No I haven't, because it's not designed for the real world. You know, the one where Ethernet cables, and USB 2/3.0 devices, HDMI, and SD Cards still exist and won't be going away for at least a decade.
This isn't like parallel, serial or SCSI ports whose days were very clearly numbered when Apple cut them off. Losing access to floppies was annoying but still grudgingly inevitable. But USB? There is no excuse for removing those. HDMI? It's still being actively developed! Their new MBP will be obsolete long before HDMI is.
You're an idiot.
Every single argument you now make was made regarding serial and parallel ports (SCSI never caught on in the PC desktop world like it did on Macs) when the original iMac threw them away in favor of USB.
Every. Single. One.
People who buy Mac laptops are very much used to using an adapter to suit whatever display they are hooking to. Not many displays, even now, are DisplayPort; so, Adapter. Yet no one (or nearly so) whines about that. They just purchase an adapter or two and get on with their lives.
And with USB-C to USB-A, there's even FAR LESS of an excuse, since the Adapters are readily available for a pittance (sub $10).
Let's look at it this way: No single collection of Ports on a Laptop can serve everyone; but with the USB-C/TB3 that's available through inexpensive (for the most part) adapters, almost any I/O configuration can be attained. That is simply not true with other ports. USB-C/TB3 truly is One Port to Rule Them All...
People are whining and whining about how the new MBPs are not "Pro" because they don't have USB-A Ports or SD Slots? Are they retarded???
When you can get:
(2) Thunderbolt 3, Daisy chain and power up to 5 Thunderbolt 3 devices
Two USB-C ports
(5) USB 3.1 Gen 1, Including two high-power USB Type-A ports for fast mobile device charging
Oh, and the TB2 version is not only $60 cheaper (for one less port), but the graphic demonstrates just HOW much I/O this is... NO laptop is going to have all these ports. None. And if they do, that's IT; whereas the MBP still has THREE MORE USB-C/TB3 Ports left that you can "break out" to even MORE I/O!!!
And the simple fact is the USB-C/TB3 ports on the new MBP are actually more, not less "Future Proof"; because there will be adapters and docks available from a wide variety of sources for a very long time to come. So, long after the last VGA port disappears off the same laptop, you'll still be able to buy an Adapter that will nicely extract/recreate those signals and have the proper connector to hook-up to your wax-cylinder player...
My company offers them when its time to replace your laptop. Most of the managers have opted for them and the rest of us plebs opt for the dell precision.
There have been some growing pains, saw my direct supervisor return his for networking issues where for some reason they couldn't get it to work when the dock was wired to his home network.
The manager use them because they don't have to do any real work.
macs are also becoming not very enterprise friendly.
With the soldered in storage being a big turn off for some usages.
The lack of server hardware / the min being a poor fit for the roll. Also apple does not let run mac os in a VM on non apple hardware. (it can be done but apple's license says no)
Apples lack of OS downgrade rights
Apples tendency to drop ports and more on the fly.
Uh huh. Sure. Please post a picture of you (or your "friend") actually using a Surface. No one would switch from a Mac to a Surface. They aren't even in the same space.
Remember the last time MS tried this fake "Switcher" bs? Turned out they were using paid shills and Getty Images for their "real" people...
Which is why I'm absolutely, utterly, livid that Apple is pulling these shenanigans. They had a platform that I *enjoyed* using, and they are doing their damndest to sabotage all that in an effort to maximize their already ludicrous profits.
Have you used one in a real-world application yet?
Try it before you dismiss it.
And "Adapter world" is only temporary, until the world catches up to USB-C, which is already well-underway.
Yes, but you aren't the target market for Apple, effluent idiots are. They just use creative types for their marketing to make the effluent idiots feel cool.
Interesting. Nearly ALL of my Mac-owning friends are engineers (mostly EEs), and I am an embedded developer myself. The other two that aren't engineers are an Ophthalmologist (who is also a software dev.) and a friend that is a CPA, JD and CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner). Only one other acquaintance is a "creative" type; but since he is a "signed" musician that makes his living with his Mac, I'm not sure he counts as an "idiot".
Oh, and I don't know if you were trying to make a pun with "effluent" (sewage) rather than "affluent" (rich); but if not, you're the idiot...
