I suspect that new iMac design has been in the can for years, waiting for the technology to catch up. And it’s a consumer device anyway; the real test will be whether the “M1X” serious iMac is inflicted with arbitrary thinness or if it will be designed with serious users in mind.
The original iPad was, in terms of compute specifications, a minimum viable product. The M1 Macs are not—they are the combination of a mature platform with a mature silicon chip. Given the sheer volume of M1 sales there’s no chance they’re going to be so prematurely deprecated as the original iPad was.
At the very least I’d put money on the M1 not being deprecated before all Intel-powered Macs (present and future) are deprecated.
I think the M1 will easily last for a few years - but we don't know what they have left in stock. Was the original iPad regarded as MVP when it came out?
> Even more cynically, you can say it's private from their competitors.
I've heard this from a few people recently, but I don't understand the implied criticism. What should Apple do here? Keep my data mostly private but also slip a copy of it to Google and Microsoft?
Obviously not. Through the high purchase price of their products, I'm paying (and trusting) Apple to manage my privacy and keep it private from everyone else. The fact that "everyone" necessarily includes all of Apple's competitors isn't just irrelevant, it's a red herring.
Wherever possible, they've done exactly that—so how is that a criticism? Case in point is the end-to-end encryption of iMessage. Or the at-rest encryption of iOS devices.
In other instances where Apple does have access to your data, there is a plausible justification for that access and no evidence shown where Apple has ever abused that access for commercial gain.
iCloud backup is on by default, which includes the contents of your iMessage conversations, even if you do turn off this default, your conversations with most other normal people are uploaded in a form where apple has the keys. Apple had plans to make all of iCloud backups E2E encrypted but backed out after pressure from the FBI. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/01/21/appl...
That is one example of many where apple could do it, but doesn't. To do many things on your apple device requires an apple id, which requires a phone number which is linked to identity. Location services uploads your location to apple constantly via close by wifi APs + GPS location, there is no option to do GPS only location w/ no network activity. All of this info is one secret supoena away to be uploaded to violent people with guns. YOU may trust your nice government, but many do not have the luxury of living in such a nice place.
Over and over again, you see the pattern of apple doing of 'private from everyone, except us'. And not mentioning the 'but us' part.
Replaceable batteries were superseded by batteries of sufficient capacity for 99% of users. (And for the remaining 1% I'm sure the non-Apple marketplace has fantastic, no-compromise solutions.) Remember when it was impressive for a laptop to have three real hours of productive battery life? Back then, most laptop batteries were trivially hot-swappable. Now it's normal to get eight or more hours of productive use from a laptop battery.
I realise that capacity is theoretically orthogonal to swappability, but functionally it's relevant because battery casings, compartments, connectors and chassis strengthening elements all take up space that could otherwise go to a larger battery pack.
Twenty years ago, such files would have been barely listenable. Ten years ago, this would have been tolerable but obviously compromised. Today, with the best encoders, 128k MP3s are shockingly good. Certainly not perfect. But good.
The crucial difference is that compared to our other senses, our ears are really, really, astonishingly shit. They can be highly precise in one context and ludicrously imprecise in another context. And they lie. They often tell us we're hearing what our eyes expect to hear.
This is true. Our hearing is well tuned for utility in a pre-modern context. They just don't have anything remotely like the precision of our eyesight, which can judge things like the straightness of a line, or simultaneously compare the properties of distinct objects.
Of course, when you look at these high resolution recordings, the amplitude of material above 20kHz is piddling. The amount of harmonics/overtones in acoustic instruments is minuscule in the first place.
You're confusing frequency and resolution. Just because a set of music fits in a certain frequency range doesn't mean that all representations of it are equal. For example, consider this in graphical form:
Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.
I am not confusing the two. In a band-limited signal, the Shannon-Nyquist theorem mathematically proves that the sampling rate is the frequency resolution. It also proves that when a signal is band limited, discrete time sampling can be a zero-loss transformation.
Your analogy misunderstands audio signals. The resolution components of bit depth and lossy compression are different axes and should not be conflated with or analogised to frequency resolution. They behave very differently.
I believe you are sincere. But I think that if you were able to run a sufficiently rigorous blind test (note: precise level matching is critical) you'd surprise yourself.
> It definitely sounded different, I heard things in songs that I've listened to for years that I've not heard before.
That usually means one of two things—
1. the frequency response of this new system is different, changing the relative loudness of different instruments;
2. the context caused you to concentrate on the music differently and your experience of it was therefore different.
The critical thing nobody ever says is "I heard things I never heard before, then I went back to my regular system and I stopped hearing the new thing." That never[0] happens—because the thing you hadn't noticed was there all along.
[0] Edit: Okay yes, so not never. I was assuming that the regular system is a reasonably competent modern setup. The median intentional audio system, shall we say.
> The critical thing nobody ever says is "I heard things I never heard before, then I went back to my regular system and I stopped hearing the new thing."
...well, I have, but only when I was a child, and my “regular system” was a thing my parents bought for probably less than $20.
I never understood the need to fold bed sheets. Crinkled sheets simply aren’t a problem I’ve ever had; you barely notice the difference once they’re stretched over the bed and pillows. I have a blanket box at the end of the bed; I just shove the second set of sheets in straight out of the dryer.
(I do fold sheets for the guest bed but that’s because the alternative set might spend months on the shelf. Most of the time the same set is washed and put straight back on the bed.)
You fold them so you can stack them on other folded things. If they're messily folded, the pile falls over as you carry the basket upstairs, or stack other things onto them on your shelves.
For me bedsheets are their own wash cycle, so there’s nothing to stack them with. I just carry them upstairs and dump them into the blanket box when they're done. No need for a basket.
But let's say your washing process is different to mine. I'd still rather do two trips upstairs than fold sheets.
