bigcountry
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HomePod is sold out, but isn't dead yet - Apple's 'end of life' explained
I had been on the fence about getting a second one to use as a stereo pair. But once I learned that HomePod was being discontinued, I went to my local Best Buy and bought one the next day. I've seen Apple's track record with their discontinued products, and wasn't the least bit concerned about being left with two dud speakers that wouldn't work. And now I wonder why I waited so long to get a stereo pair. They sound amazing together! I work as an audio engineer, and have a (relatively) high-end monitoring set-up for my work. Suffice it to say, I have a high standard. The HomePods easily meet that standard. They are a pleasure to use for casual listening.
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Final Cut Pro trademark hints at possible subscription offering
Because corporations exist to play capricious games of whim the with people who pay them money? Did I miss something here?entropys said:Subscriptions transfer power from the user to the corporation. The Corporation can end your subscription. The end point of all this is you can become an unperson on the whim of the Corporation.
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Spotify HiFi one-ups Apple Music with lossless audio streams
I think about this for a living (audio engineer).Music that is properly Mastered for iTunes (which means encoded in 256kbps HE-AAC format from at least a 48 kHz/24-bit master), is, for 99.99% of listeners listening to 99.9% of recorded music - indistinguishable from lossless-compressed audio.There is a lot of music on all streaming services that is encoded from a 16/44.1 uncompressed source (i.e. CD), or in some cases, from a lossy-compressed original. It results in audible artifacts that most people can readily identify, once they know what to listen for, especially in the latter-case. This is why people say that streamed music sounds terrible. Because a lot of it really does sound bad.It's only the most dynamic and delicate acoustic music that benefits in a meaningful way from lossless compression. And even then, only at 24-bit word depth. 16-bit lossless recordings will sound virtually identical to properly encoded compressed recordings except on the most high-end reproduction systems. There's a reason Apple has not gone down that road. If implemented widely, it would add significant overhead to their services infrastructure with next-to-no tangible benefit, at least outside of marketing. Only a small percentage of listeners even care.If a listener wants better sound quality, they should invest in better headphones or speakers. That makes a much more significant difference in the listening experience when compared to splitting hairs over encoding.What I would like to see Apple do, if we're going to cater to a minority of listeners, is support multi-channel audio (at least 5.1 surround) for music. There is no good delivery system, at least for the masses, in place right now.
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Apple Car arriving in 2025 at the earliest, says Ming-Chi Kuo
Apple had their shot to buy Tesla back in 2016, according to Elon Musk. He was offering the company for pennies on the dollar compared to Tesla's current valuation. Apple chose not to, yet have been poaching Tesla people ever since. Apple must have been holding quite a hand for Tim Cook to refuse to even meet with Musk. It seems unlikely to me that Apple would be that far out from introducing SOMETHING that came from Project Titan.
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Apple debuts new $5999 Mac Pro with up to 28-core Xeon processors
The funny part is that in spite of all of the attention lavished on “pro” users, the latest, lowly iMac will still have the highest single-thread performance in the entire Mac line. For pro audio, where modern DAW workflows demand minimal I/O latency and can only do so on a single processor core, single thread performance is the overriding concern, and where very little improvement has occurred over the last ten years. So frustrating.
