saldog

12Strangers said:

A helmet might have helped a little bit too.

Helmets are required by law in Singapore. Do you think he wasn't wearing one?

Or, are you saying the helmet deserves the credit for saving his life rather than the watch? If the latter, I see your point.

I believe what makes this wallet different is that the iPhone "knows" that it is the wallet accessory that is mated to MagSafe. Before, it might know that an accessory is connected, but not which accessory is connected. There must be some type of identification happening so iPhone knows the wallet is connected. This is not the same as AirTags so shouldn't be thought of the same way. The phone only knows the last time/place it was connected to the wallet, not where it is currently located.

Some Apple fans don't pay much attention to the entire streaming music landscape. Apple is fighting to stay relevant and must evolve its product to keep its installed base and grow it. Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, and others are offering higher quality music so this was no surprise at all. What is a bit of a surprise is that Apple is offering it at no extra charge. Amazon was charging extra for their HD stream but two days after Apple announced theirs, Amazon sent an email out to customers with a link to switch to HD for free.

I get it that many people out there didn't really understand that Bluetooth is the limitation here. They don't understand digital vs analog and what a DAC is and so forth. But once you do understand everything that goes into streaming an audio file and playing it back over the ultimate analog device, your speakers/headphones, you can see that Apple had to make tough decisions. Like not having a true analog input, requiring a fidelity-mangling ADC before any of the "magic" can be done in computational audio, which is all digital.

Apple could have just invented its own standard for wireless music transmission. Of course, they'd be criticized for not using an accepted standard like Bluetooth. There's no escaping criticism no matter what they do. They may actually be working on a new protocol utilizing either the U1 or H1 chips that would augment Bluetooth and make up for its lack of bandwidth, but there will be a limit, barely allowing Lossless but no more, so forget about ever playing back Hi-Res over your current wireless product. Getting full CD-quality would be a nice jump over others, like Sony.

But this move to support Lossless and High-Resolution was completely expected, logical, and welcome by many people who listen to music over external hardware. Not just audiophiles but just about anyone that owns an AV receiver, for example, taking an HDMI input from an Apple TV. I'm sure that Sonos users will also welcome this.

Lastly, you probably wouldn't hear much difference between AAC 256Kbps and Lossless anyway over a HomePod mini or Airpods Pro or most of the Beats phones other than the Beats Pro (wired). Perhaps you could hear an improvement with AirPods Max. But if you really cared about sound quality, you wouldn't be using any of these and instead would have a DAC/Amp and high-quality analog headphones. That would be a night and day improvement. Yes, even if you spent the same money as a pair of AirPods Max headphones.

AppleZulu said:

It’s a typo, I’m sure, but on the linked Apple support page, under “How to listen to lossless on your Apple TV 4K,” it says you should first “update your Apple TV 4K to tvOS 11.4.”

We’ve had lossless for years and didn’t even know it!

Not a typo. It's easy for ATV to support LL because it doesn't need to convert the digital signal to analog. The audio out is via HDMI, a digital format. The heavy lifting will be by the device that plays back the signal over HDMI. Your TV or receiver will have the DAC/AMP needed and the quality of the audio will be completely dependent on that and the loudspeakers. So, yes, you have had LL capability for years.

"Both versions also include support for Wide Color (P3)"

The previous MacBook Air models did not support DCI-P3 so this is incorrect. It is new to the M1.