Marvin

maury markowitz said:

lotones said:

When that comes down everybody will want one. 

I've been reading some form of this statement for 20 years now.

I really don't think people want to strap something to their face until it's the same form factor as a pair of glasses.

This is why I think a visor form factor would help, it takes away the pressure and weight from the face and straps from messing up people's hair and it would remove the need for a fitting procedure so people can buy online and use them out of the box.





It could be a version of Airpods Max like a swivel on the outside of the ear cups that allows the user to push it up on top of the head and use the Airpods for audio only.

People can use the Airpods for music as normal. If they want a relaxing environment, move the visor down and dial in an immersive environment. Similarly with a movie. Then there's no need for Eyesight because you can tilt the display up to talk to someone.

If people don't use the visor much, worst-case they paid $1600-1700 for a pair of Airpods Max instead of $550 but they'll use them regularly.

brianjo said:

PLEASE! No external power supply required.  It suck on the iMac, and would suck way more on the mini.  The old mini had a stupid external brick, and they made it awesome with the current design.  The size is great because you can put a pair of them in a single rack space easily.  Make it smaller so you can put 3 might be interesting, but too small and you can't have enough ports to be useful.  A smaller computer that needs dongles and adaptors is NOT an improvement!

Now, if they offered a DC power supply jack alongside an internal power supply, THAT would be appealing.  Probably not likely though.

There is a lot of empty space inside the current model. In the following video around 3:15, with the fan removed, half the mini is empty:



This mini size was basically unchanged for 14 years, 1.4" x 7.7" x 7.7":

https://support.apple.com/en-us/112588

This was designed to support DVD drives and 2.5" hard drives. They could make it smaller like the Apple TV or just thinner like the laptops. They could probably get it close to the Macbook Pro thickness but half the current height should be doable:

AppleInsider said:

According to sources of Bloomberg, Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue has been holding budgetary meetings with studio heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht. After allegedly spending more than $20 billion on productions so far, Cue supposedly wants to refine how the money is spent. 

However, all this spending isn't met by revenue coming the other way. At the box office, the movies failed to gain much traction, and seemingly only "Killers of the Flower Moon" managed to gain an audience in streaming. 

A plan in action

To try and reverse the situation, or at least to reduce how much this impacts Apple's bottom line, Apple TV+'s leadership is making some changes to how it funds projects.

For a start, there is the intention to pay less upfront for the shows it commissions. The idea is that shows and films that go over budget will be shouldered more by third-party production companies in the future.

The amount that streaming companies spend vs the quality of what they produce is quite shocking when compared to blockbuster movies. Netflix is spending upwards of $10b per year on original content but have barely produced a handful of blockbuster level movies.

The production cost for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy was under $300m total and made around $3b in theaters:

https://screenrant.com/all-lord-rings-hobbit-middle-earth-movies-ranked-budget-highest-lowest/

Harry Potter movies were around $100-200m each, total budget $1.7b and made $9.5b in theaters:

https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-movies-ranked-by-budget/

Here's a list of movie budgets, most are below $200m:

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

$20b is enough for 100 blockbuster quality movies, over 60 Lord of the Rings trilogies.

The streaming services are clearly missing good talent scouts and are throwing money at people hoping for a diamond in the rough. There needs to be a better process for weeding out bad productions early.

AI can help with this, someone can pitch a script and an AI can generate a movie with a cast to see what the movie could look like in a rough form with voice simulation. Then they can make a better decision on whether to greenlight it.

Some decisions seem more obvious. Productions like The Morning Show have such a weak overall structure. The audience score for season 3 is 12%:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_morning_show/s03

The shows with the good ratings are the high quality cinema productions:

https://collider.com/best-apple-tv-original-movies-ranked-rotten-tomatoes/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wolfwalkers
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tetris
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/killers_of_the_flower_moon
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_banker_2020
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/greyhound

More cinema, less low quality TV would give a better return for their investment. This comes from better writers and good source material:

https://www.shortlist.com/lists/40-best-film-adaptations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

Apple is adapting some best-selling books and these get good reviews:

https://ebookfriendly.com/top-100-kindle-books-all-time/
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/defending_jacob

9secondkox2 said:

Apple can sell 14 billion dollars of flappy bird all you want. But that’s baby stuff. 

