Marvin

jonro said:

Why bother to review headphones without comparing the sound? Seriously, features comparisons mean little without discussing the sound quality, which is the core feature of headphones. It's like comparing cars without mentioning the engine or doing a test drive.

There are some sound sites that do in-depth and consistent sound quality tests:

https://www.soundguys.com/apple-airpods-max-review-44975/
https://www.soundguys.com/sony-wh-1000xm6-review-137397/

The XM6 like the XM5 has 30mm drivers, XM4 has 40mm and some reviews rank it higher for sound quality. Smaller drivers tend to produce weaker sound, especially weaker bass but some people prefer the sound clarity with weaker bass. Airpods Max has 40mm drivers like most premium over-ear headphones.

https://versus.com/en/headphone?filter%5B%5D=driver_unit=30,90

This is mentioned in this review:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/sony-wh-1000xm6-review-hail-to-the-new-noise-canceling-king/

"When Sony moved from the XM4 to the XM5, it went from using 40mm drivers to 30mm drivers, which changed the sound fairly dramatically, and not everyone liked the change. The XM4, which remains available, is a warmer headphone with bigger, more energetic bass, while the XM5 offers more detailed sound and tighter bass. 

camber said:

Sweeney ought to be considering how many people will never but EPIC products because of his conduct!

Not enough unfortunately, Fortnite is still one of the most played games in the world:

https://fortnite.gg/player-count
https://www.demandsage.com/fortnite-statistics/

Around 30 million daily active players, 650 million player accounts. $40 billion in lifetime revenue.

This is what gave Epic the ability to lose $1b on a lawsuit.

According to a recent interview, Epic still spends more than they make though so once the one-hit-wonder game finally loses player interest, their situation will be different.

It's crazy how such a repetitive, mindless game has lasted so long and generated so much revenue.

Epic is also trying to get big game studios hooked on Unreal Engine and their store, which will tie their products to their company success. Apple has options to undermine this but they need to partner with the studios.

The likely worst outcome is that Apple is forced to lower their fee to 15% to avoid big developers processing fees externally. There's a single digit percentage that is break-even for any developer/publisher processing revenue at scale and as long as the fee is at a reasonable level, they will use Apple's setup.

Xed said:

jfabula1 said:

lukevaxhacker said:

Very simple in concept: return production to the U.S., although hasn't been done for years. Remember the Fremont plant…

It’s funny, anti-tariffs are all complaining and crying about high prices, dude open your brains, America had been ripped off for a long long time and we keep borrowing..we’re sinking fast. If Apple has to raise prices so be it. Will still gonna buy them.

So you believe that America is being ripped off by what I assume are "other countries", so you think the solution is to charge every American wanting an Apple product an extra fee?

To reiterate, American is being ripped off so let's rips off the American people? That makes sense to you?

The problem needing solved is the debt. There has been a large deficit for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:Federal_Government_annual_spending_and_revenue.webp

This has accumulated over 20+ years. When the debt is higher than a country's GDP (as it is in the US) then it's in a danger zone. There's a level where the economy collapses catastrophically.

There are a few causes. One is the population time-bomb that is affecting most countries now. When the economy is bad for younger generations due to depressed wages, higher cost of housing etc, they delay having children and have fewer children. This creates an elderly population that strains social security.

Another cause is trade deficit. The biggest one for the US is with China. The aim, as described in the following video, is to have no deficit:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v4g6pfpngEM

Vietnam offered to negotiate in response to the tariffs but their offer was rejected apparently due to still resulting in a deficit:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/vietnams-tariffs-offer-rejected-by-trump-adviser-not-a-negotiation/ar-AA1CrSiw

Some countries block foreign companies from trading at all, this isn't considered a tariff but it passes billions to other companies:

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

There are ways to deal with the debt: cut public spending, increase taxes, reduce trade deficits, increase GDP, increase population (birthrate or immigration), increase retirement age.

If tariffs are left in place and have to be paid for then it's a tax on the people of the country imposing the tariffs. If countries implement measures to reduce the deficit then they bear the cost.

Some harm to GDP is from losing manufacturing to other countries, which often happens by other countries implementing harmful working conditions to lower costs significantly. Some manufacturing of military components has been moved and has become a national security risk.

