Marvin

battlescarred1 said:
Why do they let so many of their products die a slow death? HomePod discontinued, then a meager update years later. HomeKit and the Home app. So much potential, yet so little effort put into it. FCP went dormant for years. I don't want to make an entire list of the items that they half a$$, it's depressing.

AppleInsider said:

We'll never know how long Apple spent developing FineWoven as a replacement for leather. But if the company hasn't given up on cases, it seems like it's taking more than a year to come up with a replacement for FineWoven.

I don't think they need a FineWoven or leather replacement. Silicon cases are good and they also offer polycarbonate ones, both get good reviews:

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPhone-Silicone-Case-MagSafe/dp/B0CHX9Y3ZF/
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPhone-Clear-Case-MagSafe/dp/B0CHX1M27P

The Silicon ones are 55% recycled.

Glass is another option they have for materials in future:



Even though it can crack when dropped, it would be cheaper to replace the case than repair the phone.

9secondkox2 said:

Intel meanwhile is claiming their new integrated GPU is the fastest gun in the west (and everywhere else), but that remains to be seen. 

Yet we haven’t even seen m4 Max and Ultra capabilities.

Intel says it's only 30% faster than their previous Arc GPU, which is about 1/4 the performance of M3 Max. Here they say it's 10% faster than a 780M, the GPU that's in the Rog Ally handheld:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/intel-shows-first-integrated-arc-gpu-benchmarks-for-meteor-lake-up-to-twice-the-graphics-performance-compared-to-i7-1370p

That's definitely not the fastest integrated GPU and they are using 30W of power in their demo. They are getting performance around base M4 at 30W, which will be closer to M4 Pro power. Their statements about being the fastest chips are relative to other PCs, they compare to AMD and Qualcomm.

Intel's stock is at a 14 year low, they always make empty promises about their new chips to try to build investor confidence.

9secondkox2 said:

If Apple would get serious about AAA gaming, the PC world would crumble in a hurry. There would be almost no need to get a PC. 

Apple should have a new console and Mac standard. 

Macs with a certain performance level could be marketed as Apple Arcade DNA and a new Apple TV version called Apple TV + Arcade or just plain Apple Arcade would be a custom m series with more GPU cores and less cpu.

The Mac mini is available to do this at $599, this isn't much more than the PS5 and XBox, which are around $400-500. The M4 mini would be around half the performance of the consoles.

They just need more of the top games and people will use Macs more for gaming. Steam lists over 100,000 games just now, restricting it to Mac drops to 20,000 so there are a good amount of games but they are missing a lot of popular titles. There's still no GTA V port for example but the game runs fine through a compatibility layer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuDmgYCpWRM

Hundreds of top games run ok via compatibility software and it would work best to have an easy installer:

https://www.youtube.com/@macprotips/videos

They could sell a mini + controller bundle with a special gaming UI, maybe partner with Valve for the store and they can have the streaming apps like Geforce Now fill in for missing games like Forza Horizon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6BO6z0hsZk

They can list games in the library like they do for Apple TV content where they say if it's on Disney+, Netflix etc.

Apple's strength here would be cross-play with iPhone/iPad/Mac because 1 billion people have iPhones. If you could start playing Hogwarts Legacy on the Mac and continue where you were on iPhone and vice versa, that would bring more people into the ecosystem. They can't be complacent about missing popular titles though or people won't buy into the platform at all.

blastdoor said:

I guess this speaks to what a shoestring budget Aspyr has for making Mac games.

It says here they have 140 employees and their parent company Saber Interactive was bought by Embracer Group for $100m:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/embracer-group-acquires-aspyr-media-for-usd100m

For game porting, the team should be large enough but they won't be able to do many games per year. The list of games they've ported suggests they do 2-4 games per year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_ported_by_Aspyr

Embracer lost a $2b funding deal and had to massively downsize, they let go just over 1/4 of their employees across multiple studios, including divesting Aspyr's old parent company while keeping Aspyr:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/embracer-cut-ties-with-more-than-4-500-employees-and-cancelled-80-projects-over-the-past-year

They are now splitting into 3 separate companies:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/embracer-splitting-into-three-standalone-companies-to-search-for-winning-formulas-

I'd guess Aspyr will be under the Middle Earth Enterprises and Friends (not final name) company as that group will handle AAA games. Projects get affected with major company restructuring.

The new companies will probably be suitable for an acquisition. The whole group has a market cap of around $3b and when they split, each separate company will be lower. Their AAA group has the Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings IP.

https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2023/06/22/116670-embracer-confirms-lord-of-the-rings-ip-cost-395-million/

Amazon might want to buy them out but it could be an opportunity for Apple to quickly get multiple AAA game studios and popular IP for <5% of their yearly net income.

jdw said:

Marvin said:

Keeping support for it on computers is what keeps manufacturers making the products with USB-A. 

nor will a decision by Apple to drop all USB-A ports on the Mac Mini dictate what the Windoze PC world will do.

Apple is pretty influential these days, especially with mobile and this isn't a decision that's going against the grain. PC manufacturers would love to have the mobility Apple has with the latest standards. They don't have that luxury because their competitors adding more ports count as competitive features and there's little brand loyalty among low quality brands.

PCs are trying to make thinner laptops now and they are only fitting the USB-A ports at the thickest parts of the laptops. This one has 2x USB-C/Thunderbolt and 1x USB-A:

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Zenbook-Touchscreen-i7-13700H-Thunderbolts/dp/B0CDD8BFH1/

Mobiles are all USB-C and come with USB-C cables and chargers. That hugely influences the ports that are added to computers.

jdw said:

Marvin said:

Keeping support for it on computers is what keeps manufacturers making the products with USB-A. 

By the way, I just bought the single best 1TB Thumbdrive SSD today on Amazon only 1 hour ago, and guess what?  The connector only comes in USB-A.  Check it out too, because it beats any other thumb drive out there.  Pretty incredible.  And yeah, I'll need to use a STUPID DONGLE with it on my 16" M1 Max MBP

There's also the Kingston USB-C drive, which will give mostly the same real-world speed:

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-DataTraveler-256GB-USB-C-Performance/dp/B09DVPH8NQ

The external SSDs are almost as compact as thumb drives now, some are faster and offer more capacity:

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-1TB-Extreme-Portable-SDSSDE61-1T00-G25/dp/B08GTYFC37/

This is 100mm x 52mm x 9mm
vs
92mm x 30mm x 14mm for the thumb drive

This one is around the same size and 3x faster because of USB-C/Thunderbolt3:

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Professional-1TB-PRO-G40-SDPS31H-001T-GBCND/dp/B0BGYMJBQF/

Once you own a USB-C-only computer, you will gradually move all the peripherals to USB-C connectors/cables and the exceptions will eventually drop to one or two products. Changing standards over the years have always been painful (firewire, displayport, mini-displayport, ADC, DVI-I, DVI-D etc) but this is one of the least painful because it's a compatible port.