External USB DACs are cheap enough and and enough better than apple's internal MBP DAC that a professional musicien friend swears by them. Beyond my acceptance of his clearly being more knowledgeable than I am, he's also more demanding than I am as I've always found Mac DAC's to be more than good enough for my needs (Laptops buzzing in my ears when not playing anything but with the volume set to max aren't).
You visibly think that the univers revolves around you but are mistaken, just as you are mistaken when opining that because something doesn't suit you makes it a design fault.
A friend of mine needs push/pull accelerator to drive yet the lack of same on almost every other car in no way make it's absence a design fault. Some people have absolutely no need to plugin usb devices, whether or not they are charging, my son among them. He is very happy with his Macbook and only needs a dongle to plug it into a TV to share Netflix with his friends. It wouldn't suit me which is why I have a rMBP but design faults have nothing to do with it.
Stop opining using "I think == the laws of the universe are", You're only displaying how self-centered you are and not convincing anyone (I dare say not even yourself).
Aww, snookums doesn't like dongles and wishes that there were enough people who cared enough to buy non-dongle PCs/Macs so that their flagship portables didn't use them? Would snookums like a cookie and a glass of warm milk to soothe his bobo?
Snookums also wants to change his argument because I shot down his analog hole dimwit idea.
The MacBook is for a different market that is well served with a single USB-C. With a decent Wifi, my son in college never needed more than the one port and is more than content with a fast enough, light, fanless Mac. He only uses a dongle when he hooks up his mac to a TV to share netflix.
The coming refresh of the rMBP will have 4 USB-C ports if the leaks are reliable. Looks like enough to me and with people providing micro-USB to Dock/lightning adapters (like this ) for less than $5, I'll just need a few of those that I'll leave connected to the USB-C cables next to the lightning splitter in my bag to be able to connect whatever I need.
Ohh the hardship, ohh the horror... Does snookums want another cookie?
rMBP's dominate at Cisco but PC's have indeed been catching up over the last year or so. It's amusing to see people who used to say, "you have to use an ethernet dongle on your rMBP, I couldn't do that" walk in with the nicer Dells/HPs that also use dongles. Somehow it's no longer a major issue...
You forgot/didn't notice that newer rMBP's use direct PCI flash drives that removed the SATA interfaces limitations. My 2013 model rMBP's flash drive still uses SATA so I'm pretty much in the same boat you are there.
Faster "disk" performance is almost always an important criteria (but wasn't enough to get me to upgrade either yet).
Neither Poperatzo nor I had a problem following the context. Ah but it's not conceivable that the problem is between your ears, so it it must be elsewhere...
Yeah, sure because it's somehow impossible for you to use your brain and figure out that even if they eliminate the built-in port on future MBPs that they wouldn't supply an inexpensive USB-C to Analog Jack dongle with it like they do with the iPhone 7. Nor can you rub two neurons together and figure that it is trivial to recover your precious analog hole from whatever sound system you choose to use.
There is no functional difference between using an analog jack or a dongle or an external DAC to recover the sound of DRMed video
No for some reason your brains shut down as soon as Apple is the subject and you come up with the dumbest straw men to PROOVE that Apple is evul and will capture your soul.
Do try to follow and get your attributions right will you?
Poperatzo is the one who tried to argue that Apple is removing the jack to force people to buy DRMed music to replace their napster collection of MP3s. [cue spooky/evil music]
I'm the one telling him that Apple pushed for the end of DRMed music and has made it possible for years for people to upgrade most of their ratty old MP3s into high quality apple store versions for a small one time fee. Oh, yeah, upgrading 60000-80000 tracks for $25 that's really making a buck off of people...
Is it reading comprehension or is it counting with big numbers that you fail to understand?
The Ars link you cite notes that the Ipad 2 and the iPhone 4s that both came out in march 2011 are only now being orphaned by iOS 10. That's over 5 years of support that you can contrast with Android's much shorter 6-24 months before being abandoned.
Apple gets around this by saying "We won't support older handsets after this release."
Wrong. Apple doesn't "get around" supporting old devices, they continue to support old devices for years and years while Android vendors including Google dropped support for devices mere months after selling them.
yeah sure, let your prejudices stop you if that makes you feel better about yourself.
Most of my collection is now ALACs (used to be FLACS but ALACs are equivalent & work better with my devices).
