macwhiz

The original AirPort was important, because it was the first readily available consumer-grade WiFi router.

But subsequent models had more problems than benefits.

The AirPort Express brought an audio output jack... but it also required that you plug it straight into an outlet, which usually meant putting it someplace that wasn’t a good choice for a strong radio signal. It also didn’t work well if your (U.S.) wall outlets were getting old, because the weight would cause it to pull out of the wall. And if your outlets were oriented horizontally, the antenna pattern would work poorly.

And they tended to have power supply issues due to overheating, since they were made as small as possible without much regard for heat dissipation. That problem was even worse in the first-generation Time Machine, which packed way too much stuff in a small case. It was a race—what would die from heat death first, the power supply or the hard drive?

Frankly, Time Machine over a network is something of a crapshoot. I’ve had bad luck getting a network-based TM backup to restore. Where possible, I use local external drives; they’re faster and vastly more reliable. An unreliable backup is no backup at all.

There are much better alternatives to the AirPort line when it comes to WiFi routers. For most people, I recommend the Ubiquiti AmpliFi series. It comes with a small cube-shaped router that configures easily via iOS app, and optionally one or two mesh units to extend the signal. It’s very old-Apple-like, and it’s not small for the sake of small.

And for most people who say “but I get Wi-Fi with my cable modem from the cable company,” I point out that most cable companies put a monthly charge on that modem that you can avoid by buying your own modem and router... and in most cases, if you buy your own, you come out ahead within two years or less.

macxpress said:

They do in their A-Series chips and they work quite well, but I'm not sure how well it would work pushing the size/resolution of screens Apple uses for its Macs. Maybe they'd be good. Or, maybe they're also working on a desktop class GPU as well.

The iPad Pro has a 2732 x 2048 resolution. A 15-inch MacBook Pro is 2880x1800. If the next iPad Pro has an Apple-designed GPU, then using that GPU in a MacBook is hardly a stretch. Given that the iPhone X has a resolution of 2436 x 1125 and uses an Apple-designed GPU, it's not that big a stretch.

I can't see Apple using an Intel discrete GPU, for many reasons:

• Intel has a long history of designing seriously underperforming integrated GPUs;
• Intel hasn't designed discrete GPUs for 15 years, and they weren't competitive back then;
• Apple has supposedly been actively trying to reduce its reliance on Intel parts;
• Apple likes to develop hardware that works hand-in-glove with its software. The Apple GPU in the A11 Bionic is purpose-built for Metal, Apple's graphics API. With Apple depreciating OpenGL in macOS Mojave in favor of Metal, it's more likely Apple would design its own built-for-Metal GPU than use Intel's built-for-DirectX GPU;
• If Apple indeed moves to an ARM-based Mac using the A-series processor, of course it's going to use the Apple GPU that's now part of the A-series chip.

It's unlikely it will support Dolby TrueHD; the bitrate is just too high for most users. Dolby Atmos works as a layer on top of Dolby TrueHD, Dolby AC-4, or Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3). Since DD+ is already used by services like Netflix, I'd suspect Apple will use DD+ as the bed for Atmos, but it's possible they might use the more-efficient AC-4.

Fix HomeKit on the Apple Watch. When you open the Home app, it seems responsive for a second or so... and then becomes unresponsive for several seconds while it loads device statuses, etc. When this happens, sometimes it queues up taps, sometimes it doesn't. And using Siri to turn devices on and off from the Apple Watch has gotten painfully laggy in recent iterations of watchOS.

Add real programming to HomeKit. Right now you can define a trigger... but what you can't do is use simple logic: If it's after sunset and this motion sensor is activated...  The obvious way to do this is to (a) bring HomeKit to macOS and (b) integrate it with Automator. This one thing is what keeps HomeKit from being true home automation: You can't truly link things together because you can't use boolean logic (this AND that, this OR that...)