sevenfeet

This article completely misses the point of why Airports are going away.  The reason is pretty simple.  It has everything to do with the advent of ISP-supplied wifi routers built into existing cable modems, DSL modems and fiber modems.  When that began happening and more importantly, when these add-ons became good enough for the masses, there wasn't much of a need for the third party market.  Ask yourself, how many friends and family do you know that solely relies on the cable modem provided by Comcast, Verizon or Time Warner?  This crowd that visits this website is a different kind of user.  But for the vast majority of the users out there, the ISP provided solutions were just fine.  In fact, advancements in wifi speed and antenna technology made these kinds of wifi routers give very good performance in most home and apartments regardless of where they were placed.  Only those of us with larger homes, difficult obstacles or desiring the latest in wifi gaming speeds/latency really needed to continue getting wifi from the traditional ways.

Looking back over the advancements of personal computing technology over the last 4 decades, we usually look at the beginning in the 70s with the first personal computers, the invention of the IBM PC and Mac in the 80s, GUI interfaces in the Wintel world in the 90s, the advent of the web combined with the Google search engine in the 90s/2000s and then the iPhone/smartphone in the 2000s.  But we often miss one extremely important event...the epoch of wireless communication.  We got modern laptops in 1990 (thanks Apple!) but if you wanted to communicate for email, AOL or the early web, you still needed a cable, which was most likely a phone modem in those days.  Thanks to Lucent Technology who invented Wifi (whose name was also missing from article), Steve Jobs saw an opportunity to give the Mac another compelling reason for adoption (remember, Apple in those days in the late 90s had still just escaped from going out of business).  Fresh off of the initial success of the iMac, Apple needed a hook to get buyers to the new lower priced iBook and when Steve Jobs saw wifi in the labs, he knew he had his hook.

When the iBook was announced and then the "one more thing" was that you could actually use the thing wirelessly (again, email, AOL, web), it was a jaw dropping demo.  Even better, it was a reasonably priced option for it and the Airport base station.  And while Lucent announced you could get the Orinoco wifi card for PCs, only the iBook (and later the Powerbook (Firewire) had it baked in with no drivers to install and an easy setup application.  Remember in those days, most people got their internet through dialup so the early Airports base stations could do that too.  And Apple wisely came out with an Airport base station configuration tool for Windows since for quite a while, the Airport was the only base station on the market and many PC owners (and even many companies) who adopted early technology bought them.  It was an instantly profitable line of business during days where Apple desperately needed the cash.

But most importantly, it was a new era of wireless communication.  We take it for granted now with wifi hotspots literally everywhere and global cellular communications.  But in the summer of 1999, Steve Jobs not only introduced this major piece of tech but he made it sizzle.  He showed how it was going to change the world and brought it to Apple's new low priced laptop, not the Powerbook line first.  Now wifi is everywhere in everything (even home appliances!) and wifi base station technology is delivered straight from the ISP in most cases.  The need for most people to own an Airport no longer exists.  And yes, its a sad day.

rotateleftbyte said:

Oh well, I'm seeing Drobo and Adobe stuff still 32bit.
Sigh.
time to search for upgrades.

Drobo drivers and Dashboard are now 64 bit.

FLAC and ALAC are just lossless compression envelopes for the same PCM data inside.  The music is identical between the two.  FLAC was invented as an open sourced way to handle PCM data since formats like WAV and ALAC weren't open source and free from potential legal entanglements.  Since then, ALAC is open sourced now too but the audiophile community largely endorsed FLAC but music sites like HDTracks.com allow you to purchase either FLAC or ALAC music.

Eyebrows were raised when High Sierra and iOS 11 knew what a FLAC file was and could even play them!  But iTunes hasn't been changed to deal with FLAC but considering the upcoming HomePod FLAC compatibility, it's only a matter of time.  After all, how else is a FLAC file supposed to get to the HomePod?  And iTunes already supports WAV and AIFF files for lossless audio (Apple invented PCM audio files with the Apple Interchange File Format "AIFF" back in the late 1980s) and MP3 and AAC in the lossy audio realm.

No one wants Tidal. Its just another unnecessary expense at this point. Too many others do it better, including Apple. 

Perhaps if if they had conducted themselves more honestly and without the gimmick of manipulating fans through manufactured hate, I'd feel for them.  But bad ethics deserve this kind of reward. Hope it's a lesson learned for everyone who was involved in pointing the company in the direction it went. 

