misa

Soli said:

wozwoz said:

Maybe Apple should stop making keyboards too - too much trouble ... just buy a Mac and add your own keyboard from Logitech.  Who needs those pesky 'entitled' customers ... Heck - why should Apple make a mouse anymore either? After all, Logitech makes them too. Of course, there is the small itsy bitsy issue of Steve Jobs touting the unique advantage of Apple being able to seamlessly integrate hardware and software, at every stage of the user experience ... and that only Apple can do this ... that THAT is Apple's unique advantage. Ummm - maybe somebody forgot that. Oopsy bad. 

1) It sure sounds like you've forgotten that. People have complained about Apple's mice since the beginning… and I mean the very beginning. It would be naysayers—maybe even you—that would have balked at the idea of the Mac. People that said that the mouse is useless gimmick, that real work is done with the command line, that Apple has lost its way, and would have used the failed Lisa as proof that the GUI and mouse were failed concepts that no one wanted and reduced productivity for "pro" users. History has shown that all those whiners with their prognostication of doom and gloom were wrong.

2) You should look into the W1 chip that Apple introduced 2 months ago. While it's now used in 2 shipping pairs of headphones by Beats and soon to be used in a 3rd pair of headphone with the Apple branding, it's primary function is to intelligently connect and maintain a power-efficient, always-ready paired connection with one or more devices via BT. This means that the current W1 chip, future W-series chips, and horizontally integrated development of their other wireless technologies  could be adopted for a future mouse/trackpad, a data-heavy wireless keyboard with a Touch Bar (and possible a T1 chip with Touch ID and Apple Pay), WiFi (IEEE 802.11), and even cellular broadband with their iPhone and iPad (or Mac or Watch). This is not technology in which to scoff at or write off as frivolous.

Wireless audio is a mistake, I don't care who does it. Putting wireless things in your ears is looney, and I'm not even one of those people who believes wireless will cause cancer, this is just bad for so many reasons from a latency and bandwidth perspective that I hope it's a really short lived technology. Bluetooth headphones were always terrible and I refused to buy any after the first bluetooth headset I never got more than 4 hours of use out of. It was much less of a pain in the ass to plug in the earbuds/headphones that came with the phone.

Wireless should be limited to only connecting high bandwidth devices together, not accessories. Wireless mice and keyboards have the exact same latency problems and I also will not use those either. 

While I'm not really a fan of Apple's monitors (because they're nothing special compared to any monitor with the same manufacturer's panel) I am a fan of the industrial design of not-ugly computer equipment all with the same color scheme. Right now all my equipment is black. That is by choice. When I bought an iPhone I put a black otterbox on it. I would have loved to not have to, but cell phones are the one thing that you're insane if you don't put any kind of protection on it, even if it's pretty solid to begin with. I dropped my iPad a few years ago and dog-eared one corner of it, the glass didn't pop out or crack, but you can definitely see where the glass is being pushed out by half a millimeter. So I don't want a repeat of that. My previous cell phone I always carried around in a cloth bag/sock thing that came with it.

Which brings me back to the topic. I think Apple is likely to redesign the entire iMac/MacMini/Apple Display thing. Let's say for the sake of argument that they make a USB-C monitor that has a built in Geforce 1080. That would allow an AppleTV/MacMini/iMac/Mac Pro not need a GPU at all. That's a bit of a hard sell for a Mac Pro (Xeon's don't have GPU parts at all, so I imagine that there would be at least one GPU in it) but the others always come with weak GPU's that can't be upgraded. Remember when Apple was supposed to be working on an TV?

Samsung might have been barking up the right tree with it's evolution box for it's TV's, but now replace that idea with a AppleTV->MacMini-iMac upgrade process. Wouldn't it make so much more sense to be able to use the same "screen" and upgrade it from dumb-screen for laptop/Mac Pro use, to AppleTV use if you want to use it as a TV, to a full blown MacMini/iMac with additional USB-c ports to connect your own keyboard/mouse?

(Incidently, Samsung is now getting flack for not releasing a 2016 upgrade kit)

rogifan_new said:

This headline is stupid. You can't capture more than 100% of something.

Sure you can. It's like a bonus question on a quiz, not a question of efficiency in a friction/energy/motion equation.

... and someone else already posted a better analogy.

At any rate, the point is that Apple is gaining at other phone vendor's expense, so if Apple now makes 100%+ of the profits, that means that someone (eg Microsoft/Nokia, RIM/Blackberry) lost revenue. eg They lost money with every phone.

durandal_1707 said:

blastdoor said:

Well, it's Apple's fault that they keep using Intel processors instead of something based on their wind-storm ARM cores. 

ARM still has not caught up to Intel in terms of performance, so claiming about the performance of Apple's Intel-based machines and wishing for ARM instead is an odd position to be taking.

This keeps happening. People keep going "Apple will use ARM in their MacBooks" and all you have to do is look at the iPad Pro and go "why would they bother?"