I didn't completely trust Apple when I tried out Match either so I made a copy before matching everything and used other tools to check everything. The one problem one can encounter with iTunes Match (beyond it not matching everything you'd want it to) is that it can match other versions of songs than the one you had originally. Say you have a bunch of albums from an artist who has performed different versions of some songs on different albums. If you don't pay attention you can lose some versions when you remove your originally ripped version & download the matched version from the cloud. If you do pay attention & kept a copy of the original tracks, it's not a problem.
Serious audiophiles & professional musicians have already looked into the issues you raise and continue to buy external DACs (there is a range of quality/prices as well). For USB powered external DACs, filtering the USB power input is a lot easier than protecting it from the nearby high voltage and high frequency emitters inside a PC, which is again why people who really care use external DACs.
Do remember that this was the insight of a 7 year old child and not said meanly but surprisingly full of wisdom for a someone that age. Hopefully I've got a few decades left and if I raised him well he'll do as good by me as I've tried to do by him without needing to pull bottom feeding lawyers into it. That some feel the need to do so is saddening.
Now address the point I made about iTunes Match being Apple's gift to massively upgrade ones Napster collection for a modest amount.
Does your iTunes Match collection belong to you? Do you think Apple is above deciding your music no longer belongs to you? It's happened before.
Yes, all the music that I placed in iTune Match is mine to do with as I want. You purchase iTunes Match. You tell iTunes to add all your music to it, it matches 60-80% of it (Not everything gets matched - better quality matches better up to a point but very high quality Flacs/ALACS dont match at all) & the rest gets uploaded. There is a limit of 100k tracks to iTunes Match and if you're coming close to that I'd suggest matching only the songs you like and not just everything. You make a Smart playlist containing all the matched music that's under 320kbit MP3 or 256kbit AAC and you delete the local copy (Not trusting anything to be 100% reliable you copied it all elsewhere before signing up ti iTunes Match). You select all the music that is only in the cloud & you download it them. iTunes downloads pristine copies as if you had purchased them using the iTunes store - No DRM but there is a tag with your Apple ID. If it bugs you, you use a tag editor to remove or edit the tags.
iTunes Match lasts for a year (unless renewed), after which the music in the cloud is no longer downloadable -- but your local copies don't magically disappear and again, there is no DRM on them. Apple cannot pull the music back from me, the iTunes Match contract doesn't give them the right to do so and Apple doesn't have the means to do so as I've already copied it elsewhere if they tried to pull an Amazon and delete it from my devices, which again they cannot do as the tracks are not DRM protected.
Do you want to try telling me how Apple, the soul sucking corporate entity you pretend it is is NOT giving you a good deal here? You're either going to play semantic games or admit that you were wrong.
Are you really so ignorant that you do not know that Apple worked against DRM'ed Music or is it that you are too prejudiced? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Allow me to introduce you to something you seem to be ignorant of that helps cut down on the cables.: It's called WIFI and Cisco sells lots of these things called access points and Wireless Lan Controllers. Maybe if you're a good boy Santa will bring you a book (or even two - a dictionary to explain some words that are kinda complicated) on how one can use WLCs and beam forming access points to form a meshed network capable of connecting a few hundred clients (but only if you're a very good boy).
Some techs bring an AppleTV along. It's relatively inexpensive (but somewhat resolution limited) and they can connect it to the video conferencing screens if they want to sit at the back of the room or roam around and airplay whatever they're demoing (again over that newfangled WIFI thing). Others sit at the front and connect their MAC/PC using a HDMI cable to the HDMI port.
When performing a demo/training in front of 20-50 people, I've never seen anyone plug in earphones to isolate themselves from questions we often ask but during breaks I may have missed someone. Even participants are normally there to interact with the person giving the demo/training but I suppose you'd rather plug in & tune out.
The future rMBP will have 4 USB-C ports from everything I've heard so even with one plugged in to charge, possibly one (maybe with a dongle) connected to a HDMI cable, one with a dongle connected to a jack for haedphones to listen to music on breaks, we'd still have one free (with a dongle) for Ethernet if that was necessary.
For current rMBP's that makes one Magsafe cable if the Mac needs a charge, add a HDMI if he doesn't want to roam or needs Full-HD, add an analog jack if he wants to listen to music on breaks and add an ethernet cable if he needs that.
For future rMBPs he'll need one USB-C cable if the Mac needs a charge, two + a HDMI dongle if he doesn't want to roam or needs Full-HD, three + a dongle if he wants to listen to music on breaks and add an ethernet dongle + cable if he needs that.
As that's no worse than currently, you have no point.
Apple doesn't sell DRM protected music anymore (and hastened it's demise).
That's not strictly true.
It's true enough if you look at the history of DRM in iTunes and aren't ideologically blinded.