Tidal's most reliable and lucrative customers are the audiophile crowd since it has lossless CD quality streaming of their catalog and they are doing high resolution audio through MQA.  There is a pretty robust third party support community of this feature with high end receivers, pre-pros, music players and DACs.

That being said, the big question is, "is it enough"?  I have a friend who is one of Tidal's minority owners (and a very well known artist) and even he admitted that the roll out with the video of all the major star investors didn't get the response they had hoped.

As to the Tidal app on Apple TV, my complaint was that it's not obvious what quality of streaming that you are getting.  I think the app is defaulting to the level you are paying for (Premium is lossy, HiFI is CD quality lossless) but there's nothing in the app to say so.  And it doesn't look like MQA is supported at all but I think that can't really happen until Apple introduces the revamped CoreAudio library.  As it stands, Apple TV is biased toward video which means audio is locked into a 48 kHz sampling rate (the standard for Dolby and DTS audio) and not 44.1 (CD quality) or other higher sampling rates (which MQA could take advantage of).

dewme said:

StrangeDays said:

rogifan_new said:

Still blows my mind that this is a pro machine but you can’t get inside of it. I can understand most of Apple’s portable products being sealed but professional workstations? Why? Even the 27” iMac allows upgrades to the RAM. 

I don't know what you do, but I'm a software dev in household brand fortune 100 & 500 companies. I have never, ever seen any of our IT department perform component upgrades on our workstations. Never. Machines are retired and swapped out only. Corporate workstations are not DIY tinkerer toys.

Yep. Many large companies have also outsourced or subcontracted their IT support to organizations that are somewhat detached from the business and tactical execution priorities of the company itself. This can result in bulk purchases of workstations prioritized on minimizing acquisition and/or leasing costs. The resulting machines are not tinker toys but they are often not well suited for at least some of the company employees who must use them. This is a problem and sometimes companies will have an "exception" acquisition path to allow individual who need specific configurations to obtain exactly what they need.

The iMac Pro should be able to fit into these acquisition patterns with standard and build-to-order options, but the main inhibitor will still be the overall cost. Getting the corporate bean counters to open up the wallet for the iMac Pro versus a standard iMac is going to require some arm twisting especially since the TCO on a brand new product is hard to estimate. Even as a software developer or manager I would always look at lower cost options and the best bang for the buck. It always depends on the actual work you're doing, and your mileage may vary, but the biggest improvement and bang for the buck that I've seen in the past few years for software dev machines was a result of moving strictly to SSD storage and away from spinning hard drives, both on desktop and mobile computers, and having multiple monitors on every workstation. Before buying an iMac Pro I would also consider what a full-SSD iMac with a second 4K monitor costs.

Finally, I hesitate to put too much emphasis on looking at the iMac Pro through the lens of how it fits into software development organizations because I don't believe that SW dev is really the target for this machine. In fact Apple is currently rather weak across the board for supporting the full spectrum of modern SW dev operations like DevOps, Ci/CD, Agile, SAFe, cloud computing, etc. It's just not Apple's focus at this time. They are going after the high intensity creatives who need massive computing power sitting right there in front of them on their desk.



 

A lot of this is viewed through the prism of the buyer.  Many of us (myself included) came up from the ranks of multi-slot Macs that you could keep around for 5-8+ years if you just did an mid-life upgrade or two.  I have a 2008 Mac Pro under my desk now that has had these kind of upgrades and before that, PowerMacs going back to the original Mac II (which was upgraded to a IIfx).  If you're a small-medium sized shop, upgradability allows you to extend the investment of a pretty expensive resource.  There are a lot of those users around the world and lots of the griping about the current Mac Pro comes from those users.

But I now work for one of the world's largest software companies.  We don't upgrade anything.  Everything is purchased to be used for a limited number of years, then replaced.  Up until recently, we haven't had any company purchased Macs except for one major area:  software development.  Those guys have been able to get high end Mac Pros and Macbook Pros to do their jobs.  And now in 2018, the rest of us in the field will get a chance to have our own company purchased Macbooks instead of bringing our own (which has been supported for years).  Again, those machines won't be upgradable but we never allow users to upgrade the PC laptops either.  If you need more resources, write a purchase request and get approval.