tht

robin huber said:

neilm said:

I wish multitasking on my iPad Pro could be turned off. I’ve never once wanted it —have a Mac for that —but every now and again I fat finger something and it gets accidentally invoked in the most annoying fashion. The worst is split-screening Safari, which completely screws up whatever I was doing.

Amen to that—thought it was just me. I can’t do a leisurely scroll though my AppleNews+ feed without inadvertently invoking pop-ups, slide-ins, and other annoyances that defy my efforts to dismiss them. I have to quit the app sometimes in order to get rid of them. At very least they could put a little X in the corner to dismiss. Need a “classic mode” for those who like unitasking. 

Settings --> Home Screen & Dock --> Multitasking 

Two different settings: Allow Multiple Apps and Gestures. Just turn them off.

Furthermore, microLED diverges from TFT LCD and OLED greatly by not using a backlight. Instead, the microLEDs are used directly to make the picture. 

OLEDs do not use backlights is this sentence implies. Maybe you switched OLED for miniLED here?

OLED, microLED, and plasma (for the olds in the audience) are fundamentally the same idea: the subpixels are emissive. Ie, the subpixels themselves are the light sources. The big difference between OLED and microLED is the illuminating compound in an OLED subpixel is made of an organic compound (hence O = organic in OLED) while with microLED, it is made from an inorganic compound. The pixels change their color and brightness by varying the color intensity of the subpixels through changing the amount of electricity going through them.

LCDs need a light to shine through crystal subpixels for color to be seen. Ie, there needs to be a light in the back that illuminates the crystals. Hence, backlight. In combination with changing the brightness of the backlight, the crystal subpixels change their color intensity by the amount of electricity going through them. For the sake of a better term most LCDs of older vintage used a fluorescent light source as a "monolithic" backlight. Monolithic as in one. LCDs of more recent vintage use LED light sources, typically multiple ones along the edge that shine their light into a mirrored chamber behind the LCD. Just one chamber of light the size and shape of the display.

miniLED is a TFT LCD that uses a discretized backlight. Instead of one monolithic light chamber behind the crystals, there are hundreds to thousands of chambers in a grid. The iPP12.9 has 2596 backlight "chambers" with 4 LEDs in each chamber. As can be imagined, the more backlight chambers in miniLED, the closer and closer it gets to certain aspects of OLED technology. The iPP12.9 miniLED has a big advantage over the Pro Display XDR here. And as you can imagine, the more backlight chambers, the more difficult it will be to mass produce. It's going to take a while for the tech to spread.

I would surmise the primary reasons for Apple developing and shipping miniLED for the iPP12.9, and subsequently, probably the MBP14/16, the iMac Pro, iPP11 and stand alone monitor eventually is that it uses less power on average than OLEDS and has longer expected lifetimes with less issues than OLEDs. If it gets cheap enough, maybe the lower end devices.

The tradeoffs between OLED and miniLED really comes down to what a device is displaying and for how long. If it is a white or bright background web pages and apps, LCD wins. If it is movies and photographs, OLEDs. If the device is going to be used for 5 to 8 years displaying computer content? LCDs. So on and so forth.

People don't anticipate the issues with self emissive pixel display technologies to be mostly solved until microLED comes. No one is expecting these to come soon. The first device in Apple's lineup to use microLED is likely to be the Watch, so, the wait for microLED is going to be 2024, 2025, 2026 time frames for big high DPI displays. It will come to TVs, where the subpixels are much bigger, hence easier to manufacture, in 2022, 2023, 2024.

This type of YoY growth is likely a 2 quarter thing. Q2 2020 was not a good quarter, as east Asia was in lockdown during Q1 2020. Not a lot of product got sold. early last year.

AI_lias said:

The Laptop 3 and 4 killer feature is its 15” screen. That’s what made me go with two 15” entry level surface laptops for my kids for their remote school work, instead of Apple 13” laptops at those price points. Makes a big difference. Apple should make 16” laptops for general computing. 

Yes. Apple is missing a few configurations in their product lineup. An M1 MBA15 at a starting price of about $1500, a midrange tower starting at about $1500, a branded monitor, and maybe a large display iMac with an M1 SKU (assuming the "M1X" SKUs are more expensive).

As my wife found out, you still need a dock or dongle with a Surface Laptop for desktop duty. Her work provided her a Surface Laptop, wireless radio keyboard, wireless radio mouse, an external 27" display and the Surface Dock+Power brick. Two peripherals that use USBA and the monitor only has HDMI or VGA input. Even with the Surface Dock, we still needed a dongle as the Surface Dock we have only has mini Display Port for video out.

Now, we just need to figure why the Surface Laptop doesn't recognize the external monitor after unplugging it from the dock and plugging it back in. We have to unplug the HDMI cable from the monitor and plug it back in to get it to recognize the external display. There is a miniDP-to-HDMI dongle for it. Maybe a single miniDP-to-HDMI cable is better.

The Surface Laptop port situation really isn't much better than the M1 Macs. Meh, the port situation isn't a big deal.