bitmod

gmgravytrain said:

I think as long as Apple can prove that their iOS user base will continue to climb, TimeWarner should be convinced they'll get their money's worth. Apple needs to market AppleMusic more than they currently do. Considering Apple has 1B active iOS users, 20 to 30 million AppleMusic subscribers doesn't seem like a very large number. That's about 3% tops of Apple's entire iOS user base. I would have thought Apple could get closer to 50 million AppleMusic subscribers at this point but that was just my rough guess.

Have you tried Spotify? 
Vastly superior in every conceivable way. 

Apple needs to implement HiFi audio streaming. (MQA)
Make Airplay easier to license for HiFi companies.
Remove the DRM from Airplay.
Fire everyone they have doing curation and start over. 
Completely re-work the GUI of Apple Music so it's even somewhat logical. 
Support more HiFi companies.
Add better DAC's to their gear.

They do this and they won't be perceived as a streaming service catering to top-40 teenie boppers - listening to garbage on garbage earbuds. 
Curated by lousy algorithms perpetuated by mainstream DJ's recommending more the same mainstream. 

Streaming is about the excitement of discovering new music and having it sound great and work flawlessly. Spotify gets this. 
Apple see's streaming as just another computerized revenue stream to enhance their ecosystem.

I just bought a maxed out 2017 i7 iMac... and I have to say i'm quite disappointed... the first time ever in 30 years. 
The screen isn't as nice as the 2015 even thou it's supposed to be a better panel. (professionally calibrated). It has slightly more detail in shadows, but very muted / desaturated colors. No vibrancy.
The 'brightness' improvement is false advertising. It's no brighter than the 2015 panel. This is from both visual and spider readings. 

The keyboard (that I paid an extra $40 for keypad) is a total piece of shit!
It feels cheap - because it is cheap.  It's barely angled unlike the previous keyboards. The keys are super cheap, noisy, wobble, and I'm having nothing but repeat or mis-key problems. And to top it all off, they removed the usb ports on the side. 

I don't notice any improvement over the 2015 in RL performance. Running all the benchmarks the new one is scoring slightly higher. 
All-in-all... it's a bit faster on paper, but built cheaper. 

My first new Mac that i'm disappointed in. 
Welcome to Tim's world. 

Congratulations to Betty Jones and her St. Vincent 5th grade classmates on their 900k windfall!

I looked at one last week. The Apple store employee was touting the health feature of tracking pulse.
I told them my phone can also check my pulse. I then proceeded to show them how as they had no idea you could.
As the watch still needs to be paired to the phone - the only advantage of the watch is a little bit of convenience.

I could see it being handy for the fitness enthusiast who wants to monitor pulse while working out, (you have to be still for phone to work).
At this point in time thou, I still can't find a compelling reason to get one.
Anyone who is going to drop some serious cash on a watch for fashion isn't even going to consider a techy watch. They are going to get something mechanical that can be passed down to grandchildren. What's the shelf life of these watches? A couple years?

I think it would have to replace a phone to be compelling - and that tech is at least 10 years away.

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

Keynote is 50-70 years ahead of PowerPoint. I don't know anyone who uses PP anymore - it's dead.
When I quote medical presentations: $5-7k in Keynote - $90-150k for the same thing in PP and it will look like shit. In other words, I refuse to touch it.

Pages is so much easier to use than Word. I do a lot of my work in pages, then just export as a word document. Saves me days, weeks and tens of thousands of dollars working in Pages. Things that take 1.5 seconds in Pages are a 3 day odyssey in Word... like importing a pdf or vector image with layers. Apple you copy paste or drag/drop vector images - Word you need to hire a team of engineers, consult the Oracle from another planet, shake a chicken over your head during a full moon eclipse and pray for the best...

Excel is a bit better than Numbers.

Although not as refined as Adobe Creative Cloud - The apps are miles ahead in terms of creating somewhat interesting creative documents. Small-Midsize businesses.
Office has all the mega enterprise functionality for 50,000 people sharing and modifying a sourced document threaded through a network etc...