Tariffs are not the end goal. The goal is to have close to zero deficit trading, domestic manufacturing, more jobs, higher birthrate. But until they get those requirements, they are planning to use tariffs as a cudgel to achieve it. It's reckless, probably won't be effective and they should try to achieve their goals more responsibly.

If the people of the country imposing the tariffs end up paying more, this actually results in paying more taxes to cut the deficit, assuming they keep buying.

I doubt it would impact iPhone sales much. People mostly pay on contract so even a 50% increase would be $30/month vs $20/month. An extra $10/month is minuscule vs people's typical monthly expenses. This is why the iPhone is such a good product for Apple because even at a premium price point, it's an inexpensive product relative to everything else.

There's a sense that they are trying to fix the debt issue urgently and it doesn't seem like it needs to be done that urgently. Although it's a critical issue to solve, they could implement fixes over the course of 1-2 years instead of 'by Wednesday, or else'.

They could also communicate their goals more effectively. They can post an official page showing the debt, what's responsible for it, their proposed fixes, projections and their success rate. Like the following site but with more accurate numbers and clearer information:

https://www.usdebtclock.org/
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

Mike Wuerthele said:

ssfe11 said:

Maybe I’m missing something but Tim meeting with Trump and in Feb and then both announcing the 500b US investment has total exemption written all over it. Again am I missing something? Would welcome comments. 

You're missing the fact that the President said yesterday that there were no exemptions.

There are some exemptions listed on the site:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

"Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/semiconductors-are-exempt-from-trump-s-massive-32-tariff-on-taiwan-though-pc-gamers-will-still-feel-the-heat/ar-AA1Cev7t

It's not clear how much impact it will have on Apple's products.

This move is being widely criticized but other countries have been unfairly locking US companies out of trade for a long time. While this likely won't have a good outcome, continuing to let other countries engage in unfair business practices shouldn't just be accepted either. These tariffs are in response to the unfair trading practises of other countries. The expected outcome is that other countries start trading fairly and drop their original unfair business practises and tariffs and the US can do the same.

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

If the US tariffs were removed tomorrow, all that happens is US businesses go back to being taken advantage of. It's clearly a ham-fisted approach with the intent of trying to get a quick fix similar to the war negotiations but the US has a huge debt running out of control:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-could-hit-debt-ceiling-as-early-as-mid-july-study-shows/ar-AA1ByPeh

This is what the government spending cuts and tariffs are about. If there's a better way to fix the debt issue other than cutting spending and trying to make up trade deficits, they'd probably like to hear some ideas. These moves suggest they don't have any better ones.

michelb76 said:

I had high expectations, but my god this runs bad. 23fps on an M4 MacBook air at the low preset to 500p render target. Barely hitting 40fps on the medium preset on my M3 Max, with a lot of low fps moments. Crazy.

There were a few Macs tested here and they all run pretty badly:



M3 Max looks playable around 50FPS after turning raytracing down but it doesn't look good without raytracing effects.

It runs poorly on low-end PCs too, the Nvidia 3050 is just above the performance of the Air and gets around 30FPS:



At 3:43 they enable frame-gen and get 60FPS. MetalFX will have frame-gen at some point, Cyberpunk 2077 was reported to support it, maybe they will enable it at a later date.

It should perform better on the M3 Max chip, maybe they haven't used the Metal hardware RT APIs properly and it's falling back to software RT.

The minimum requirements for the game at 1080p/30 are actually pretty high, roughly 8TFLOPs GPU. Only the Max chips and latest Pro chips are at this level.
Recommended GPU is around 13TFLOPs, which is essentially M3 Max or above.

This is why Apple having a reference renderer library would help developers. On Mac and iOS, game devs could use Apple's rendering engine and know it will perform ok. They probably have one internally already that they use to help 3rd party developers out with their proprietary engines. If they partnered with Microsoft, Sony and Valve, maybe Pixar, they could make a reference renderer that supports DirectX, Metal and Vulkan. This would support path tracing, approximated path tracing, shadow maps, mesh shading and multi-pass rendering. Royalty-free, possibly open-source so game studios can modify it. Post-production rendering software has multiple rendering engines like V-Ray, Redshift, Arnold, Octane etc, game engines should have the same.