CarmB

It surprises me that since the battery was put into a separate unit more of the electronics involved hasn’t been incorporated into the external supplemental unit. Doing so would, I would imagine, result in a lighter headset and that would improve the comfort in long-term use.

Of course, I’m no engineer, so maybe I’m way off base here, but it sure seems to me that the less electronics a user is expected to put on one’s head, the better the experience all around. 

Just saying . . . 

ApplePoor said:

To keep just the three parts of the Apple One bundle I actually use would cost more with their individual prices than the complete bundle.

Guess it depends on which three items one is interested in. In my case, it’s Apple TV+ ($129 a year), FItness+ ($99.99 a year) and News+ ($16.99 a month). That works out to $432.87 annually. Apple One costs $44.95 a month in Canada which comes to $539.40. What I found is that I get more bang for my buck by forgoing Apple News+ and instead going with a digital subscription to a Toronto daily that was about $40 for the first year and this year is costing just shy of $126 annually. So going the route I did, it’s costing me about $355 rather than the $539.40 I’d be paying for Apple One. The news package is not as extensive, certainly, but roughly $184 a year is well worth saving. The additional news content is just not enough to justify paying so much more every month. I could save a heck of a lot more by only carrying Fitness+ and Apple TV+ for half the year, that sort of thing. What I can’t justify is paying in excess of $500 a year in part for a bunch of services I really don’t need. Apple doesn’t offer the bundle I’d like to have, namely TV/Fitness/News, which, I suspect, many others would flock to if offered. The very combo I want is the one Apple doesn’t put on the table. Kind of reminds me of the packaging cable providers were notorious for back in the day. 

While I agree that 4K should be included in every tier, the truth is that even at 720p the picture looks decent on a good 4k TV. The set upconverts and as long as it’s a good quality set, that upconversion yields very good results. At least that’s my experience on my Sony 4k sets. The ads are not really all that much of a pain, either. As long as one is fine with a single feed, the ad-supported tier is a great deal. 

The $3,000 price point is utterly unworkable. That alone should have caused Apple to simply not release this device. When Apple launched the iPad, the genius of that product, the one element that launched widespread interest in tablets was an excellent price. There were tablets before the iPad but none that delivered a decent, useful product at the right price point. 

Simply put, $3,000 is not the right price point for any personal media consumption device. This thing is dead on arrival. 

Whatever Apple does with the Mac Pro, it has to consider a price target and the needs of the pros who would be seeking out such a model. The Mac Studio appears to be powerful enough to meet the needs of a particular set of users. So in developing the Mac Pro, it needs to be designed for a somewhat different group of users. This will dictate exactly what choices Apple makes. Either the Pro will offer expandability that isn’t available in the Studio or it will deliver so much computing power out of the box that there would be no need for the vast majority of users to consider adding power beyond what is already there. Probably it will be a little bit of both. More expandability and a lot more power under the hood. I’m not one of those potential Mac Pro buyers. Really, I’m not even in need of something like the Studio. Definitely not in a position to properly set out what the Pro needs to be. But certainly Apple will focus on what those potential buyers want, select a price target, and deliver what can be delivered with the technology available. The Studio has picked off some of the Mac Pro buyers so it will be interesting to see what exactly Apple aims for with the Pro itself, 

By the way, the cynic in me suspects that the Studio is, among other things, a high-powered device intended to entice those with the means to buy more computer than they really need because the prospect of having all that horsepower under the hood is too good for some of us to pass up. The Pro is another matter. It needs to be focused on the needs of pros that go beyond what a Studio can provide. I know from personal experience that I overspent on computers at one time not to meet a need but to own something more impressive. Most distressing is that had I put a lot of that money into Apple stock back in the early 2000s  instead of Apple computers, I would be in a whole other place financially.