sevenfeet

sflocal said:

HDMI 2.1 had a bandwidth speed of 48gb/s.  Thunderbolt tops out at 40gb/s.  The MBP most likely has four Thunderbolt/PCIe lanes and one of those lanes is used to share between the HDMI port and SD-Card port.  So it makes perfect sense why it's limited to HDMI 2.0

People whined and complained about getting back ports, and now that they do they still complain.

I can see people primarily using that port to connect to projectors, and TV's on a TEMPORARY basis.  Quite whining on a feature you may very likely never use on a laptop. 

This is correct. I don't think this changes until Thunderbolt 5 happens which is rumored to have a top bandwidth of 80 gb/sec and at that point, the latest DisplayPort and HDMI standards should be baked in. In the meantime, it's not that the MacBook Pros can't edit in 8K....far from it, they made it clear that you can do 7 different ProRes 8K files in the workflow simultaneously which is nuts. And 8K final content is still largely not a thing except for some Youtube nature videos.

TB 5 is supposed to happen in 2022 and Apple has always been the earliest of early adopters. Perhaps we'll see it in the M2 hardware and the upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

Apple is all about the control of what they do.....engineering, development and delivery. Right now the one thing Apple is fine with third parties is manufacturing. And that's the only path for Intel right now since Apple will never ever go back to buying an expensive general purpose CPU or GPU since they will never meet their specific needs. And right now, none of them have the power or especially the power per watt that Apple is doing.

To give some context, the new Mini's screen is only 1.5" smaller than the original iPad's screen.

Strange....I have an old iPhone 6s I use for testing and it still says 14.7 is the version for it.  Everything else is updating.

genovelle said:

rcfa said:

Most people never heard of lossless? Really?

Anyone who’s ever heard of these silver discs calls “CD”s has heard of lossless.

Only Napster, music piracy in conjunction with slow internet, metered cellular data and expensive flash memory brought us the “blessings” of lossy audio compression algorithms.

So, no, lossless isn’t “niche”, it was and should always be the normal case, lossy compression should be the exception.

CDs are not lossless. They are limited to 16 bits and 44.1 kHz while lossless is at least 24 bits and 96 kHz. Every record theses days is recorded well above CD quality. 

CDs are lossless. They do not use a compression technology that throws away data like MP3 or AAC. That is the meaning of "lossless". Do not confuse that with the sampling and bit rates, which certainly do make a difference to the overall sound profile.

As for what Eddy Cue said, yes Spatial Audio will probably make a bigger difference to most listeners than lossless.  Most people get their music from their phones now and since lossless Bluetooth isn't a thing, Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos makes more sense because it can be implemented with what most listeners already have.

That being said, I'm in the minority of users who does have the ability to easily show the difference between lossy AAC and lossless and especially HiRes audio. I have a dedicated 2 channel listening room, a smaller 5.1 home theater listening room and a larger 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos home theater. I spent some of today listening to the Atmos tracks in the Atmos theater and it sounded nice....not unlike the similar content on Tidal (which I also subscribe to mainly since I use the Roon player). I've been waiting for Apple to go lossless for a LONG time, and we got the added bonus of HiRes lossless which I wasn't expecting.

The problem for me now is that Roon has made it really easy to pipe my lossless and HiRes music to wherever I am in the house at the best possible quality. Apple Music and Airplay can't do that right now which makes using it for day to day listening a lot harder. Airplay can do straight 16 bit/44.1 CD quality lossless right now (it's been part of the standard since Airplay 1 was invented two decades ago). But I usually try to listen to HiRes audio these days if I can and that's going to be hard to feed my DACs which already connected to Roon.