reader for your computer, but a MacMini would already have this slot. That camera takes 6720 x 4480 14-bit raw pictures. That means at the minimum you need 240,844,800 bytes of memory simply to open the file. When you start working on the file you need that much memory in the GPU as well if it's GPU accelerated. This already pushes iGPU solutions into "painful to use" territory.

So these MacBook Pro's are not photoshop tools (Professional Artists use a Wacom Cintiq which they hold on to for years, alternatives still only come with DVI-D or straight VGA.) Who's tools are they really for? The Videographer? Hardly. Take a look at the system requirements for 4K+ cameras. At best you're going to use a MacBook Pro for dailies, and not much else. Any serious editing or video effects work is going to be done at a studio with the highest end systems available.

Which is why there is all this frustration over Apple not bringing back the 2010-style Mac Pro with a socket-2011 series upgradable chassis.  The MacPro that they came out with, was an interesting, but ultimately useless product for production. It would have been better off called "MacMini Pro", at least then it fits the marketing. I'm sure It's Pro enough for people using their iPhones as video cameras, but it's a complete joke to the film production industry, whom feel that Apple has abandoned it.

Apple is not going to be able to survive on iterations of it's iPhone product forever, at best that has 3 more iterations left before there is no more performance improvements possible, much like all other electronics. We might see 14nm cpu's, we might even see 7nm, but that's not going to result in cheaper parts. The only way up then is to make products bigger again. Once we reach this plateau, it becomes like cars, where some people have to replace their iPhone's and iPads every year for business tax-write-off reasons, and everyone else hangs on to them for 7 years because there is not a significant change in the technology to warrant it. 

So I hope Apple comes back and starts producing real Macbook Pro and MacPro's again that appeal to the Professional user, not just the prosumer.