sevenfeet

anonymouse said:

So, HBO is one of the most recognized brand names in entertainment and they decided the best thing to do was delete that from their branding for streaming?

That would be like Apple renaming their service to just TV+

I agree. When this was first rumored, I said to myself "why on Earth would they abandon a well known and liked brand name that's been around since 1972 (over 50 years!)." I may have only taken a marketing course or two in school, but this makes no sense. The only thing left of "HBO" is in the logo, and that looks like it was done by amateurs.

Ecky-Thump said:

Still no return to having a dedicated digital audio output, so you need to use an HDMI breakout box.  And digital audio still limited to 48khz.

2 major fails.

Since the new Apple TV 4K is an HDMI 2.1 compliant device (with eARC), in theory the device would support HD audio up to 24/192 kHz or uncompressed audio. And Apple Music does have HD audio up to 24bit/192khz in the library. At this point, the problem would appear to be lack of support in tvOS. Hopefully this will be rectified at some point but we usually only see major feature upgrades in the fall of any given year.

For me, all my receivers/processors are HDMI 2.0 only so I would need upgrades if and when this feature ever saw the light of day.

The new Apple TV was a bit of a surprise since the refresh period for Apple TVs is usually three years and the 2nd gen 4K model just came out 18 months ago. And the entry level model is a recognition of the fact that many customers use it with Wifi only and would never use the wired Ethernet port. But the A15 is a sizable leap ahead of the A12, especially for gaming. But the thing that is intriguing for me is a possible bump of RAM for the new model. The existing A12 model is the same as the iPhone XR/XS with 3 gigs of RAM. The A15 which is in last year's iPhone 13 has 4 gigs of RAM. Of course Apple doesn't have to keep RAM consistent between products, but the increase of RAM may help some poorly written apps that don't deal with memory management well. I know of some apps that just love to crash even though the iOS version runs just fine. The difference is that iOS has virtual memory and tvOS doesn't, which means that tvOS apps have to really live within their means.

Spacial audio is a really good application for cars, much more so than lossless audio. Most luxury and new luxury cars have at least a dozen speakers in them and sometimes over 30. Dolby Atmos by itself can be mapped to take advantage of this but Apple Spatial Audio is the glue to take advantage of it. It should be fun when more vehicles come with Dolby Atmos standard or an available option.

Like the author of there article, I'm a recreational diver (25 years experience, advanced open water & nitrox certs).  Like the author, I wear a Zeagle BCD, specifically the same Ranger model I've used since 1998. Unlike the author, I have no problem wearing the Apple Watch Ultra as a primary dive computer since my current computer is, well, a little old.  22 years ago, Zeagle sold a dive computer (made by someone else) and I bought it. It's still my main computer after all this time and I've changed the battery twice since owning it and had the seals inspected a few times because of its age.  This Zeagle computer does have PC computer integration....if I could find the Windows 95/98 software it came with.

So something like the Apple Watch Ultra is a very attractive upgrade, especially since I was looking to invest in one anyway. But ever since the announcement, i've seen a lot of chatter on the inter webs about why you shouldn't buy this product.  They fall into the following categories:

1. "I won't risk my life on a 1.0 product". This is odd since all standard dive training centers around using dive tables to calculate your bottom time and deco limits, which was what we always had to do before dive computers. Dive computers are a nice to have, but not a requirement for rec diving.  Also, Apple spent millions crash testing this product, the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch 8 in case you were in a car accident.  Somehow I think that their R&D safety budget for this product was more some manufacturers sell in actual product for their dive computers all year.

2. No air integration.  Many dive computers, in fact probably most don't have this feature.  It's a "nice to have", in fact a "great to have".  But everyone dives with a tank pressure gage as standard dive equipment that came with your regulator.  Would it be nice to have this feature?  Sure! Why doesn't it?  Well it probably has to do with his radio frequencies travel through water. I don't know for sure, but I'd reckon that the frequencies used for AI are probably pretty low frequency.  Submarines communicate through low frequency radio transmission and I would imagine that higher frequency signals like what's used in cell towers, Wifi or Bluetooth probably wouldn't go far under water (and all that's needed for distance is about 5 feet), the distance between the sensor attached to the 1st stage regulator behind your head on the tank, and your wrist.  The radio chip set in the Apple Watch Ultra probably doesn't handle radio frequencies like this and they probably didn't want to make a custom design for it this cycle (and antennas might be an interesting challenge too).

3. I trust a company more that only makes dive computers, or the "jack of all trades, master of none" argument. Fair point, I guess but this goes back to the same logic in example 1.  And considering how often Apple is sued, I'm sure the legal team had to be comfortable with all kinds of issues with this product before coming to market with it.

4. Not big enough screen. Well if you want to buy a Shearwater, nobody is stopping you.  Heck my dive shop sells them and they are wonderful. But they are a dive only product whereas the Apple Watch Ultra can work as a dive watch and then wear it home. There are plenty of dive computers that also function as standard wrist watches, but few can auto populate your phone's electronic dive book to track what you did on your dive the moment you return to the boat. That is a killer feature in its own right that few discuss.

5. You can't service it like a typical dive computer.  A fair point but this isn't a product that you're going to use for more than five years anyway since Apple will obsolete the Watch OS software by then.  If you upgrade your dive computer every five years or so, then it's not a problem. As for people like me who still rock a 20 year old computer, a Watch Ultra can at least replace the Watch I have. The problem is that it's a pretty new Apple Watch 7 bought only a year ago.

6. Only 40m depth compatibility isn't enough!  It is for anyone doing normal rec diving since that's what you're certified to safely dive at.  Anyone doing tech diving or using tri-mix gas to go really deep (like 100m) can buy something else since that's not the majority of divers out there.

7. You need to charge this at least every other day. This is true, most dive computers go a lot longer on charges (my old one lasts years). And if you're on a dive boat for a week or longer, you'll have to figure out how you charge it.  Again, not a problem for most people. And solar powered chargers have been a thing for some time.

8. The Oceanic app is subscription only. So are a lot of apps these days. I heard the model has a daily rate and considering how often I dive every year (not often), that's enough for all the other features you get.