What's up with Apple? Seems to me like they should have just dropped the i9 option altogether, since they couldn't make it work. It just further torpedoes their fading reputation for being able to build top-notch hardware.
I think the comment that they can't build top-notch hardware isn't entirely true. Airpods really made an impression. We also need to count the fact that the entire PC laptop market is in some kind of limbo. Few tried touch and then hybrid then detachable. At least Apple is still kicking in the game I'd say.
I might miss something, but what's so great about the airpods? Mediocre sound quality (literally my 8 bucks earpods have a better sound) and leaking so much sound it's obnoxious (if you're disturbed by music in the subway, look around: it's probably someone with Apple earplugs).
I don't think they were the first to make bluetooth earplugs? Is it the miniaturisation? The touch-sensitive thing?
In the common case for Apple users (listening to iTunes), the AirPods will have the same quality as wired headphones, since they play back with the same codec/bitrate either way (256kbps AAC).
Now if they're wired headphones with gold-plated connectors, that's a whole different ballgame.
> In the common case for Apple users (listening to iTunes), the AirPods will have the same quality as wired headphones, since they play back with the same codec/bitrate either way (256kbps AAC).
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.
This is inaccurate when applied to AirPods or other good Bluetooth audio products manufactured in the last couple years. It is accurate for products that only support SBC, though.
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.
Yes, they are literally piping the AAC-encoded bitstream as it appears in the iTunes files with no manipulation. Why would they decode it only to re-encode it?
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.
That's exactly what they do - when a call comes in it switches to bluetooth voice codec and it all gets mixed. You notice the reduction in quality, but sync remains rock solid.
They sound better to me and my three bandmate, one being a sound engineer. Admittedly those are great for their price (good ol' Panasonic Ergofit), but pick any decent 20 euros pods and they'll crush the earplugs.
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)
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.
AirPods were actually completely rushed to market and were hand-soldered according to teardowns. There were tons of supply chain constraints and bugs. I don't feel like this is the best example for your argument.
They are re-living their 2003-2004 period when the IBM PPC G5 CPU was way too hot and power hungry to put in the PowerBook and it needed water cooling in the PowerMac. Back then their solution was to switch to Intel CPUs. Now it's probably going to be to switch to in-house designed ARM CPUs.
Many things could go wrong, but the Apple codebases and engineering processes should be pretty robust to architecture changes at this point. NeXT went from 68030 to Intel/SPARC/others, and then to PowerPC with Mac OS X. OS X went from PowerPC to Intel. And large chunks of it are shared with iOS on ARM already.
I have very little confidence it will be a smooth transition this time. Apple now is not the same people, and not the same culture as it was then. I don't see them sweating the details over Mac hardware.
With the CPU design or the transition to a new ISA? Lots of things can go wrong at any time even by doing nothing. But Apple does have a team of pretty good engineers that managed to design what's probably the fastest (best?) ARM cores on the market, and with good enough perf/Watt numbers. So I doubt their biggest hurdle will be to design a CPU.
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.
> 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.
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.
@394549, I don't doubt that they can do it, as I was also saying a couple of comments above this one. But at what price? The difference is that now they have big QA issues before having to maintain the 2 branches. Their software (and possibly the software team) a decade and a half ago when they were moving to Intel was in a lot better shape. Unless I'm looking at this through nostalgia goggles. :)
ARM is a well established ISA. The customization Apple might bring to the CPU architecture will make no difference to a user as long as the compatibility is there.
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.
"Not established" and "not established in a specific segment" are two vastly different things. So no, most definitely I didn't say what you said, or what you think 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.
It's a terrible argument, but I agree it's probably how Apple views things. If they're willing to sacrifice build-quality, ports, and a decent keyboard all in the name of thinness... I suppose adding a fraction of an inch of headroom in the bottom case is unthinkable to them.
Analysed in a vacuum yes, it's a terrible argument. But if you look at it through Apple magnifying glass it makes sense. They are locked on the objective of making their devices thin enough to be able to shave with one of them and whatever Intel is doing is no longer fitting this concept.
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.
Their design pipeline may be years deep. It's entirely possible they expected Intel to have completely exhausted their bowels from their bed-shitting by now and Intel has surprised them by continuing to soil the sheets.
I'd bet anything Apple believed there'd have been a process shrink by now and they'd be able to get more cores in the same case design. Maybe Apple's been torpedoed but it's Intel doing the torpedoing.
Or maybe where Jobs would have been obsessing over every detail Cook is content to have delivered an animated poop emoji and never used any other feature anyway
It is irrelevant what may have happened between Apple and Intel.
Apple decided to put a CPU into a case that can't handle its heat. We can safely assume Apple knew full well about this and still threw the thing onto the market acting as if nothing was wrong. The question is if they seriously didn't expect the customers to notice or just don't care.
Headline: "Apple fans are returning their new MacBook Pros that cost a minimum of $2,800 because they can't reach the advertised speeds"
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.
A few big-name tech websites already confirmed they are investigating the claims and will publish their findings. So we should have some (mostly) impartial conclusions on the topic soon-ish.
We have seen this pattern over and over again. Remember Apple's Q2, where nearly all analyst were negative. Outrage and pessimism were rampant on HN and Reddit. The vast minority complain the loudest while the vast majority go about their lives and work using Apple products.
Geekbenchmark runs it tests in bursts with short delays between them to allow for the SoC to dissipate heat. They implemented that so laptops and cellphones wouldn't overheat, or thermally throttle while running the benchmark.
Surely, Apple saw these issues in their internal tests. I don't understand how Apple (or any other company that does something similar to this) decides to release the product knowing all of the issues beforehand.
68 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadThere are a lot of turtles!
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.
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!
.
(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.
I'd bet anything Apple believed there'd have been a process shrink by now and they'd be able to get more cores in the same case design. Maybe Apple's been torpedoed but it's Intel doing the torpedoing.
Apple decided to put a CPU into a case that can't handle its heat. We can safely assume Apple knew full well about this and still threw the thing onto the market acting as if nothing was wrong. The question is if they seriously didn't expect the customers to notice or just don't care.
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.
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.