macplusplus

entropys said:

It is a dilemma. I would want to buy MBPs for my daughters, but I am sure the younger one would probably want the gold MBA. Maybe the money and weight saved would go to a USB hub so when inevitably one of her friends want to give her something on a USB stick she can actually use it.


on the touchbar issue: I think adoption would be easier if Apple actually went all in. Where is the magic keyboard with a Touch Bar? Will the Mac Pro, iMac pro and the iMac end up with the touchbar? because i suspect one reason there is still grief about it (apart from raising the cost of the notebook) is it isn’t universal enough for a critical mass of developers to bother taking advantage of it.

rossb2 said:

I think Apple are making too many laptops, with the air. They dropped the 12 inch. But the air that is left, I find it pointless. It is not light enough to really be an air. Plus it is only a 7 watt TDP processor, and only two cores. For those reasons alone I would go with the pro. I feel that Apple should be concentrating on economies of scale with the pro, and just selling that. Splitting your customers off on to the air seems wasteful at this point.

user847 said:

To me a bigger difference would be that for the price of the MBP you can get the air with double the storage at 256GB and get the whole thing in gold. 

That’s a way better deal than slightly faster and slightly better screen. 

canukstorm said:

wizard69 said:

1STnTENDERBITS said:

Amazon has the 9.7" iPad for $249.  Couldn't resist.  I picked up 2 yesterday to replace 4 aging iPads of various vintages going all the way back to the OG iPad - which still works btw.  Giving those away to friends and family.  The new ones should last just as long as the ones they're replacing.  One for the fam, and one for me.

Great deal!    However I’m worried, these new models could be significantly better if the next A series chip lives up to expectations.  Well A series and Apple removing head from but and addressing the RAM and SSD sizes (one can hope).  I can imagine Apple wanting to kick off iPadOS with really compelling hardware.  

Im not sure how other people see this but iPadOS “could” be a jig thing at Apple.   I say could because it takes a man with vision to move a platform forward and do it in a way that inspires the user base.  I’m not even sure such a person exists at Apple right now.  If he does exist I can see Apple being persuaded to really goose up the iPad to make the new OS attractive.  

iPadOS might be a beginning to something bigger

https://www.macprices.net/2019/07/26/with-the-new-ipados-apple-is-paving-the-way-to-a-forthcoming-merger-of-ios-macos/

elijahg said:

The whole music app's GUI isn't great. It is quite a bit better in iOS 13 however. The Airplay UI is pretty clunky still, especially since they shoehorned in the ability to control currently playing devices - which is great, but needs a better implementation. Maybe a grid of playing devices rather than having to scroll through a linear list. But I digress..

My main complaint with Apple Music is its algorithm isn't anywhere near as good as Spotify's imo. When Siri is shuffling with music that I'll apparently like, there're two problems: one being a lack of new music, second is when it does insert new music it isn't remotely similar to music already in my library. More often than not it ends up with "Hey Siri, skip this". The "new music mix" is generally terrible and weighted toward pop crap which I don't like, and have none of in my library. It knows I don't like pop/hip hop, I've told it enough times, and yet it still pushes it over and over. Friends who have had both Spotify and Apple music seem to prefer Spotify's algorithm, which may be part of the reason people aren't taking up Apple Music quite as they were.

The curated playlists on Apple music are great, but again they're weighted strongly toward hip-hop, R&B and pop stuff and even the slightly less popular genres have a very limited number of curated playlists to choose from. For example, the "throwback" section of Apple Music has 21 playlists, 12 of those are "pop."

Not sure Iovine has had much to do with the highly computer sciencey art of algorithm writing, and there doesn't seem to be that much to show for the money he's apparently spent.