welshdog

The only thing that would get Apple to switch to a new architecture is, a new architecture. It will take another group of geniuses like we saw at PA Semi to come up with a new way forward, either on ARM or something new altogether - not ARM, not Intel, not AMD. A total fresh start CPU seems unlikely, but a new way of improving ARM like Daniel W. Dobberpuhl and his team did is certainly possible.

It would be nice to see Apple get it's hardware back to a position of preeminence in video post, editing, compositing, animation etc. They were once dominant or at least the preferred platform. Final Cut (original) destoyed the market for expensive, high end editing equipment but the animation and compositing world turned to cheap PCs and Linux boxes as Apple never offered budget priced workstation type machines or machines with the chassis and power to handle multiple graphics cards and giant amounts of RAM. The creative people I was working with wanted to do their work on Macs, but the people with the money didn't want to pay for Macs. This happened all over the world and it was probsbly Jobs who let it happen. The current MAc Pro doesn't really fix the problem because, again super expensive compared to the other options. Also I still hear a lot that people would work on Macs if there was Nvidia/CUDA support.

Is this article suggesting that Apple has turned some corner and want's to get back into these fields? I think that would be great, but is Metal the way to do it? I guess if they are going pay developers to offer apps that utilize Metal maybe so. Also, would Apple ever develop it's own Metal based, stand alone graphics card? Would they allow someone else to do so? If they were open to this sort of thing they could probably sell a lot more Macs into the pro-video/animation/compositing space.

I find the Homepod hand off from iPhone to be kind of a mess. The proximity thing is cool, but it works in a confusing manner behaving different ways at differet times. Sometimes iPhone asks if I want to send the current song to the Homepod, sometimes it just does it on it's own. Sometimes it plays what is on my phone other times it plays the last thing playing on the Homepod. I can of course select a Homepod via Airplay directly which is fine, but I feel there needs to be some polishing here. Not their best effort.

itinj24 said:

BLUF:  It has to be the Home Hub causing this. 

I’m pretty convinced that this is an issue with the Home Hub.  The other day, my dad visited for the first time since I set up HomeKit Secure Video with my Logi Circle 2’s. After he left, I went to add him as a recognized face in my home but noticed that he didn’t show up there. Found this strange since I do have a lot of cameras in and around my home. Also realized I stopped receiving camera notifications sometime early that day before he showed up. I went to check recordings of my cameras to see if any camera caught his face and noticed all recordings stopped at about 1030 that morning. This couldn’t be a camera specific issue. Checked which of my devices was the active Home Hub and it was an OG HomePod. Went to reboot it and it kept saying there’s no Wi-Fi connection. A-ha!  Rebooted the AppleTV it was defaulted to and then unplugged the HomePod until it finally regained connection and sure enough all the recordings for that day were restored, my dad’s face showed up in facial recognition and notifications were coming alive. 

Absolutely silly that Apple won’t let you choose the active Home Hub and keep it glued.  Why they switch sometimes for no apparent reason beats the hell out of me but what I described above would’ve been the perfect time for my Home Hub to switch, but didn’t.  I do notice varying HomeKit performance issues when certain devices are being used as the Hub. Would be nice to be able to select the best performing one on my own. 

See this is where I feel Apple almost always drops the ball. They come up with nice hardware we all want and then the software implementation seem to be lacking. Their updates to fix issues are slow in coming and sometimes don't fix everything. I just don't get how a company their size, depth and power and with their reputation, cannot do a better job of polishing the software experience. It's generally good, but there always seems to be little annoying shortcomings that they don't take seriously - at least as I perceive it. Siri is the evergreen example of this. I will give them credit for fixing Maps and making it excellent, but did that happen because they got publicly embarrassed by Maps debut?

I do feel that Apple being Apple and all giant and dominant and stuff, that they could in general do a much better job of making all their softwares work better. Siri is kind of useful, but just barely. I find that the interaction between my phone and Homepods is just a bit weird and confusing now, what with all the various ways to connect the devices. Homekit is also nice, but needs to be more reliable and have a few more settings to help users fine tune the experience. Mac OS day in and day out works for me and always has, but it is not without little bugs and hiccups. iOS is, of course, a huge target for hacking as this article suggests. Apple might want to throw some more money and bodies at the problem. With more than a billion users, shouldn't they have a rather huge team devoted to finding and patching vulnerabilities? Maybe they do and we just can't see it. They definitely should work out the issues with the bug bounty program and get that working smoothly.