Apple isn’t actually “serious” until they go after BRAND NEW AAA games and score them at launch. Not months or years later when the market is tired of them. 

A. Triple A exclusive or three (timed or not) would be massive. 

It would be good for them to have exclusive AAA games but they take a lot of time to make and aren't guaranteed hits. The industry is moving away from platform exclusives because a single platform doesn't make back the development budget where 5m copies at $60 is often break-even:

https://twistedvoxel.com/marvels-spider-man-2-sales-break-even-colossal-budget/

GTA 5 was made in 2013. GTA 6 was announced in 2022 while already in development and due in 2025. The GTA franchise has had just 2 main game releases since the original iPhone. Baldur's Gate 3 took 6 years. If they started a AAA production today, it wouldn't ship until 2028-2030.

A GTA 6 leak said the company had allocated $2b for it. 1000 employees x $50k x 6 years = $300m, marketing $200m, probably online services for >50m players, it's easily over $500m:

https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/gta-6-budget/

There are some types of game that are faster to make like Call of Duty games have a shorter cycle as they are mainly multiplayer. Fighting games like Street Fighter have little content in them. Racing games can be done quicker and expanded over time.

The best kind of games for companies like Apple are replayable ones like Minecraft, Roblox, The Sims. I doubt they'd want violent games in the portfolio.

If they had 'evergreen' games like Forza Horizon, Mario Kart, The Sims, Stardew Valley, Football Manager, Smash Brothers, those would get regular players:

https://steamcharts.com/app/1222670#All
https://steamcharts.com/app/413150#All

They can commission studios to build games for them instead of buying the studios. They can scale up faster that way, they'd just have timed deliverables to justify funding and if a studio doesn't deliver, they can pass the work onto another studio.

It's not easy finding good independent studios to buy because the big game companies keep buying them up and some want to stay independent because being owned by Apple means being owned by Apple's shareholders. A lot of studios have been burned by shareholder driven companies before and gone through crunch periods, mass layoffs etc.

I think commissioning exclusive games could work for them so that the studios maintain independence. They probably want to avoid using Unreal Engine too or they have to pay Epic a fee.

foregoneconclusion said:

saarek said: Yep, and if you believe a Mac with 8GB of Ram will perform just as well as one with 16GB of Ram I have a barely used bridge to sell you in Egypt, going super cheap!

This person said they were able to play Elden Ring (which requires 12GB RAM minimum on Windows 10) through Crossover with an 8GB M2 Air laptop. As they point out, not every game works like that (Cyberpunk 2077 is also a 12GB min game and is not really playable). But it's certainly interesting that 8GB unified is able to run a 12GB DDR minimum game.

Desktops use the SSD when they run out of memory so the games still run but it causes performance bottlenecks that show in some games. The following video shows the issue, especially towards the end around 4:30:



Apple doesn't necessarily need to make the entry model 16GB but people who intend to use them for gaming should get the memory upgrade. It would be nice if the baseline increased a bit since RAM costs <$5/GB. Moving to 12GB at the same price wouldn't be much to expect, this costs Apple <$20.

appleinsideruser said:

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

He stayed on the line with emergency services for an hour and updated them as to his approximate location. A rescue helicopter was dispatched, located Shearman, and winched him into the craft to take him back to the beach.

It's good that the battery in the Ultra can last this long and support an hour on a cellular call. It would be useful to have an easier way of sharing ad-hoc location with people. This would benefit taxi services too. Possibly a What Three Words integration:

https://what3words.com/

Then the location can be shared by text or reading the words on a call or the watch could emit a sound (like an audio QR code) that could be heard on the call and translated into a location. In the case of a riptide, sending a couple of locations would let the emergency support see which direction he was moving in.

Unless you’ve turned it off, I thought calls to emergency services share your GPS location?

It says on the support page at the bottom it depends on country and region if it can send location to the emergency services:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108374

Not a great way to find out that you're in an unsupported region in the middle of an emergency.