But let's falsely pretend that Apple is only off to make a buck off people and every decision they make is to lock people down with DRM and make money off them.
You've got to be joking. Why do you think Apple exists? Do you believe they're the fucking United Way? OF COURSE THEY'RE ONLY IN IT TO MAKE A BUCK OFF PEOPLE, YOU GOOFBALL.
That Apple wants to make a buck off me does not imply that it is evil nor that I am unwilling if I deem the service worth the payment.
Now address the point I made about iTunes Match being Apple's gift to massively upgrade ones Napster collection for a modest amount.
Yeah it's certainly too bad that Apple didn't come out with a chip that makes bluetooth pairing easier...
I agree that BT is a classic designed by committee clearly suboptimal rats nest but if sound quality is as important to people as some claim, the chicken/egg problem of no market need to justify an easy to use, high quality solution is soon to be history.
But, that's the way it has always worked at Apple. They vote on EVERYTHING and neither Steve Jobs nor Tim Cook nor Johnny Ive or anyone of their execs ever take part in decisions. It's DEMOCRACY at it's best!
They voted to remove the floppy in the 68K Macs. They voted to remove optical drives in the rMBP. They voted to replace Serial ports with USB. They voted to not put Flash in iPhones or iPads. They voted to not have a physical keyboard in the iPhone when everybody KNEW that it was folly.
It's uncanny how often they've voted the way the market was about to turn.
Take another look at the recent macbook. How many connectors did Apple leave on it that they didn't think were absolutely necessary?
I assume that your computer has Centronics, 25 pin serial, 9 pin serial, SCART, EGA, VGA, AT keyboard, microphone, Micro AT keyboard, s-Video, SCSI, eSATA, TOSlink, 5.1 audio, Display port & Firewire 400+800, Thunderbolt 1+2 and HDMI ports? Well why the hell not!? They're all sooo useful?!?!
Apple doesn't sell DRM protected music anymore (and hastened it's demise).
Apple also makes it easy to upgrade most of that 5000 CD collection of poorly ripped 96-128kbit MP3s to high quality 256kbit non-DRMed AACs using iTune Match for a one time fee of $25.
But let's falsely pretend that Apple is only off to make a buck off people and every decision they make is to lock people down with DRM and make money off them.
Slashdot Mirror
That is precisely what do.
External USB DACs are cheap enough and and enough better than apple's internal MBP DAC that a professional musicien friend swears by them.
Beyond my acceptance of his clearly being more knowledgeable than I am, he's also more demanding than I am as I've always found Mac DAC's to be more than good enough for my needs (Laptops buzzing in my ears when not playing anything but with the volume set to max aren't).
You visibly think that the univers revolves around you but are mistaken, just as you are mistaken when opining that because something doesn't suit you makes it a design fault.
A friend of mine needs push/pull accelerator to drive yet the lack of same on almost every other car in no way make it's absence a design fault. Some people have absolutely no need to plugin usb devices, whether or not they are charging, my son among them. He is very happy with his Macbook and only needs a dongle to plug it into a TV to share Netflix with his friends. It wouldn't suit me which is why I have a rMBP but design faults have nothing to do with it.
Stop opining using "I think == the laws of the universe are", You're only displaying how self-centered you are and not convincing anyone (I dare say not even yourself).
Aww, snookums doesn't like dongles and wishes that there were enough people who cared enough to buy non-dongle PCs/Macs so that their flagship portables didn't use them? Would snookums like a cookie and a glass of warm milk to soothe his bobo?
Snookums also wants to change his argument because I shot down his analog hole dimwit idea.
The MacBook is for a different market that is well served with a single USB-C. With a decent Wifi, my son in college never needed more than the one port and is more than content with a fast enough, light, fanless Mac. He only uses a dongle when he hooks up his mac to a TV to share netflix.
The coming refresh of the rMBP will have 4 USB-C ports if the leaks are reliable. Looks like enough to me and with people providing micro-USB to Dock/lightning adapters (like this ) for less than $5, I'll just need a few of those that I'll leave connected to the USB-C cables next to the lightning splitter in my bag to be able to connect whatever I need.
Ohh the hardship, ohh the horror... Does snookums want another cookie?
rMBP's dominate at Cisco but PC's have indeed been catching up over the last year or so. It's amusing to see people who used to say, "you have to use an ethernet dongle on your rMBP, I couldn't do that" walk in with the nicer Dells/HPs that also use dongles. Somehow it's no longer a major issue...
You forgot/didn't notice that newer rMBP's use direct PCI flash drives that removed the SATA interfaces limitations. My 2013 model rMBP's flash drive still uses SATA so I'm pretty much in the same boat you are there.
