robjn

jbdragon said:

Those prices are just crazy. Apple will be pricing themselves right out of the market if this rumor is true. If Apple is going to release a so called iPhone 7s and 7s Plus and a iPhone 8, well then the iPhone 7s and 7s Plus are already outdated!!! The 8 is over priced, and I'd stick with my iPhone 6 for a 4th year.

I don't think anyone really thinks it will be called "iPhone 8" that would position it as a successor to the 7s.

The new premium tier will likely be called iPhone Pro or iPhone Edition.

It will be priced out of the market. Apple might sell one of these for every 6 lower tier iPhones. And the point is that this is all they will be able to manufacture.

It will cost $1200 - $1500 and after 9 months there will still be a 4-6 week shipping delay for new orders.

Gruber's piece is excellent and his logic is rock solid.

bill42 said:

Metriacanthosaurus said:

With no exaggeration, the Home Pod appears to be the best home speaker money can buy.

Sadly at this size it will be lacking adequate bass to fill a decent sized room. Sonos and other competing sound systems with optional subwoofers will blow the audio quality of the HomePod out of the water. That being said I think the HomePod will surely be the best smart speaker that listens to and responds to voice commands with support for smart home systems. Perhaps that is what you meant to say.

Serious bass can be generated from a four inch woofer so long as it moves at the right frequency and generates sufficient pressure.

Large speakers generate a more pressure since they have a bigger diaphragm surface area and they also tend to have a lower natural frequency.  You get a boomy sounding bass when you are listening to large enclosure resonate but this is not a true reproduction of the source.

In this case Apple are generating a lot of pressure by means of high displacement. The combination of high displacement and a small back volume can result in high pressure = loud sound.

There is an old myth that a speaker enclosure needs to be as big as the wavelength it is generating. Since bass frequencies might have a wavelength more than ten meters long - no speaker is big enough. The fact is that the back volume can be small and we don't want to listen to the resonance of the enclosure we want to listen to the resonance of the diaphragm.

This patent shows that Apple have found a way to tightly control a driver by measuring and adjusting to external factors that effect the radiating impedance.

It's going to be interesting to see a tear down of the HomePod. There might be more microphones than the six Apple has shown us. I'm curious as to whether each of the tweeters has an integrated microphone in the back or if this technique is applied only to the woofer.

There is much more to HomePod DSP than this one patent covers. Those six external mics are being used to do a lot of different stuff!

Apple's share price did not appear to double. It appeared to loose about $20.

It seems that only a few sources made this mistake but it spread - I spotted it at the head of the 9to5Mac home page. I checked a better source and confirmed it was an error.

It can't practically replace TouchID.

Imagine holding your phone down to the reader to pay for your Tube journey and having to lean over and push your face down their over the reader!

Facual recognition would be a welcome edition, especially for some accessibility situations and perhaps for unlocking your phone, but it would be impractical for Apple Pay.

if TouchID is not under the display or on the back it must be on a side button (as per Patent filing). In my opinion this is the ideal place for it.