lorin schultz

macxpress said:

pulseimages said:

I disagree. It’s nice to know for a change that products are finally coming instead of just wondering endlessly. 

I think this is why they started doing it. They kept getting so much backlash about never releasing anything they had to do something to show people that they are working on things.

That being said...I do wish they'd just go back to release something when its ready. I like the element of surprise, but I guess too many people in this world are too damn impatient.

What I would really like, is you know, I don't want to know about HomePod or iMac Pro ahead of time. I don't want to know about it at all. I'd love to see Apple just be able to have a damn keynote and nobody knows why and boom, here is this new iMac Pro with these specs and boom, here is HomePod and it can do this and this and it sounds amazing, etc. I know in this day and age its pretty much impossible because people can't keep their damn mouth shut about anything.

It's got nothing to do with people keeping their mouths shut. There are two good reasons for pre-announcements.

1. It discourages potential customers from buying a competitor's product. Anyone considering a voice-controlled music streaming device last year would probably have purchased a Google, Amazon, or Sonos device. By pre-announcing the HomePod, Apple persuaded a certain number of buyers to wait and buy it instead. The charging pad announcement has probably had the same effect.

2. Business operations require advance planning. In large corporations, acquiring a new workstation may require submitting a proposal with budget many months in advance. If one doesn't know what to expect, one can't make plans. Apple being silent about whether or not the Mac Pro would ever be updated led to at least one production facility I know of switching from Mac to Windows. We now know Apple was developing a new version, but the facility had no way of knowing that. Had they known, they may have waited instead of switching.

While @Soli certainly doesn't need any help from me, I think it's worth mentioning that I got a different impression from his remarks than did you: 

crowley said:

[...] Apple's white knight, graciously donating his time to distribute Apple's stickers (they're free!) to the poor, ignorant masses of independent shopkeepers is just about the saddest thing I've ever heard.   

It would be if (s)he was doing it on behalf of Apple, but he isn't. Accelerating the uptake of Apple Pay benefits those of us who prefer it over other methods of payment. That particular activity serves his own interests. That it also happens to benefit Apple is a side effect and not the motivation.

crowley said:

[...] I wish you well in your quest to being manager in the esteemed company of Apple sycophantry.   

I don't perceive @Soli's comments as sycophantic at all. The read I get from him is that he views Apple as one supplier of goods among many. If what they offer is something he wants, he buys it. If it isn't, he doesn't. What bothers him is not criticism of Apple, but expectations that fall outside free market economics. He champions Apple's freedom to do whatever the hell they want, whether you or I like or not. I don't know why it upsets him so much when others hope for (or even expect) Apple to do things he doesn't think belong on Apple's radar, but his reaction is not Apple worship. If anything, it's Apple agnostic, with the company simply being the theme we all have in common here.

macplusplus said:

[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.

Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.

It's a great idea, and certainly good enough for my particular needs, but I don't know if I'd be as happy if I had bandwidth-intensive tasks to perform.

wizard69 said:

What is really interesting here is all the focus on performance testing.   If this was an Intel platform  performance would be limited by the Intel supplied chips. In otherwords not much they can control performance wise.   This makes me wonder if the machine will be one if the rumored ARM based machines.

Nope. It's about finding problems that don't show up in benchmarks, like this:

“These aren’t necessarily always fundamental performance issues,” notes Ternus. “These aren’t things that you’d find in a benchmark or an automated test flow. You know we have examples where we find something… like it’s a window that a 3D animator uses frequently to make some fine tweaks. The windows are not super graphically intensive in terms of processing and stewing but we have found an issue where that window was taking like 6 to 10 seconds to open and they’re doing that 100 times a day, right? Like ‘I can’t work on a machine like this, it’s too slow,’ so we dig in and we figure out what it was.

“In that case we found something in the graphics driver was not right, and once you know where to look and you fix it, it completely changes the kind of live-on-ability for that system — the productivity for that user completely changed.”

foggyhill said:

Because Apple has properly tested for a neutral sound and not for some random sound. That's the one its' trying to reproduce.

I don't understand what you mean by "tested." There's no such thing as a baseline standard of "neutral sound." There isn't even consistency from one song to the next. The frequency spectrum of an a cappella vocal track bears no resemblance to an electronic dance track. What is this abstract standard of "neutral" Apple is using, and how is it applied to testing?

foggyhill said:

Some people actually said it does make a difference, and I'm inclined to agree, it doesn't sound the same. The uniformity of sound that you get when the sound originates from the speaker itself is not the exactly the same.

Based on Apple's description of how its room correction works, an EQ adjustment shouldn't make any difference, so if it does there's a problem.

Are you sure what you're hearing is real and not placebo effect? Did you do a blind comparison? Did you control other variables? For example, the only way to apply EQ is to use AirPlay. Did you eliminate that as the source of any difference you might perceive?

Humans are easily fooled, and confirmation bias is a powerful force. Since you're predisposed to believing that EQ has a negative affect, you're likely to think you hear that whether it's true or not. The only way to overcome that is a double-blind comparison with controlled variables.