shareef777

tht said:

blastdoor said:

tht said:

Apple is certainly taking their time on this. It was a strategic error to discontinue a branded Apple monitor+dock. They should have shipped an Apple Thunderbolt 5K display in 2018. They really should have done it in 2016, but I digress. 

I can understand the wait for XDR miniLED versions, but a 27" 5K monitor, sourced straight from the iMac, should have been shipping 2 years ago.

Would love to hear how their product marketing and finance folks made all these decisions. Better be a book. It would be a horror book, but those are fun to read too. Maybe it was a bargaining chip with LG for monitor development?

I’d say tactical marketing error rather than strategic error, but otherwise I agree.

An apple branded monitor is a marketing tool. Marketing-wise it’s nuts to have Mac users staring at a Dell logo all day. If they’re going to do that, then might as well put “intel inside” stickers on Macs too.

Who knows what the difference between tactics and strategy are here, but Apple left billions of revenue off the table by discontinuing monitors.  A typical desktop setup in modern times, and I'm going back about 10 years here, is to have a laptop with an external monitor or two connected to it. When the 4th gen Macbook Pros came out in 2016, it should have been when this type of setup is mature, no dock dongle needed as it would have been in the monitor. Plug in the TB cable, everything is lit up, plug-n-play, and theoretically more "reliable" if it came from Apple. This is more or less how it works with my LG UF27, except that it only has 3 USBC in back. It could have Ethernet, SD card, the usual.

Apple sells about 20+ million Macs per year that could use an external monitor. With a take-up rate of 5% for a $1000 Apple monitor, 1m units per year, that's $1b per year in monitor sales alone. That's huge! Wasn't thinking about branding purposes at all.

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

Mark Gurman proposes what he believes Apple will be bringing out in 2022, following what he describes as a "modest year for Apple product releases."

Completely upending one of Apple's biggest product categories and effectively forcing one of the world's leading chip manufacturers into using one of their competitors to try and catch up isn't exactly modest. Everything can be disappointing in fantasy world though.

AppleInsider said:

Gurman doesn't really break new ground with the report

Almost as if he doesn't know anything about what's going on.

AppleInsider said:

"Gaming should be a strong focus of the machine," he says, before mentioning its use of multiple processors, a cooling system, high-resolution displays, and its own App Store. "Look for Apple to position the device as a dream for game developers."

Apple is also anticipated to work with media partners to create VR media, and to include a "VR FaceTime-like experience" using the headset.

For mainstream use, movies offer a big opportunity here. VR gaming is still quite a small market due to the hardware price but there is potential to expand it.

Offering people the ability to have a virtual cinema screen in their own home has a huge appeal and it's 3D. Disney movies are almost all CGI so they can have kids watching the movies and the characters can hop out of the screen and walk around them. With LIDAR tracking on the front, they can track the wearer's hands so they could make a movie like Peter Pan and the Tinkerbell character flies out of the screen and lands on the hands of one of the kids.



Horror movies can have hands grabbing at the viewer from over their shoulder. Alien movies can fill the floor with fog or have the alien crawling over the ceiling.

Combined with spatial audio, it can offer a very immersive experience and with Apple TV+, Apple has the means to distribute movies that use its capabilities best.

For better clarity in bright light and a VR mode, they can use dynamic tinting with electrochromic glass, shown on the following page:

https://www.tuvie.com/dusk-electrochromic-smart-sunglasses-with-dynamic-lenses/

Holographic Facetime is a possibility, this would need the glasses to scan the wearer's face or articulate a face from voice. This has some interesting possibilities as shown in the following video:



You would effectively see a person in the same room. This could be used for remote education and would be a lot more effective trying to do a remote classroom. Remote fitness classes would be better with a full body accessory scanner, possibly an iPhone.

For some people it could replace using an iPad or iPhone like students taking notes in classes. They can have a hardware keyboard and be typing but using the view in the glasses instead of an iPad screen.

Brandonw said:

swineone said:

"A Mac with Apple Silicon inside isn't just noticeably faster than their Intel counterparts; it's capable of a few other exclusive features too. Here is what an Apple Silicon-based Mac can do that the Intel Macs can't."

"but as Apple can control every facet of these chips, there is currently a subset of Mac features exclusive only to Apple's chipsets."

Let's not kid ourselves. All features listed (even running iOS/iPadOS apps) are well within the realms of the computing power available on Intel-based Macs. Hell, Dragon NaturallySpeaking did on-device dictation what, over 20 years ago? Surely not as well as Siri today, but then again, you can't compare a few-hundred-MHz Pentium Pro or Pentium II to current chips (and even older ones).

It's not a technical issue, but merely a marketing strategy of differentiation to move new product. And Apple is (or at least should be, you never know with governments these days) well within their rights to do so. But don't pretend there's some magical Apple Silicon fairy dust that enables this. It's just good old marketing.

Did they say it was a technical issue or apple silicon "fairy dust"? Nope.  I don't even know why I read comments anymore...it's exhausting.

mac_dog said:

Sounds like someone’s still butt hurt bcoz someone didn’t buy his company. Let it go, Elon. 

MplsP said:

This isn’t new (at least for me.) I’ve been having the monitor issue with my 2016 MBP for some time. Half the time when I plug it in to the dock it works fine, half the time it doesn’t and I have to unplug the monitor and plug it back in. I also routinely have issues with the BT ‘magic’ mouse not connecting and the BT keyboard hesitating then repeating keys unless I physically plug it in.

Seems like both of the issues reported in this story are likely software issues rather than hardware and should be fixable with an OS update.