spheric

This is not a new connector, and it is apparently nothing Apple themselves intend to use. They've merely certified it to be used for "Made for iOS" Lightning adapters and accessories. It's in use by various manufacturers as yet another standard USB connector. https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/02/no-apple-isnt-developing-an-all-new-port-for-accessory-makers/

MacPro said:

I am sure these are aimed at professional studios, they will be followed next year by a lower-cost version for the great unwashed.

Music studios have no use for Bluetooth headphones, except maybe for reference purposes — you need to check your mixes on consumer-grade equipment to make sure they work across a variety of playback environments. 

The latency of Bluetooth audio makes it completely useless for recording, and the lossy compression of the audio stream means you're hearing everything through digital artefacting and noise masking algorithms, which is simply not an option for production.  

The biggest issue right now is the distribution of subscription fees. 

Currently, everyone's fees are thrown in a pot and distributed according to the total number of streams. 

This is somewhere between problematic and catastrophic. 

1.) it opens the floodgates for manipulation. Bot farms streaming hundreds of thousands of instances generate real money, and take it away from all the rest of us. 

2.) it ensures that only the major players get any sort of meaningful revenue. 

What we need is a model where each user's subscription fee is allocated to the artists THAT USER listens to. 

A kid who pays a $12 subscription fee, but only listens to his three favourite underground bands, sees all his money goes to Drake and Taylor Swift. 

That is not okay, and it makes work impossible for a whole range of indie artists who used to sell just enough records to their loyal fanbase to break even. 

Use case 1: my daughter is in tenth grade. Her iPad and iPhone are her only computers. All of her schoolwork, notes, and schoolbooks are handled on the iPad/Pencil. 

Use case 2: The live music industry has been largely revolutionised by iPad.
a) Remote mixing is the norm. A sound engineer will walk through the venue during sound check and adjust the mix using his iPad to control the mixing console. 
b) Our onstage monitor mixes (making sure the musicians onstage hear the other musicians, click tracks, cues, and talkline, etc.) used to require a dedicated engineer, or be handled as extra duty by the front-of-house mixer. It has become the norm to have a wifi-enabled rack mixer for monitoring, with each musician using an iPad (or smartphone) to control their own individual mix. 
c) Paper notation is a thing of the past. Cover bands with massive binders full of sheets for a six-hour gig are a very, very rare thing these days. iPad completely replaced paper for most of us. 
d) it's not just paper replacement, but sound program changer, synth remote control, and, for a number of us, actual sound engine, as well. 

jdgaz said:

Now I completely understand why England left the EU. 

No, Britain left the EU because rich crooks wanted the freedom to keep hiding their money in offshore tax havens after it was clear that the EU would eventually crack down on them. 

PLEASE make a clear distinction between "News" and editorialising content. 

This is obviously the latter, but it's not always as easily distinguished. 

MacPro said:

I am sure these are aimed at professional studios, they will be followed next year by a lower-cost version for the great unwashed.

22july2013 said:

No mic? I can't use it to talk with my iPhone? The fact that it has active noise cancellation proves it has some sort of mic in it, but not one I can speak into?

It's labelled with L and R for the Left and Right sides. How are they going to market that in countries where English isn't known or spoken widely?

Headphone manufacturers have managed to sell their 'phones with "L" and "R" labels internationally for seventy years. I'm pretty sure the market will be fine. 

I was so glad to replace the dork-slab Xs with an actually pocketable 13 mini. 

mikethemartian said:

jfabula1 said:

mikethemartian said:

The previous owners of Twitter must be laughing their asses off.

That’s what this legacy car makers are doing when Mask started Tesla, who’s laughing now??

Tesla and SpaceX probably have really great teams that get the work done in spite of Musk interfering and not because of him. With Twitter you get to see his on hands management skills and it is a shit show.

There was an anonymously sourced interview with a SpaceX employee that pretty much said exactly that. They had people “working late” in the offices even when there was literally nothing to do — actually gaming, with their monitors turned away from the cubicle doors and windows — just so that Musk could satisfy his fantasy of everybody going “above and beyond”. He was routinely confronted with irrelevant decisions, so that he felt in charge, while not given the chance to hinder actual development. 

9secondkox2 said:

nubus said:

Would we ever accept an ISP blocking some sites and features like local shopping "to protect us"? Do we want or need a gatekeeper on apps? A warning perhaps - but a gatekeeper?  And the 30%... that Apple then lowered to 15% after massive political pressure.

People experience a juggernaut going from lost cause to lost cause in courts while taxing customers on memory, taxing developers, blocking app-installations, and blocking upgrades. Apple should go win some hearts.

Actually, we DO need an app gatekeeper. but not in a censorship way. that's awful and apple is guilty of that as well. But we DO need someone to make suer the appas arent' nefrarious in their coding, spying, etc. 

If there's ever an App Store on iOS that guarantees that, you'll be free to use it.