Faster "disk" performance is almost always an important criteria (but wasn't enough to get me to upgrade either yet).
Neither Poperatzo nor I had a problem following the context. Ah but it's not conceivable that the problem is between your ears, so it it must be elsewhere...
Yeah, sure because it's somehow impossible for you to use your brain and figure out that even if they eliminate the built-in port on future MBPs that they wouldn't supply an inexpensive USB-C to Analog Jack dongle with it like they do with the iPhone 7. Nor can you rub two neurons together and figure that it is trivial to recover your precious analog hole from whatever sound system you choose to use.
There is no functional difference between using an analog jack or a dongle or an external DAC to recover the sound of DRMed video
No for some reason your brains shut down as soon as Apple is the subject and you come up with the dumbest straw men to PROOVE that Apple is evul and will capture your soul.
Do try to follow and get your attributions right will you?
Poperatzo is the one who tried to argue that Apple is removing the jack to force people to buy DRMed music to replace their napster collection of MP3s. [cue spooky/evil music]
I'm the one telling him that Apple pushed for the end of DRMed music and has made it possible for years for people to upgrade most of their ratty old MP3s into high quality apple store versions for a small one time fee. Oh, yeah, upgrading 60000-80000 tracks for $25 that's really making a buck off of people...
Is it reading comprehension or is it counting with big numbers that you fail to understand?
The Ars link you cite notes that the Ipad 2 and the iPhone 4s that both came out in march 2011 are only now being orphaned by iOS 10. That's over 5 years of support that you can contrast with Android's much shorter 6-24 months before being abandoned.
Apple gets around this by saying "We won't support older handsets after this release."
Wrong. Apple doesn't "get around" supporting old devices, they continue to support old devices for years and years while Android vendors including Google dropped support for devices mere months after selling them.
yeah sure, let your prejudices stop you if that makes you feel better about yourself.
Most of my collection is now ALACs (used to be FLACS but ALACs are equivalent & work better with my devices).
I didn't completely trust Apple when I tried out Match either so I made a copy before matching everything and used other tools to check everything. The one problem one can encounter with iTunes Match (beyond it not matching everything you'd want it to) is that it can match other versions of songs than the one you had originally. Say you have a bunch of albums from an artist who has performed different versions of some songs on different albums. If you don't pay attention you can lose some versions when you remove your originally ripped version & download the matched version from the cloud. If you do pay attention & kept a copy of the original tracks, it's not a problem.
Serious audiophiles & professional musicians have already looked into the issues you raise and continue to buy external DACs (there is a range of quality/prices as well). For USB powered external DACs, filtering the USB power input is a lot easier than protecting it from the nearby high voltage and high frequency emitters inside a PC, which is again why people who really care use external DACs.
Do remember that this was the insight of a 7 year old child and not said meanly but surprisingly full of wisdom for a someone that age. Hopefully I've got a few decades left and if I raised him well he'll do as good by me as I've tried to do by him without needing to pull bottom feeding lawyers into it. That some feel the need to do so is saddening.
Does your iTunes Match collection belong to you? Do you think Apple is above deciding your music no longer belongs to you? It's happened before.
Yes, all the music that I placed in iTune Match is mine to do with as I want.
You purchase iTunes Match.
You tell iTunes to add all your music to it, it matches 60-80% of it (Not everything gets matched - better quality matches better up to a point but very high quality Flacs/ALACS dont match at all) & the rest gets uploaded. There is a limit of 100k tracks to iTunes Match and if you're coming close to that I'd suggest matching only the songs you like and not just everything.
You make a Smart playlist containing all the matched music that's under 320kbit MP3 or 256kbit AAC and you delete the local copy (Not trusting anything to be 100% reliable you copied it all elsewhere before signing up ti iTunes Match).
You select all the music that is only in the cloud & you download it them.
iTunes downloads pristine copies as if you had purchased them using the iTunes store - No DRM but there is a tag with your Apple ID.
If it bugs you, you use a tag editor to remove or edit the tags.
iTunes Match lasts for a year (unless renewed), after which the music in the cloud is no longer downloadable -- but your local copies don't magically disappear and again, there is no DRM on them. Apple cannot pull the music back from me, the iTunes Match contract doesn't give them the right to do so and Apple doesn't have the means to do so as I've already copied it elsewhere if they tried to pull an Amazon and delete it from my devices, which again they cannot do as the tracks are not DRM protected.
