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Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores
Apple has long sold Bose headphones and speakers in its retail stores, including in the time since it acquired Bose-competitor Beats Audio, and despite the lawsuit filed by Bose against Apple alleging patent violations on the part of Beats. That's come to an end this week, though: Apple's dropped Bose merchandise both in its retail locations and online, despite recent news that the two companies have settled the patent suit.
"Invest" in this case is a venerable old metaphorical usage (see "to make use of for future benefits or advantages" in Merriam-Webster), meant in this case to express my outlay of a considerable amount of money in the expectation that these particular headphones would provide me with such long listening enjoyment that the initial purchase price would hardly seem excessive.
I call BS. The Sony's barely worked. I tried them back to back with the Bose.
Active noise cancellation is not about HiFi. It's about high background noise environments like on airplanes or in offices.
Try a set of Bose QC3s in a quiet environment, listening to music through a stereo of any quality will not be better than something with a large seal and a half decent speaker, but that's not the point. I doubt people could actually tell the difference in a quiet environment. If there's nothing to cancel, cancellation doesn't help. But in a high noise environment, the Bose are clearly better.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
As a former audiophile (my ears are getting old), here is my take on Bose. Yes, Bose did some research on speaker design. To say it changed things...? Well, Bose went one direction, whereas the mainstream speaker companies went another direction. And a lot of other companies, and the NRC of Canada also did research. For more info (maybe not much on Bose) see Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole (Aug 22, 2008) (book or kindle) if you want too much information.
Research: one thing common in marketing audio, automobiles, --- political ideologies, can be summed up as: we did research (or thunk it up, or it was revealed to us) and we have unique technology/knowledge/beliefs that is superior to any other speakers/ political ideology. Just pick up any issue of Popular Science of Mechanics from 1970 to 1990, or listen to Faux News.
A little thought (gee!) will quickly reach the concept that research or clever insight by one person is rarely exclusive, and rarely exhaustive (there is a lot more going on that their insight doesn't address).
Bose's direct/reflective (I think that's what it's called) technology in it's early 801, 802 and some other models created a large sound-field with a large sweet-spot, or almost no sweet-spot. (A sweet spot is the place the listener sits to get the full stereo effect). This can be, hmm, I'll use the words very different and seductive. On the other hand, those Bose speakers could suffer from comb filtering effects, lumpy frequency response, phase shifting effects, and limited frequency extension at both high and low frequencies. Not exclusive to Boze, sometimes instruments sounded larger than life. The 20 foot long piano.
Other Boze Speakers not using the direct/ eflective lack the large sound-field effect. About 1998 I needed new speakers, and tried with an open mind to check out Bose products. I found:
1. almost exclusively sold at the time in Bose owned stores
2. information, specifically frequency response specification were not provided by the company. this was/is very unusual for a speaker company. I eventually figured out that the entire Bose line at the time had little frequencies below 50hz.
The rest of the speaker/audio community was mostly working toward flat frequency response, reduction of box resonances, controlled dispersion or the sound coming out of the drivers, and greater extension in low and high frequencies.
A joke among audiophiles, in response to the great success of Bose--they sell by far more speakers in America than any other company, is "Friends don't let friends by Bose."
The rational reason (there are irrational reasons) is that Bose does not offer good value. For $X00 spent on Bose, it is almost generally possible to get a better speaker from another company for the same amount of money.
Final issue, look up the lawsuit between Bose and Consumer Reports. Bose sued Consumer reports over a review. Consumer Reports eventually won, but Bose almost bankrupted them. Which may partially explain why you rarely see any reviews of Bose in the audiophile press. And Bose likes it that way.
it's part of the OS
When was the last time YOU wrote a fuckin' bootloader? Last time I did that was oh, about... a week ago. It most certainly IS a separate piece of code--maybe bundled with other bits of the OS, but it isn't the same binary. A bootloader needs to be SMALL. A kernel can be quite LARGE (and that is the OS *proper*).
Citation, because I fully expect you to be a dumb shit and claim I'm wrong:
BootX (/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX) is the default bootloader on Mac OS X.
BootX is also the name of an open source bootloader (different from Apple's BootX) that allows dual-booting Mac OS and Linux on "Old World" machines.
At this point, BootX draws the Apple logo splash screen, and starts the spinning cursor. If booting from a network device, a spinning globe is drawn instead.
Depending on various conditions, BootX tries to retrieve and load the kernel cache file.
The next step is to "decode" the kernel. If the kernel header indicates a compressed kernel, BootX tries to decompress it (typical LZSS compression is used, as you compress this kind of data once but expand it many times). Since the kernel binary can potentially be a "fat" binary (code for multiple architectures residing in the same binary), BootX checks if it indeed is (fat), and if so, "thins" it (figures out the PowerPC code).
BootX attempts to decode the file (possibly "thinned") as a Mach-O binary. If this fails, BootX also tries to decode it as ELF.
If the above fails, BootX gives up, draws the failed boot picture, and goes into an infinite loop.
If BootX is successful so far, it saves filesystem cache hits, misses and evicts, sets up various boot arguments and values (such as whether this is a graphical or verbose boot, whether there are some flags to be passed to the kernel, the size of installed RAM), and also calls a recursive function to flatten the device tree.
Finally, BootX "calls" the kernel, immediately before which it "quiesces" Open Firmware, an operation as a result of which any asynchronous tasks in the firmware, timers, or DMA get stopped, etc.
If you mean bundled the same way OS X is, then GRUB is part of the OS too, since distros package it up with the kernel.
You fail. Please do not ever write system software because it would be worse than The Poettering. This comment is on par with you claiming that iOS is part of the "Linux theme". FFS, you keep showcasing how ignorant you are about system dev, so please do us all a favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP.
The worst part is that you make some pretty intelligent comments--until you get into talking shit out of your ass about things you clearly don't know diddly about. So again, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
You are an idiot.
I was using the same NT 4 install as a native boot and under VMWare, under the original VMWare beta. Back before it was Workstation, back before Player or any of the server products existed. Back when you had to build the kernel modules by hand after tweaking the kernel. Back when the only VMware version available outside the company was for Linux. Back before OS X was released.
Actually, as many review comparisons have noted over the years, Apple's products are priced only a very little bit higher than what other PC manufacturers offer given the exact same hardware.
So what? Apple makes their decisions on a different basis than I do. They choose parts based on maximum availability and profit. I choose parts based on price:performance ratio. I can build much more machine for significantly less money. Who cares if some other corporations are also trying to milk me?
I can ALSO install VMWare on the Mac
Yeah, I can also install vmware on my PC, and run MacOS in it, because some people have worked around the roadblocks that Apple put in the way to prevent users who pay for their software from doing that. How odd that Microsoft will permit me to virtualize their OS, but Apple won't. It's almost like they're bigger assholes than Microsoft. No, wait. It's exactly like that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"