The iPad Pro is better at being a laptop than many of the Intel-based i3 parts. There is no demand to run macOS software on the iPad Pro. This is different from Microsoft's problem where they completely fumbled by releasing not one, but two different products that people didn't want. They released Windows 8 without the "classic" interface, thus subjecting desktop users to what is clearly a touch-interface that nobody had (Microsoft didn't learn this lesson with Windows CE/Mobile either) but they then put out an ARM-based Windows Surface laptop/tablet that didnt't run Windows classic software either. Microsoft illustrates the folly of trying to have one OS be everything. Microsoft should have literately stolen Apple's idea and released the "Windows 8 UI" as it's own OS even if the underlying OS could still run classic applications through a control panel widget. It should be been "Buy all your apps from the Microsoft store" just like Apple. They might have even gotten away with calling the Windows 8 UI OS "Windows Metro 8 " and then later releasing a "Windows 8 64-bit" for the desktop/laptop and drop support for 32-bit CPU's.

But no, Microsoft in all it's brilliant screwups since Bill Gates left, opted for the ARM chip for no reason and then abandoned it. See also Zune, and Windows CE/Mobile where Microsoft just outright abandoned a software/hardware product and shot off their own foot in the process. Who was going to buy a Windows Phone now? Microsoft is just going to abandon Windows Phone users, and have done so. If you want the mass market to adopt something you have to put your full support behind it, and unfortunately Microsoft only puts their full support behind their Office product and the Xbox. Nothing else. A surface-series computer is a hard sell because you know Microsoft is not going to support it for 8 years.

jaffa said:

I didn't realise before I read this that Apple are still using IPS LCD - in a 2016/2017 device, that's hilarious. OLD-tech display, no HD on the small phone, no SD slot, can't copy files on and off. But, but, but you can get it in shiny black - hahahahahahahh, I have to stop or I'll wet myself.

Perhaps you need better reading comprehension.

IPS, is the de-facto gold standard for displays. Not OLED. Likewise HD has a vague definition but it generally means any vertical line resolution of 720 to 1080. Above 1080 but below 2160 is neither HD or UHD. Anything below 720 but above 480 lines is neither SD or HD as well. It's a marketing term more than it is a technical one.

The goal right now is rec.2020 colorspace (wide gamut,) but no display technology is close to this. Most HD televisions only meet rec.709, which is something that a TN LCD can accomplish. Quantum-dot displays (marketed by Samsung) might be able to pull this off. Rec.2020 requires 10 or 12 bits per sample. IPS are 8 or 10 bit displays. It's currently only possible to hit rec.2020 with lasers.

OLED's also are super-dim. That's something you don't want in cell phones. Then there is the lack of durability to the actual OLED pixels, which both burn out quickly and have image retention "image burn-in" issues.

The reason Apple is sticking with IPS panels is because that is the best currently available technology. An e-ink rec.2020 display is impossible, but that is likely what everyone would like. OLED screens have been available since 2004. You might notice that Apple's desire to make the phones water-proof. That would be an absolute requirement to use OLED as moisture instantly destroys OLED displays. OLED's consume more power for "solid white" types of visuals such as reading AppleInsider. So you weigh all these things and the only justificable reason for Apple to even consider switching to OLED is that someone has come along and solved all these problems.

Personally I'd never buy an OLED device. I'm waiting for rec.2020 availability before I commit to replacing my existing computer screens, but I might have to settle for a 4K IPS screen.

1983 said:

Why? Here we go again Apple crippling the 13" Pro's spec in comparison to the ridiculously more expensive 15" version. Even though they're both very expensive laptops to begin with. They give you something good with one hand, slap you in the face with the other. The 15" already has a lot of power user advantages over the 13", they could of at least given the 13" 4 'proper' TB3 ports.

I'm almost willing to bet this is a limitation of the CPU. The 15" models are quad-cores while the 13" are dual-core. Notice there is also a RAM speed difference between 13" models as well that wouldn't otherwise be justified.

What I bet, is that all 4 ports support full speed, but the dual core CPU doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to support running all of them on the dual core, so there's a bridge chip that creates more lanes, but is technically splitting one.

If you look at https://thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/all/themes/tb/images/Thunderbolt3_infographic_100715.jpg

You'll note that the chip itself is 10Gbits, and allows 4 PCIe lanes to go over thunderbolt. So to have 4 ports you need 16 PCIe lanes free. Take note that Skylake only has 16 PCIe lanes from the CPU, and 20 come from the PCH. Now, on the Quadcore models, you also have a dedicated GPU. That means those 16 lanes on the CPU are connected to the GPU, and all the thunderbolt lanes are connected to the PCH. 

So if you look at http://ark.intel.com/products/91169/Intel-Core-i7-6660U-Processor-4M-Cache-up-to-3_40-GHz , which is a dual core, what do you see?
12 PCIe lanes.

Versus the top-of-the-line model http://ark.intel.com/products/93336/Intel-Core-i7-6970HQ-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz
16 PCIe lanes.

So if this is the kind of thing Apple did, then it's reasonable to believe that the 13" model only has 12 PCIe lanes, so two ports are going to share 4 lanes. That may not be meaningful depending on what you connect to it. Desktop and Server models all have 16 PCIe lanes.

Some dual core models only have 10 lanes (m5 and m7 models.)