cgWerks

I’ll go on record admitting I consider Elon near hero-status for taking over Twitter and exposing the corruption.

That said, I don’t agree with several of his decisions regarding Twitter as a business. He didn’t buy it *just* to be altruistic, and fear for what it might become. What he/they did to Twitter 3rd party apps was really uncalled for. That’s the kind of thing you do with advanced notice.

I do support this character expansion limit, but primarily to make threads unnecessary. Sometimes you just want (or more, need to) post a few paragraphs or include some information, and having to break it up across a dozen tweets doesn’t benefit anyone, IMO.

What I don’t get (if I’m understanding correctly), is the showing the summary with ‘more’ button for non-Twitter-Blue, but for Blue, will it just display the whole thing? I think it would be better to have the more for everyone, as having some huge ‘tweets’ is going to make using Twitter harder, I’d think.

danox said:

Oh boy, a bigger Landfill doesn’t make for better garbage….

Garbage is everywhere. If you don’t know how to sift through it, you’re in trouble. But, sometimes more data is necessary, especially to make or rebut a point. It is a welcome addition, I’m just not sure of the implementation. Like it or not, Twitter is where it is at for a lot of information flow. I don’t think that is going to change.

AppleInsider said:
… "While Apple's headphones do a good job of approximating spatialization, they're not able to fully replicate being within a speaker array, and it mostly seems like a marketing tactic to sell more headphones and differentiate Apple Music," he said. …

This fairly well sums it up in my experience so far. It would be boon to the audio industry if everyone were to try and put ‘Spatial Audio’ systems in to replace their ‘surround sound’ systems, which replaced their ‘stereo systems’ which were often considerably better anyway. Outside audiophiles, the overall quality of listening to music has been on a fairly steady decline, IMO, from the 70s onward, at least in terms of home audio systems. We’ve got lots of lights, bells, and whistles to take the place of quality, though.

Improvements have primarily come in car stereos and headphones, in terms of the average person having a better experience. I’ve tried Spatial Audio a few times, but find it more annoying than beneficial. I suppose like 3D movies or even real surround sound, there is certain content/context where it is nice, or at least a quick thrill.

InspiredCode said:

…I think part of the GPU story is being missed, but we will see. Apple knows they have a hole to fill in preview rendering and they have been putting a lot of effort in to making metal ready on the software side. ….

Yeah, I guess the question is whether they are committed to creating a solution, vs just letting that market segment go. It sure seems they are somewhat committed based on software work and partnerships (ie. Blender, Vectorworks, etc.) and some hardware.

I suppose I’m mostly concerned it will be another Apple so-so attempt where it will be kind of almost enough, but not truly competitive, forcing us once again into a situation I was hopeful Apple Silicon would resolve when it was announced.

Currently, from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t much matter if it is 72 GPU corers, 128 GPU cores, or 256 GPU cores, etc. it won’t be competitive (or even really close to the Intel Mac Pro) without some GPU piece we’re currently missing.

Kind of a wild and shaky rumour here, but unfortunately matches what I’ve been anticipating. My read on it is that if you need serious GPU power, a PC is in the cards for the next couple of years. Then maybe.

beowulfschmidt said:
I'm amazed that anyone still thinks that the exclusion of any kind of "audio in" has anything at all to do with the cost of the component, or in fact any engineering factor.  With the premium prices Apple charges?  No way.

It's sole purpose is to restrict the speaker's use to Apple products so as to encourage the sale of those other Apple products.  It's a simple as that.  Why on earth would Apple want to encourage people to use another company's products?

But because the HomePod line, an accessory, is really only attractive to people who have already invested in the Apple ecosystem, it's not that big a deal, because those people don't want to use other people's products.  This is different from a foundational product like the Apple TV, Mac, or iPhone, in that those users have a wide array of non-Apple products that they are going to want to use.  Can you imagine if Apple restricted the iPhone to only using AirPods products?  Or an Apple TV couldn't be connected to a receiver?  Or a Mac could only use Apple monitors?

Agreed, though to me, that just makes it all the worse. They are purposely limiting a great hardware product, to try and push more income of their services. (Will ‘services’ be the ultimate undoing of Apple?)

But, if that were completely the case, why did the include audio-in on the AirPods Max? My hunch is that it is a combination of wanting to limit the HomePods to Apple services, but maybe even stronger, their conception of what a ‘smart speaker’ is and is for. I suppose smart-speakers don’t tend to have audio-in? I’m probably just not the target market in terms of I could care less about the smart-speaker aspect, I just want a great sounding speaker that is smart about tuning to the environment, etc. I might even consider it NOT having Siri a feature I’d pay for. LOL

dewme said:
My only real concern quality-wise on the new HomePod is whether Apple attempted to correct the component failure issues that were present, if even in small numbers, in the first gen HomePod. I have to assume they did, or at least hope they did because their support channel must have processed some of those failures and finding anecdotal evidence of these failures on social media and secondary repair channels is not terribly difficult.

Aside from audio-input/lag, this is my primary concern. Apple seems to be treating sub-$1k stuff these days as nearly throw-away devices. The ‘old’ Apple I know would have eventually admitted to a problem and extended some kind of replacement program.  They are getting more and more picky about this kind of thing, and not replacing obvious manufacturing defects (ex: my AirPods Pro exhibit the ‘clicking’ problem, and didn’t pass the tests at an authorized service center, but they were manufactured a couple months after Apple’s cutoff).

I love my AirPods Pro, and I’d like a better audio setup of some kind at home (either HomePods or AirPods Max, etc.) but Apple’s service and quality issues on these kind of items are making me wary. This isn’t the Apple anymore where my laptop would be exhibiting a hard-drive clicking ‘pre-failure’ symptom, and the Apple Store genius would walk me over to the shelf and pick out a new one, and do a swap. I don’t even expect that level of service anymore, but I do expect them to admit and honour problems resulting from some kind of known defect.