lukas_canji

sidrictheviking said:

The SE lovers have been pretty vocal about this NOT being what they wanted as an upgrade of their beloved device.  

This 150%! Iphone 8 body is not SE size. Their is a huge market being left on the table. I have a Xs and will switch the instant the successor to the SE is released. Using these phones has gotten so clumsy. No, the market has not moved on, the product we want just does not exist yet.

Ok I think that the event was more of apple doing some strategic realignment in preparation for 2020. From an excitement perspective, going from a 2 year cycle (refresh and s year) to a 3 year cycle is exhausting. All eyes are on 2020. - Starting with services was a bold move and reinforces apple's commitment to the space moving forward. I was also pleasantly surprised at the prices for these subscriptions. VERY reasonable. I would be very curious if they would offer bundled options. I already have Apple Music family plan, perhaps I can bundle the other services to make the value proposition even better. - Establishing cheaper (or maintained) pricing across the board was appreciated. - Ipad refresh was minimal but the inclusion of a cheaper price was appreciated. - Apple Watch series 5 was not deserving of its time spent on stage. - iPhones were slight refreshes. iPhone 11 price drop was appreciated. We will see how it performs (probably the best selling model) - No apple tile competitor. - No reverse wireless charging - No 16" MacBook announcement I think the most newsworthy item was the astounding 4-5 hrs battery life improvement on the 11 pro and 11 pro max. This is remarkable to me. Battery technology has not been keeping up with the improvement of all other components. This is not just an incremental improvement but a step function. And the fact that that most of this can be pinned to the amazing A13 Bionic energy efficiency improvements really shows that apples vertical integration of hardware, software, and services is the right way to go. I honestly did not know that SOC's could have that dramatic of an effect on battery life. Also, is the battery size bigger as well? Additionally the night mode for photos looks great as well. Making a great camera even better. I am very curious to see how all of this additional hardware and their advances in computational photography will stack up against the Pixel line of phones. Ultra wide looks great as well. I don't think the "by innovation only" was an appropriate tag line for the event giving the overall incremental nature of the updates across their product line up.

I really miss my iPhone SE. I just hate the moronic act balancing my current XS (smallest of the previous generation phones) on palm with open hand to shift to reach the corners, or on the tip of the fingers to gain functional use of the upper corners. The fact that I have not dropped it yet is a miracle.

zimmie said:

lukas_canji said:

knowitall said:

Server dependent solution, epic fail.
Also an insult to device local processing power.

That's funny. 

On a more serious note, I would love if Apple took gaming more seriously. But an emphasis on mobile performance will always lead to a divergence in priorities. The mobile constraints of power consumption and efficiency will always allow PC's and consoles to play games that cannot be played on mobile. I hope there is a shift in actually allowing for apple products to be powerful enough to games that are commonplace in the AAA space. Until there is a drastic upgrade in local compute power available in Apple products (and at prices that make sense), game streaming will be the only way for high-quality games to be played on Apple's platforms. 

Steam Link works great. My PC and apple tv 4k are both connected to my network via ethernet so the performance is really good. You have three streaming options, fast (low latency, high fps), balanced, and beautiful (visual fidelity over responsiveness). The steam link vastly outperforms moonlight and kinoconsole if you have tried these solutions in the past. I was stunned at how playable these games are. I have a steel series Nimbus and it works fantastically. The only problem is that the R3 and L3 (push in the analog sticks) is not supported on that controller which is annoying but that is an issue with the controller and not steam link.

I tried playing Sekiro, and it plays very well. The performance is a solid 1080p 60fps. This is better than current console performance for the same game being played locally.

Most modern chips perform thermal scaling. If you can keep them cool (and powered), they'll run at top speed forever.

The first tvOS Apple TV runs on an A8 with 2 GB of RAM (iPhone 6 also used this chip, but with 1 GB of RAM). The GPU delivers 115.2 GFLOPS of 32-bit floating-point performance. The original Xbox's GPU delivered 7.3 GFLOPS. The Xbox 360's GPU can do 240 GFLOPS. So the original tvOS Apple TV has a GPU about half as powerful as the Xbox 360 and about 15 times as powerful as the original Xbox. CPU performance is a bit worse, relatively; the Xbox 360's CPU is about 3x as powerful as the A8's.

The Apple TV 4K is based on the A10X with 3 GB of RAM. The A8X had an additional CPU core (1.5x CPU performance for multithreaded tasks) and twice as many GPU cores. The A9X has 1.8x the CPU performance and 2x the GPU performance compared to the A8X. The A10X has 1.3x the CPU performance and 1.4x the GPU performance compared to the A9X. Taken together, that means the A10X CPU is 3.5 times as powerful as the A8 and the A10X GPU is 5.6 times as powerful. The A10X in the Apple TV 4K handily outperforms the Xbox 360.

While yes, desktop computers can always outperform consoles, a huge amount of gaming is done on consoles. If Apple Arcade is a sign they're getting serious about gaming on the Apple TV, it is an incredibly capable console already. They just need to improve the human interface hardware.

Overall on the hardware side of things, I am quite confident that any constraint in computing will not be a concern for long. I want to see a serious commitment to gaming from the company. They are in an excellent position to compete with traditional gaming companies. Gaming revenue consistently outperforms that of film, tv, and music. I just want the space to occupy a little more space in Apple's mind. If they really want to cement their position in the living room, this is a great way to do it. 

Mobile games are great (not really) and all but by offering console and pc quality games on their platform as well they can make people love their devices even more.

Once Apple is a regular fixture at E3, I will consider their commitment in this space cemented. 

knowitall said:

Server dependent solution, epic fail.
Also an insult to device local processing power.

That's funny. 

On a more serious note, I would love if Apple took gaming more seriously. But an emphasis on mobile performance will always lead to a divergence in priorities. The mobile constraints of power consumption and efficiency will always allow PC's and consoles to play games that cannot be played on mobile. I hope there is a shift in actually allowing for apple products to be powerful enough to games that are commonplace in the AAA space. Until there is a drastic upgrade in local compute power available in Apple products (and at prices that make sense), game streaming will be the only way for high-quality games to be played on Apple's platforms. 

Steam Link works great. My PC and apple tv 4k are both connected to my network via ethernet so the performance is really good. You have three streaming options, fast (low latency, high fps), balanced, and beautiful (visual fidelity over responsiveness). The steam link vastly outperforms moonlight and kinoconsole if you have tried these solutions in the past. I was stunned at how playable these games are. I have a steel series Nimbus and it works fantastically. The only problem is that the R3 and L3 (push in the analog sticks) is not supported on that controller which is annoying but that is an issue with the controller and not steam link.

I tried playing Sekiro, and it plays very well. The performance is a solid 1080p 60fps. This is better than current console performance for the same game being played locally.