Apple fans returning new MacBook Pros with Core i9
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Actual data: two Reddit comments that say they're going to return their MacBooks
What's wrong with the headline "Youtuber finds New MacBook Pros Not Performing as Advertised" or "Youtuber finds Cooling Issues with High Performance MacBook"?
It's basically useless to read headlines from most online news sources these days.
I don't think they were the first to make bluetooth earplugs? Is it the miniaturisation? The touch-sensitive thing?
Makes people look a lot more pretentious, in my opinion
Yep, they may not have been the first, but once again, they come in and have a bunch of refinements that just make them stand out.
I've had bluetooth headphones before, and from pairing to loss of sync when moving more than a couple of metres away, AirPods beat them hands down.
Of course they do! Any wired solution will outperform even the best Bluetooth one.
Now if they're wired headphones with gold-plated connectors, that's a whole different ballgame.
Are they literally piping the AAC-encoded bitstream as it appears in the iTune files straight to the AirPods with no manipulation? Because if they're decoding then re-encoding (e.g. decoding the file to raw to pass to the OS, then re-encoding to sent to the AirPods), there will be quality loss even if both codecs are exactly the same, since you'll have generation loss.
That’s what’s happening.
It’s not like Bluetooth uses the AAC codec, it must be decoded and reencoded.
I’ve done a direct comparison and the deifference is clearly audible.
Bluetooth A2DP supports AAC and AirPods support AAC. Apple would never have released them if this were not the case, because they would sound awful.
Because it's more generic and easier to implement. I would imagine to support streaming AAC from the file to the AirPods, they'd need to create a special channel for it in the OS's sound system.
Even with that, I don't think it'd work in all cases. Sometimes you have to manipulate the audio. What happens when you need to mix in audio from an app, like an alert sound? The AirPods can't keep using the file's unmodified AAC stream, so you'd have to temporarily stop streaming that to them, decode it, mix in the app audio, re-encode that, and ship the modified stream to the AirPods. All the while you have to keep the timing prefect throughout all the changes or it will be even worse-sounding due to the skips.
It's a lot easier to just decode-mix-reencode all the time, since that's a pretty straightforward pipeline, instead of having to switch back and forth between different audio streaming methods, and deal with loads of extra complexity.
The sound quality is abysmal for >150 euros pods. Any "refinement" is worthless if the base feature of the object, the sound, is less than acceptable for the price.
And it is unacceptable to leak so much sound that it's a disturbance to people around you (yes, if you're using those in the subway, you're disturbing people).
That being said, I can absolutely believe that the bluetooth connexion is better than other brands and that it is a major feature for a lot of people that do not use earplugs in the same way Ido (communication rather than music)
All of those sound awful to me because they just don't suit my ear shape.
Sound quality is good enough, mic quality is pretty good, the battery lasts forever and then they also recharge extremely quickly in the carrying case, they pair without any trouble to my phone and mac, etc.
At least in my past experience you have to mess around with bluetooth headphones constantly to get them to work. With AirPods, you hardly need to.
What could possibly go wrong!
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(Fun fact: even classic Mac OS was running on Intel at one point before the 680x0-to-PowerPC transition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project)
So there's good reason to think that they could pull this off.
It will be to split the "MacOS" ecosystem in 2 and maintain two branches for x86 and ARM. And while they also have a team of pretty good software engineers with x86 and ARM experience they are already having major quality control problems lately. Having to maintain a dual ISA MacOS will be a challenge. Then they have to provide the legacy compatibility in order to convince people to buy into something with little to no support for most of what's out there today.
But you know... we could use some diversity in this space. I wish them all the best.
They've done that twice before (68k -> PPC, PPC -> Intel), and IIRC, seem to be preparing to do it again (Bitcode).
I think the biggest risk for Apple is that they may not be able to keep up with x86 on the desktop performance front. They have a much smaller market to amortize the R&D over than Intel does.
The problem is that as established as ARM is they really don't have a meaningful presence in the desktop/laptop ecosystem. You have probably tens of thousands of apps for the mobile space but even if Apple magically adapted them for a non-touchscreen, keyboard and touchpad world the vast majority still won't cater to the regular or professional user wanting to buy a laptop, not a glorified tablet. And that's a hard sell. Why am I buying a MacBook if all I get is an iPad with a keyboard? And don't get me wrong, having used both iPads and CoreM ultraportables (Apple or otherwise) the iPad offered the better experience more often than not. But if I compare it to the regular CPU it just can't compete. The productivity with mobile apps is not where it should be to convince a normal buyer to switch, let alone a more demanding user.
Yes. Not established. That’s what I said.
Look at another way - Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel. It's not that Motorola ISA weren't well established but they simply weren't as well established and didn't have access to the same mindshare in terms of high performance hardware and software engineering.
So in this sense it's a step back the other way - except for perhaps Intel seem to be stuck in the mire these days.
One other thing Apple is aiming for is to go back to fully controlling the development and integration of their products. This means the HW and the SW. It worked just fine for them with the phones, admittedly a segment where no major architectural/compatibility changes were needed.
We'll get to see if they can pull it off in a segment where the compatibility is a huge burden. Microsoft tried and failed perhaps for this very reason: no control over the HW. Also an even bigger burden of legacy (likely the biggest of any SW company). But Apple already managed to transition from 68000 to PPC to x86. They'd really set a hard to beat record if they manage to move to ARM even if just for the regular laptop lines (Air, MB) and not the Pros.
https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2018/07/macbook-pro-mid-2018-...
https://www.xda-developers.com/geekbench-ceo-fireside-chat-p...
I get that Geekbenchmark is extremely accessible, but it is not rigorous.
Citing a benchmark that's designed to avoid thermal issues, as proof a chip doesn't have thermal issues is just bad.
The blog post is not about benchmarking with geekbench at all.
John Poole found that using only CPU bounds tasks (compiling) wasn't that bad for the thermals.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.yahoo.com/amphtml/finance/n...
It looks like a (AMP) copy of a (AMP) copy of a web page. Just https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/finance/news/apple-fans-return... or https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/apple-fans-returning-macb... would work.
There are a lot of turtles!