AppleZulu

xyzzy01 said:

CuJoYYC said:

I'm sure the delay is Apple's fault.
 

That's likely, actually. Before Apple launched lossless with no change in price, it was an option that came at a premium. When Apple just included it in their normal subscription, launching it at a higher price tier was less attractive - and adding it to their normal subscription wo ld just cost Spotify more in fees and bandwidth.

Spotify makes their living from their service, for Apple it's just a part of keeping you in the eco system.

Apple's decision to make lossless and spatial audio formats available at no extra cost is what moved those things (particularly spatial audio) from niche formats into the mainstream. Tidal had Dolby Atmos a year before Apple, but paying extra for it was a truly unrewarding experience. The extra cost kept the user base small, which made the incentive to produce and make content available in those formats correspondingly small. It was a death-spiral. A few months after signing up, you'd listened to what they had, and new premium content was arriving at a slow trickle. Then Apple opened lossless and spatial audio up to all of its subscribers, and there was suddenly a reason to make the effort to produce and master lossless and spatial audio content, and there's been a flood of it rolling out since.

On the one hand, that surely threw a kink into Spotify's plans of charging a premium to pay for building out the storage and bandwidth, but on the other hand, because of Apple, there's already a lot of content produced and made available in high resolution formats. 

It's interesting, however, that even at this point, it looks like Spotify is wimping out quite a bit. There's no mention of spatial audio at all, and while it appears they're going to have full 24-bit depth on the vertical axis, they're limiting the sampling rate (the horizontal axis) to 14.1 kHz, the bare minimum to qualify. Apple's lossless streaming is up to 24-bit/48kHz, and you can download 24-bit/192kHz audio files. 

While it's true that Apple has a whole ecosystem to support their decisions, it's doubtful that they're taking a financial loss beyond the very short term to implement their lossless and spatial audio music formats. I probably wouldn't recommend investing in Spotify, because they truly seem to lack the fundamentals at both ends of their business. They're on the low end for paying out to artists for content (the thing they sell), and are clearly struggling to generate the revenue required to keep up with the now-inevitable shift to lossless and spatial audio formats, the merging standard for the thing they sell. Talk about a death spiral, you may be looking at one right there. 

This just reinforces my thought that Apple will be rolling out an AI implementation that will allow Siri to provide you with a morning news summary sourced from your Apple News+ app, avoiding copyright issues entirely. It could also include information from other sources to which you have subscribed. It will verbally give you the news summary, naming sources, and then offer to drop links to any items of particular interest that you would like to read in full later. 

ssfe11 said:

There is something seriously wrong with this woman. 

Warren is right about a lot of things, banks and other predatory lenders, for instance. 

She's misguided about Apple, however. A lot of people are misguided about Apple, even among regular commenters here. Even though it's right there for everyone to see, people simply do not understand that Apple functions differently from other tech companies. Its devices are produced as complete units, software and hardware developed together. As @darelrex pointed out above, it's not divisional. After all these years, it's surprising that no other company in this sector has copied that model, but it sets Apple apart, and makes people erroneously believe that it's "stifling competition" in areas where it's not designed to have competition in the first place. Apple operating systems do not compete with other operating systems for placement on third-party hardware. Apple hardware does not compete with other hardware for adoption by third-party operating systems. Because it remains a unique characteristic, people do not "get it," which leads to Sen. Warren's confusion, as well as the confusion of regulars here, who are constant posting things about what Apple should do that will never be things that Apple will do, because Apple doesn't work that way.

DAalseth said:

rotateleftbyte said:

DAalseth said:

The smartest thing Apple did, and also the most criticized, has been to not use macOS on the iPad. It’s a different device, that needs a different environment and UI. Now I think it could do more, and slowly they are making padOS do more. But if they had just dropped macOS onto the iPad, like Microsoft has done with the Windows on the Surface, it would have languished and died. macOS would not fit on a tablet. The modifications you would need to make it work on a tablet environment would be so extensive that, you’d end up with padOS.

The fact that Apple had the guts to go all in and not try to shoehorn a desktop onto the iPad is to a great extent why it is doing so well.

MacOS would fit on the iPad but that is not the point.

Exactly, they could have, it’s capable of running full macOS, but they were smart enough to understand that would have been a mistake.

danvm said:

DAalseth said:

The smartest thing Apple did, and also the most criticized, has been to not use macOS on the iPad. It’s a different device, that needs a different environment and UI. Now I think it could do more, and slowly they are making padOS do more. But if they had just dropped macOS onto the iPad, like Microsoft has done with the Windows on the Surface, it would have languished and died. macOS would not fit on a tablet. The modifications you would need to make it work on a tablet environment would be so extensive that, you’d end up with padOS.

The fact that Apple had the guts to go all in and not try to shoehorn a desktop onto the iPad is to a great extent why it is doing so well.

Maybe Apple didn't shoehorn a desktop in iPadOS, and that's the reason we see the limitations, for example, in multitasking. .  

Not sure why multitasking comes up. I mean it does. Maybe you don’t have separate windows for everything, oh yeah, now you do, but it does. As far as the Surface being a “better device”, I’d let sales answer that one. Sure the surface has the full Win11 environment going for it, but the iPad outsells it handily.

danox said:

DAalseth said:

The smartest thing Apple did, and also the most criticized, has been to not use macOS on the iPad. It’s a different device, that needs a different environment and UI. Now I think it could do more, and slowly they are making padOS do more. But if they had just dropped macOS onto the iPad, like Microsoft has done with the Windows on the Surface, it would have languished and died. macOS would not fit on a tablet. The modifications you would need to make it work on a tablet environment would be so extensive that, you’d end up with padOS.

The fact that Apple had the guts to go all in and not try to shoehorn a desktop onto the iPad is to a great extent why it is doing so well.

That is very true. The iPad didn’t need the full OS on it, I think people saying that it should have the full OS are just using it as a talking point and it’s like saying Apple should have a touchscreen on the Mac computer, not taking into consideration that the Apple touchpad is by far the best in the business, Microsoft to this day, still can’t get it, close to right.

I had occasion to configure and support some Win touch screen systems, as well as some experimental work trying to integrate a Surface into the systems the company I worked for manufactured. Windows with touch scabbed on top really is not a good experience. Apple went the right route starting with a simplified UI and adding features to it. 

Now after 13 years of growth, it’s a powerful system. My M1 iPP is my primary computing device for creativity and business. 

The thing people forget when they say macOS should run on iPad is the fact that macOS also runs every Mac up to Mac Pro. This sets up significant functionality conflicts noted in your experience with Windows. An iPad without a touch UI would be pointless. A Mac Pro with touch would be pointless. (A multi-screen desktop workstation with a touch UI would be an ergonomic nightmare.) An OS that carries two different UIs, with each displaying separately based on the hardware configuration adds a lot of useless bloat and increased likelihood of bugginess. 

There’s a good reason iPhone was created with its own distinct touch-based UI, rather than some sort of adaptation of macOS. It followed easily with the introduction of the iPad that a tablet device would be better served by an extension of iOS than by an extension of macOS. Even as iPad has become a much more powerful hardware device, that fact still remains true, and this continues to be the reason there won’t be an iPad and MacBook merger, a la MS Surface. A tablet with a workstation OS with a touch UI scabbed on top is a hot mess. 

It was an interesting choice to leave this out of the article, but here's the link: https://www.apple.com/iphone/why-upgrade/ 

It's interesting to note that the page only compares iPhone 11 and 12 models (but not iPhone 13 or 14 models) to the iPhone 15. 

Perhaps this link should be offered without comment as the stock response to the annual whinging about "incrementalism" when new iPhone models come out.