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Comment by jhack | Hacker News Reader

Of course Apple is nowhere to be seen. Bad enough their refusal to support VP9 is locking Safari and Apple TV users out of 4K Youtube, it's only going to keep getting worse going forward.

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Well, I want to be the old grumpy guy here: just don't buy their stuff.

Also don't buy a PS4, Xbox, GoPro, Sony/Canon/Panasonic camera etc.

Or watch TV in Europe or Japan.

H.265 has been ahead for a number of years so obviously quite a few products exclusively support it.

Microsoft[1] and Sony[2] devices support VP9, and there is no reason to believe they won't support AV1 as well. GP was obviously talking about consuming video, so GoPro isn't relevant.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/201...

[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

The PS4, XBox and the Sony range of cameras do not support VP9.

Not sure why you brought up Edge and Android TVs.

PS4 Pro supports VP9[1] as does XBox One X[2]. The point is that all of these companies now support VP9 in their consumer video consumption devices and will support free codecs going forward. Apple is the only holdout.

[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/review.php?id=1482404506&subact...

[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/xbox-scorpio-engine-soc-det...

Yea, Apple seems to be the only major holdout for royalty-free formats in general at this point.

Again we don't know if AV1 is royalty free because it hasn't been tested yet. VP8 infringed on a number of MPEG-LA patents and would've required a license. VP9 could likely be the same.

And H.265 has been the industry standard for a number of years now shipping in hardware from Intel, Nvidia, GoPro, Sony etc.

According to http://aomedia.org/about-us/ , Intel and Nvidia (and ARM, AMD, Cisco, Broadcom, etc.) are all on board with AV1.

Intel, Nvidia, ARM etc have been shipping HEVC hardware since 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#2...

I'm not sure what that statement is intending to conclude. AV1 is intended to compete not with H.265, but with H.265's eventual theoretical successor.

> Again we don't know if AV1 is royalty free because it hasn't been tested yet. VP8 infringed on a number of MPEG-LA patents and would've required a license. VP9 could likely be the same.

On the contrary, we know that nobody has tried to set up a patent pool for VP9 or otherwise ask for royalties. On the other hand, new patent pools for HEVC keep popping up. You could pay one and then be asked to pay another. https://blog.streamingmedia.com/2017/05/velos-media-hevc-pat...

There's no reason to use a Mac anymore unless you're targeting iOS. The performance is better, the tools are better, the battery life is longer (for laptops), the input devices are better, and the connectivity is better for Linux development machines. Switch (TM).

The UI experience is however atrocious. Anything is better then the death by a thousand papercuts on Linux.

I use Mac OS, Linux and Windows to roughly the same degree. It's all fine.

I spend most of my time developing (server) software in Mac OS, and I'd rather do it in Linux, since it seems obviously more suited to it. I'm glad I don't have to do it in Windows, since it seems obviously less suited to it.

But it's all minor stuff. Overall it's all fine.

The idea that a Linux laptop even comes close to a Mac one is a pretty laughable statement to make. The driver situation is extremely poor, the trackpads on almost all PC laptops are inferior, the applications are far better on a Mac (i.e. you can't run Photoshop/Office on Linux) and how is connectivity better ?

wifi on macbooks is notoriously awful, and has been for the last 10 years or so.

I've been quite impressed with the 7260AC chipset in the T440 and newer. Places where I used to get 30Mbps down, it'll hold well above 100Mbps, with the same exact 1st gen AC Access Point.

That being said, its worth it to swap a T460 trackpad in to get a decent trackpad. IIRC they're sub-$15.

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