AppleZulu

DuhSesame said:

AppleZulu said:

bigtds said:

Soli said:

So they copied the entire look of the case without copying its utility.  Exhibit A:

What utility is need that isn't provided for off-the-shelf components?

The Apple design involved actual engineering. Though the aesthetics of the new Mac Pro are indeed compelling, the case and internals were designed together, putting a lot of computational power inside, and and then enclosing it in a case that's designed specifically for those internals and is rigid and creates the right airflow to keep the computational power from burning itself up.

Suggesting you can take a look-alike case, fill it with off-the shelf components and get as good or better results than the Mac Pro is nonsensical. You can buy a fiberglass Ferrari lookalike car body and put a VW Beetle under it, or Cadillac parts under it or whatever. Your end result is not going to be a Ferrari. You will have a nifty looking VW bug, or a poorly designed, tricked-out overpowered car that throws a rod or flips over when you try to drive it like it's a Ferrari.

I don't think chassis itself is that complicated, anyone with some proper CNC knowledge could do it, especially for an open standard.

I'm betting there are quite a few patented design features (including the blowers inside) in the Mac Pro box that yield significant cooling performance that are not legally available to "anyone with proper CNC knowledge" to just copy.

Again, you can make a thing that sort of looks like another thing, but when the other thing was created as a result of scads of engineering in its design, "sort of looks like" isn't going to yield the same result. You could stack some giant cylinders so that they look a lot like a Saturn V rocket and then fill it with kerosene, but lighting it up probably won't get you to the moon.

P.S. If "Dune Case" was as careful in making their Mac Pro case copy as they were in making their Mac Pro webpage copy, it is definitely a crappy "sort of looks like" knockoff. Just go to their site and read the text to find some amateur grammatical errors. 

Presumably Apple will offer something like this soon. If you have the hardware and bandwidth to stream UHD movies with 5.1, 7.1 or Dolby Atmos sound, you have the bandwidth for lossless audio.

Aside from lossless audio, there's also currently the niche market for music mixed in 5.1, 7.1 or Dolby Atmos. Right now, you have to buy those on physical media and play them on a Blu-Ray player. When they're done well, these multi-channel formats can be revelatory. There's a small but decent catalog of recordings already available in lossless 5.1 mixes. The recent Beatles reissues of Sgt. Pepper's and the White Album are available that way, and they're outstanding. Abbey Road comes out this month in Dolby Atmos, which is an object-oriented audio format that can use from seven to a bazillion speakers to place sounds in three-dimensional space, not only horizontally around you, but also vertically above you. These formats have been a really small niche market in the past, but were they available through things like Apple TV, which many people already have hooked up to surround sound setups, the market could expand.

Also, for things mixed in an object-oriented format like Dolby Atmos, I think it's possible to decode those into a binaural output, which creates the three dimensional field using earbuds or headphones. If I were to hazard a guess, that might be the thing that has others (like Amazon in this case) coming out with their "HD audio" offering first, before Apple comes out with something significantly better that you didn't know that you needed. Perhaps Apple may come out with lossless and surround formats available not just on the Apple TV, but also a binaural decoder built into your iPhone, making for something pretty remarkable. Add to that, if AirPods can be made to detect motion, you could have not just a binaural surround experience that places instruments in three-dimensional space around you using your earbuds, but it would be possible to actually move your head around within that environment, so that you could actually turn to face the guitar over on the right, or the piano at stage left, etc. 

agilealtitude said:

Haven't been a fan of Eve.  I think their app lacks...and each time I open it to view a short-term history for temp / humidity in my home I have to wait 10 minutes or more, as history is loaded from oldest to newest.  Ridiculous.  I've contacted the company, and their reply was basically "it is what it is".  No thanks.

The wait is because they store that data on the device and transfer it directly to their app on your iPhone when you check for it. They don't put any of it in cloud storage, which is a security selling point. If you check that data more frequently, it doesn't take that long to download the data. Also, in my experience, anyway, it's never taken longer than a couple of minutes, even in cases where I haven't checked for that info in weeks.

“Best” is of course a subjective thing. The iPhone camera is really good, and probably better than most phone cameras and a lot of pocket cameras. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it’s as good or better than a DSLR or one of the mirrorless professional or semi-pro cameras. That would just be hype. 

iPhone lenses are excellent, but they’re tiny and they have limitations. For instance, the reference to zoom functions in the article is partly correct but partly incorrect. There is no optical zoom on an iPhone. If you have a dual-lens iPhone, that means you have two fixed lenses. When playing with the zoom function, 1X is one lens, and 2X is the other lens.  Everything else is “digital zoom,” which is actually just cropping the frame before you save it. Everything between 1X and 2X is cropping the image from the first lens, and everything beyond 2X is cropping the image from the second lens. There are no moving lenses in an iPhone, and there is no optical zoom. 

Optical zoom requires a big lens which has multiple lenses (elements) inside that move closer or further away from each other in order to physically magnify the image that reaches the sensor. It’s physically impossible for the compact lens in an iPhone to do that. 

iPhone lenses are also fixed aperture. In photography aperture is referred to as “f-stop,” and that refers to the size of the opening in the lens that determines how much light comes through. It’s like the pupil in your eye.

In pro- or semi-pro cameras, you can adjust the f-stop, or how big or small the “pupil” is. With the complex physics of light and lenses, this will change your depth-of-field, which refers to whether things near and far are all in focus, or if a certain distance from the camera is in focus, and everything else is more blurry.

Adjusting the aperture can get that great landscape shot where everything is in focus, or that great portrait, where the subject’s face is in focus and everything else is blurred. 

Because the iPhone’s lenses are so tiny, that ‘pupil’ has to stay one size. All the depth of field portrait stuff on an iPhone is simulated after the fact. The dual lenses can help the computer gauge distances, but the rest is computer simulations. It’s done really well, but sometimes if you look around the edges of a head or face where the iPhone has blurred the background, you can see places where the algorithm missed a detail, leaving a tiny bit of background in focus, for instance, or your cat’s whiskers get blurred with the background. On a big camera, that doesn’t happen. 

All this is to say that the iPhone’s cameras are really great, but let’s not kid ourselves by claiming it’s the “best” camera you can get. You can take great pictures with an iPhone, but that person with the big camera next to you is probably getting much better shots than you are. 

beowulfschmidt said:

godofbiscuits said:

They still haven’t figured out how to deal with Apple as a special case in the wider tech market. 

Why should they deal with Apple, or any company for that matter, as a "special" case?

Frankly, I've found CU's ratings to be quite useful, especially when paired with the user reviews.  The fact that my experiences differ on some items, both for the better and the opposite, doesn't invalidate their entire ratings system.

Because, in a misapplied effort to be “impartial,” they often use testing methodologies that directly defeat new technologies.

They tested HomePods in their speaker testing room, which has acoustic wall and ceiling panels that deaden reflected sounds. HomePod actually uses walls and ceilings to actively cancel unwanted acoustics and to create presence in the room.  They tested battery life in MacBook Pros by disabling software features that eliminate redundant data downloads to extend battery performance. Defeating these innovative features makes the devices more like the competition in the tests, but it entirely misses the point of innovation. 

If they reviewed restaurants, they’d pour ketchup on everything they taste, and claim that makes them “impartial.”