saldog

But why would anyone prefer Chrome over Safari?

My company has over 200K users and we use Google Suite/Workspace for document creation/management. It works in Safari, but there are many small things that do not work or do not work quite right. We must use Chrome, unfortunately. I use Safari for everything else, but Chrome for work.

Exactly -- the Amazon and Sonos products seem unable to natively access your iCloud Music Library or Apple Music subscriptions, and can only act as an endpoint receiver of audio. That is the status quo and is no big deal. But now for the HomePod, if it can't access Spotify natively, that is somehow a Really Big Deal (tm) despite being the exact same sort limitation everyone has accepted on the Sonos and Alexa products.

I think this illustrates the hypocrisy of those grading Apple on a curve.

Apple Music and iCloud Music are the ONLY music services that Sonos doesn't play natively, requiring you to stream those from iOS. All other services (~65) are handled directly by each Sonos device. So, not fair to imply this puts Sonos on the same compatibility level of HomePod. It seems to me the restriction is by Apple, not Sonos. For those who use non-Apple music services, no system comes close to Sonos for compatibility. It would be nice if Apple was the same way with HomePod, but at this point, I think Apple is only concerned with appealing to Apple Music customers, which is not a bad approach since they have more of those than they do HomePod owners. I was on the fence about doing my 8-location multi-room setup with HomePods (which sound great), but the price is just a little too high for that. If Apple had a lower cost speaker closer to Sonos One, I would have mixed and matched the two types across the house and bought an Apple Music subscription. Instead, I went with Sonos and bought Amazon Music, which works well over Sonos and all of our Echos.

Some Apple fans don't pay much attention to the entire streaming music landscape. Apple is fighting to stay relevant and must evolve its product to keep its installed base and grow it. Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, and others are offering higher quality music so this was no surprise at all. What is a bit of a surprise is that Apple is offering it at no extra charge. Amazon was charging extra for their HD stream but two days after Apple announced theirs, Amazon sent an email out to customers with a link to switch to HD for free.

I get it that many people out there didn't really understand that Bluetooth is the limitation here. They don't understand digital vs analog and what a DAC is and so forth. But once you do understand everything that goes into streaming an audio file and playing it back over the ultimate analog device, your speakers/headphones, you can see that Apple had to make tough decisions. Like not having a true analog input, requiring a fidelity-mangling ADC before any of the "magic" can be done in computational audio, which is all digital.

Apple could have just invented its own standard for wireless music transmission. Of course, they'd be criticized for not using an accepted standard like Bluetooth. There's no escaping criticism no matter what they do. They may actually be working on a new protocol utilizing either the U1 or H1 chips that would augment Bluetooth and make up for its lack of bandwidth, but there will be a limit, barely allowing Lossless but no more, so forget about ever playing back Hi-Res over your current wireless product. Getting full CD-quality would be a nice jump over others, like Sony.

But this move to support Lossless and High-Resolution was completely expected, logical, and welcome by many people who listen to music over external hardware. Not just audiophiles but just about anyone that owns an AV receiver, for example, taking an HDMI input from an Apple TV. I'm sure that Sonos users will also welcome this.

Lastly, you probably wouldn't hear much difference between AAC 256Kbps and Lossless anyway over a HomePod mini or Airpods Pro or most of the Beats phones other than the Beats Pro (wired). Perhaps you could hear an improvement with AirPods Max. But if you really cared about sound quality, you wouldn't be using any of these and instead would have a DAC/Amp and high-quality analog headphones. That would be a night and day improvement. Yes, even if you spent the same money as a pair of AirPods Max headphones.

"Both versions also include support for Wide Color (P3)"

The previous MacBook Air models did not support DCI-P3 so this is incorrect. It is new to the M1.

12Strangers said:

A helmet might have helped a little bit too.

Helmets are required by law in Singapore. Do you think he wasn't wearing one?

Or, are you saying the helmet deserves the credit for saving his life rather than the watch? If the latter, I see your point.

Apple forgot how to STAY HUNGRY.