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My Python 3.6 plotting script execution time:

2015 rMBP15 w/Intel Core i7-4980HQ (2.8/4.0 GHz): 91.1 sec

2017 iPad Pro 10.5 w/Apple A10X (2.3 GHz): 91.5 sec

This is 45 W vs a 10 W envelope or so. Use Pythonista on iPad. Terminal on macOS. Don’t know if the Core i7-4980HQ actually turbo-ed to 4 GHz. Who knows. That’s why you do a lot of testing.

fmalloy said:

I'm underwhelmed with Apple News. It still shows me articles from news sources I'm not interested in, and I have no idea how to exclude them. This is not a political manifesto, but let's just say the delivered content has a certain political slant. Using "Dislike Story" hasn't seem to have made any noticeable changes in the content delivered.

Force touch an article in the feed, slide the pop-up, and tap the Dislike Channel button. Or, you can tap the unfollow heart for the channel in the Following page. 

Here is an image of them on a person:


It it seems to defy physics! It looks it is secured by the earbuds only. I’m not knocking though. If it stays secure that way, great.

This ambient noise feature is weird though. It’s basically what every earbud does, so, what is the improvement here?

bluefire1 said:

jungmark said:

bluefire1 said:

Good luck equaling Bose's QuietComfort 35.

Never doubt Apple. 

Companies/analysts doubted the iPod, iPhone, iPad, AppleWatch. 

I never doubt Apple; I'm just saying that the competition here is Bose, not Samsung, so they have their work cut out for them.  I'm hoping they can actually improve upon the Bose headphones since I'd gladly buy them and give the Bose handset to my wife. 

Currently, Beats has about 25% and Apple has about 3% of the retail headphone market in terms of unit share. Like in other market segments, Beats and Apple branded headphones have about 50% of the revenue share in the market. Beats is the vast majority (~45%) of this though since Apple has only recently started selling a headset for over $100.

Bose is a well known brand, but they are not the market leaders. It’s Beats. Bose is currently second with about 8%. If there are some recent statistics with AirPods for end of 2018, I would not be surprised to see Apple closing the gap with Bose in terms of both unit and revenue share.

I would bet a lot that Apple will not be competing with Bose or whatever boutique headphone maker on sound quality alone. It’ll be as good or close enough to not matter in terms of sound quality. Apple will be selling the headset based on ease of use, comfort and sound quality. It’s not going to be a generic “headphone”. There are going to be Apple platform exclusive features, the same that you see with AirPods, that will sell the device.

Things like easy switching of audio sources from Watch, iPhone all the way to the iMac Pro. There may be an array of microphones to make Siri interaction easier and better. Maybe there will be an A8 or A9 SoC inside to do computational audio stuff. Maybe it’ll be charged through a Lightning port, but maybe there will be something unique about how it charges.

tenthousandthings said:

One thing that will be interesting in the better reviews will be discussion of the W-2140B/2150B that appear to be in use here.

The question is why? Obviously heat due to the constraints of the iMac form factor, but there may be other considerations, like an IGPU capability -- this was speculated upon back in October when PikerAlpha first reported it. [Sadly, his wife was hit by a car and died, and his blog is done for the foreseeable future.]

I don't think the engineering decisions made in the iMac Pro are fully understood yet -- it's premature for VRing to claim he/she has any real idea. My sense is that Apple is squeezing everything it can out of the form factor, and when you compare it like-to-like, nothing is going to come close to it for now. That said, the speed with which HP or Dell or one of the other serious players comes out with a competitor will say a lot about the emerging market for these things.

1. Product segmentation. Apple follows this religiously, where the value per dollar for each SKU is basically constant for the majority of the market, or the value in the model they want to sell most, the upsell model, is higher than the base model. Sounds like they want to sell the 10-core model.

2. The 4.2 GHz (or whatever it is as it is not clear) vs the 4.5 GHz max turbo is basically designer’s choice. The 14-core and 18-core models have max Intel advertised turbos of 4.3 GHz. If those models are demonstrated to have higher turbo frequencies, it’s definitely product segmentation as Apple wants you pay more for higher single threaded performance in these machines. 

I don’t think is it number 2 as nobody are buying these machines for the best single threaded performance. They are close enough at 4 GHz max turbo. The iMac Pro is for people who can use 8 or more cores, need >64 GB RAM, 3 5K monitors, 4 TB SSDs, can use the Vega GPUs, or some combination thereof. Single threaded performance is but a small feature playing into the buying decision here, and just needs to be competitive, and they basically are.

Apple desktop hardware strategy is rather mysterious. I think they just fucked up. Whoever drove the 2013 Mac Pro and Apple branded display decisions was high enough in the management chain to drive those decisions through; and, they have to reset as the market has obviously proven those decisions drastically wrong.

They could have redesigned the 2013 Mac Pro internals to support modern components if they wanted to. They just didn’t for whatever reason. Who knows why they waited so long to reset.