Do you want to try telling me how Apple, the soul sucking corporate entity you pretend it is is NOT giving you a good deal here? You're either going to play semantic games or admit that you were wrong.
That'll work great when people are looking for gifs like face or forehead or ear, etc...
My son was seven when he told me & my wife that we'd better be nice to him because later on he'd be the one choosing our retirement home...
Are you really so ignorant that you do not know that Apple worked against DRM'ed Music or is it that you are too prejudiced?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Aww gee a poorly contrived strawman, how cute...
Allow me to introduce you to something you seem to be ignorant of that helps cut down on the cables.: It's called WIFI and Cisco sells lots of these things called access points and Wireless Lan Controllers. Maybe if you're a good boy Santa will bring you a book (or even two - a dictionary to explain some words that are kinda complicated) on how one can use WLCs and beam forming access points to form a meshed network capable of connecting a few hundred clients (but only if you're a very good boy).
Some techs bring an AppleTV along. It's relatively inexpensive (but somewhat resolution limited) and they can connect it to the video conferencing screens if they want to sit at the back of the room or roam around and airplay whatever they're demoing (again over that newfangled WIFI thing). Others sit at the front and connect their MAC/PC using a HDMI cable to the HDMI port.
When performing a demo/training in front of 20-50 people, I've never seen anyone plug in earphones to isolate themselves from questions we often ask but during breaks I may have missed someone. Even participants are normally there to interact with the person giving the demo/training but I suppose you'd rather plug in & tune out.
The future rMBP will have 4 USB-C ports from everything I've heard so even with one plugged in to charge, possibly one (maybe with a dongle) connected to a HDMI cable, one with a dongle connected to a jack for haedphones to listen to music on breaks, we'd still have one free (with a dongle) for Ethernet if that was necessary.
For current rMBP's that makes one Magsafe cable if the Mac needs a charge, add a HDMI if he doesn't want to roam or needs Full-HD, add an analog jack if he wants to listen to music on breaks and add an ethernet cable if he needs that.
For future rMBPs he'll need one USB-C cable if the Mac needs a charge, two + a HDMI dongle if he doesn't want to roam or needs Full-HD, three + a dongle if he wants to listen to music on breaks and add an ethernet dongle + cable if he needs that.
As that's no worse than currently, you have no point.
I don't Podcast but my media management tool is MediaMonkey. If you're on windows it may help.
That's not strictly true.
It's true enough if you look at the history of DRM in iTunes and aren't ideologically blinded.
You've got to be joking. Why do you think Apple exists? Do you believe they're the fucking United Way? OF COURSE THEY'RE ONLY IN IT TO MAKE A BUCK OFF PEOPLE, YOU GOOFBALL.
That Apple wants to make a buck off me does not imply that it is evil nor that I am unwilling if I deem the service worth the payment.
Now address the point I made about iTunes Match being Apple's gift to massively upgrade ones Napster collection for a modest amount.
Yeah it's certainly too bad that Apple didn't come out with a chip that makes bluetooth pairing easier...
I agree that BT is a classic designed by committee clearly suboptimal rats nest but if sound quality is as important to people as some claim, the chicken/egg problem of no market need to justify an easy to use, high quality solution is soon to be history.
But, that's the way it has always worked at Apple. They vote on EVERYTHING and neither Steve Jobs nor Tim Cook nor Johnny Ive or anyone of their execs ever take part in decisions. It's DEMOCRACY at it's best!
They voted to remove the floppy in the 68K Macs.
They voted to remove optical drives in the rMBP.
They voted to replace Serial ports with USB.
They voted to not put Flash in iPhones or iPads.
They voted to not have a physical keyboard in the iPhone when everybody KNEW that it was folly.
It's uncanny how often they've voted the way the market was about to turn.
Take another look at the recent macbook. How many connectors did Apple leave on it that they didn't think were absolutely necessary?
I assume that your computer has Centronics, 25 pin serial, 9 pin serial, SCART, EGA, VGA, AT keyboard, microphone, Micro AT keyboard, s-Video, SCSI, eSATA, TOSlink, 5.1 audio, Display port & Firewire 400+800, Thunderbolt 1+2 and HDMI ports? Well why the hell not!? They're all sooo useful?!?!
Apple doesn't sell DRM protected music anymore (and hastened it's demise).
Apple also makes it easy to upgrade most of that 5000 CD collection of poorly ripped 96-128kbit MP3s to high quality 256kbit non-DRMed AACs using iTune Match for a one time fee of $25.
But let's falsely pretend that Apple is only off to make a buck off people and every decision they make is to lock people down with DRM and make money off them.