nightwatch

Im sure everyone has seen that MS commercial that ends with the tag line, "A Mac can't do that."

Everytime I hear that I think to myself, "But my iPad Pro can."

MS is demonstrating an app that plays video while the user writes notes on the screen with a stylus. The iPad Pro excels at this. Yet Apple hasn't taken this obvious opportunity to take advantage of it. I thought for sure they would. 

My remark about the iPad Pro being able to do anything a surface can was in regards the overall power of the A9x CPU and the quality of some creation apps that have been very well designed to take advantage of gestural and stylus usage. 

I compose orchestral music for film and TV. I use Notion iOS and can compose and playback entire large orchestral cues, and print out indivdual parts while on breaks sitting in a coffee room, or in my car. The gesture based iOS is spectacular at this. I wouldn't be able to be this mobile or work this fast with a MacBook Pro. 

It even accepts wireless MIDI from my guitar through a USB dongle and the USB to lightening adapter. Amazing!

But my point is the mobility. Being the size as a small clipboard I can literally take the iPad Pro with me anywhere I want. I don't need to set my iPad down to work. In other words, for a composer's workflow which usually requires a lot of peripherals, the iPad Pro is so much more mobile and plenty powerful enough for iOS apps that are well optimized for a tablet.

If there aren't apps for your needs then of course, the iPad Pro won't do, but for my job the freedom the iPad Pro affords is practically a workflow miracle. My productivity and output has easily tripled. 

I hope Apple continues with the Pro concept and adds features to iOS that will open it up just enough to enable a few pro user needs. 

Can Apple manage to build a Mac Mini without soldering all the internals inside? I have a feeling that will be a bone of contention. Personally I’d rather Apple go back to 2012 design when we could installl two SSDs and hopefully the architecture haa been updated to 32 GB of RAM.

Ok. Apple nailed the iPad Pro. They really are listening to us musicians and other creative pros. Everything they added is exactly what we needed. Lightening was too slow as an I/O. It limited how much audio I could stream. USB-C can pass 100s of audio streams, especially with that A12x! 

A12x, USB-C, and what they did what the Apple Pencil! Yeah baby. Now, how much? I’m worried. $1,500 loaded? 

Apple ALMOST nailed the Mac Mini. They should have offered one with dual flash SSDs like the iMac Pro and a maybe a SATA bus for 2nd large SATA SSD. An i9 would have been nice. 

mac_128 said:

Seems like the headphone jack is gone?

Personally, I hope so. I use an audio interface anyway cause those cheap 3.5mm parts are just not up to pro studio quality in terms of ruggedness. 3.5mm is a nightmare in recording studios and live venues. 

Great. Now when will Apple Watch get Notes? The most obvious app for Apple Watch, and it’s nowhere to be seen.

One thing that made Steve so great is that he grew up as a computer enthusiast. He knew exactly what he wanted as a user and he knew other people would like what he liked. He had a lot of confidence in what he saw as needs, and good taste to go with it. He knew enough to start the invention, then found great people to build it. In a big way, Apple was just a company that built things that Steve wanted to use, and then to sell. The Keynote app is a good example of that. And it makes sense that if you’re a kid in the ‘70s Silicon Valley, if you like some technology you just dreamt up, had built and used it, everyone else would like it too. 

Combine that with Steve’s charisma and coolness and you have the makings of the greatest tech CEO of all time. I’ve been fascinated by Jobs since the ‘80s. He was the perfect guy to bring computing to the masses. He completely transcended that ‘80s “nerd” label. Jobs would have never named his company Microsoft. Yet that’s what everyone else did in an attempt to achieve legitimacy. Steve knew his and other’s ideas alone with great people around him would ligitimize a tech company called Apple when no one else would have dared. 

Great read, btw. There are some great NeXT-era interviews when he was starting to lay back a bit, that are truely enjoyable to read. 

Just another politician who doesn’t use the technology that they’re going to be responsible for changing. Yes, Apple sells FCPX and Logic X on the App Store. FCPX isn’t keeping video editors from using Resolve if they want to. The App Store may give Apple a slight promotional edge over old school Mac DAWs like MOTU’s Digital Performer, but Apple’s come back in the late ‘90s may have saved MOTU and other companies from going down with the mothership. And Logic isn’t keeping me from using Digital Performer (which is my DAW of choice, not Logic although I use it some). 

Bottom line. Apple selling a few apps on the App Store does in NO WAY interfere with 3rd party sales. PERIOD! I can’t think of one iOS app made by Apple that I’ve ever paid for, or had to pay for. And every non OS critical or security critical app has 3rd party equivalents in the App Store that many people choose to use. Google Chrome for example. Or some of the paid for apps like Cubasis 2 (a competitor to GarageBand which I paid for and use). 

Besides most people realize that half of Apple’s apps are simpler versions of apps that 3rd parties have done better, or are full featured (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), and these are free anyway. Or these are apps that are filling a very niche market, (macOS Server, Apple Configurator). How many times have Apple made it clear that they’re not an app company? Jobs said it a million times. When they do build apps it’s usually to jump start a market or because no developer has met their basic standards for what an app should be like. Airport was the hardware equivalent of this strategy. When the market matured Apple dropped Airport (and I wish they hadn’t).

I don’t think Warren and people like her have a clue how little these apps add to the bottom line. They’re valuable in that they place a competitive app into a market they want to see grow. These apps sell the idea of macOS as a platform. And macOS helps sell the hardware. That’s were Apple makes their money. But Apple rarely has the best app or the standard in any category. FCPX and in a way Logic are the only two and their competition isn’t hurting. IT HELPS THE COMPETITION. This goes all the way back to the Claris days. I was at Apple back then, I would know. 

I doubt she she even consulted with anyone about this. 

I wonder if Apple could include Spatial Audio recording on the iPhone at some point, (in other words, a built in ambisonic mic with an SoC co-processor and a preference on how to decode it, unless it's Spatial Audio only - or at least make the files compatible with Logic Pro ). The mic array will have to somehow use an algorithm that would create an Ambisonics array out of their mics, because physically it's impossible to record Atmos/Spatial Audio ready audio without an ambisonic capsule array. I would think a special renderer on the SoC could handle this but I'm not exactly sure if it's possible. 

If so, that's a feature that I'd buy a new iPhone for alone. Small market I know. 

“Can you imagine how cool it would be to just see the vibrations of sound waves? It will be even better than reading lips; nothing can be hidden, not even text tones.”


 It would be impossible. Waveforms show timbre, which is made up of harmonics, and amplitude. Those two don’t combine to make up any kind of shape that would correspond to words at all because waveforms also contain the sound of a person‘s voice in the timbre, how loud they spoke (in the amplitude), and a lot more.