Are you really comparing a MBP to a Chromebook like they serve the same roll? Really?
Maybe you're just an idiot for paying 3k for a web browser but there is no Chromebook that can do anything for me that my MBP does, other than browse the web.
If you don't do anything other than what a Chromebook does, then you're an idiot for buying anything OTHER than a Chromebook.
Your post illustrates your shortcomings and in ability to buy the right product, not any of the flaws on the current MBP
Mods? Parent is "-1 Insightful"???
If that doesn't demonstrate what is wrong with Slashdot's moder-haters, I don't know what does...
CSR 8670 doesn't guarantee that two audio streams fed to two unsynchronised devices are in sync during playback.
There's too many issues with Jitter and varying clock rate of individual sound cards (which is what the ear buds are).
Personally I don't think this can be solved without some shared clock between the two buds. Maybe a high power microwave signal as the clock source beamed straight though your head.
Considering the vertigo-inducing result that even a tiny bit of jitter and/or frequency-drift WILL produce in stereo audio playback, you might be right.
Like it or not, the only way Apple is going to be able to fix this (or at least spackle-over it nicely!) will be for them to declare one earbud as "Master", and have that do comm. of raw output data over to the other 'bud, with enough FIFO to allow them to present the output to the DAC sections in perfect sync.
But the trouble with all that is that you have a "Master" (the two earbuds are no longer "peers"), and the additional FIFO means additional latency...
Point of order... skepticism is NOT hate. It has been two years but Apple is the company whose CEO made fun of people that expect to use a computer longer than three years from date of purchase. Expecting a company with Apple's track record to care about a produce they have marketed for more than 30 seconds after the OEM warrantee expires is total fantasy.
And yet Apple has a pretty damn good record of supporting stuff long after the warranty expires, even in the U.S., which does NOT have strong consumer protections in that regard...
If they did care, they could have used the CSR 8670 which supports device-to-device syncing and streaming, as used in the Earin and Bragi Dash products. Out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf operation as needed by the AirPods. But then, why use something everyone else uses (that works), when you can invent your own (W1) that doesn't? Because - courage!
I am quickly going to be out of my depth relative to a BT developer like you; but it looks like the CSR8670 uses AptX, which is not only proprietary (and licensed!) (whereas the W1 is backwards-compatible with BT 4.0, IIRC); but also does nothing to fix the connectivity problems rampant in BT headsets, whereas, if the reviews of the Beats 'phones that use W1 are correct, connectivity using the W1 is a large step above everyone else.
And I note that the Bragi does NOT use BT for the intra-pair communications; but rather what appears to be a proprietary comm. protocol. Although you say that there is a provision for "device-to-device syncing" in the 8670, unless you are talking about the AptX-low latency support, which only states an absolutely horrible 40 ms. of "latency" (which I don't know if that means that's as good as it gets for "device-to-device synchronization"). A 40 ms ear-to-ear delay would make the difference between a good, tight stereo image and something that sounds like it was played-back in a 20 foot hallway.
And besides, why would Apple put the nearly-obsolete 8670, which is BT 4.0 at best, into a product on the threshold of BT5 being approved?
Vs the existing implementation of sending the audio to one and having it relay the audio to the other? Apple's method would have less latency and higher throughput but does that matter for this application?
They wanted the earbuds to be independent, so they could operate in a solo situation, rather than have a Master-Slave relationship.
I find it very hard to believe that Apple cares about what happens when one ear piece is lost or a battery dies, let alone that the ear pieces play audio in sync. Or, for that matter, anything else that affects the consumer.
You're so full of shit, it's running out your hater-ears.
How does being inside a vehicle make you a magnificent human being? More than the engineers that designed the craft? The technicians that built and maintained it? The scientists that made it possible at all? The community workers feeding the poor?
I know not of this Opeth of which you speak, however. Should I check them out? I'm not too much of a Death Metal fan; but their Wikipedia page makes me think they are more akin to Dream Theatre (but maybe a bit less "Proggy"), which I quite enjoy in limited doses... As for metal for metal's sake, I'm more of a Rammstein fan.
Opeth are a prog metal band. They started out heavily influenced by death metal, so they interspersed heavy guitars and growled vocals with acoustic sections and clean singing. The contrast between soft/hard sections was their trademark. I recommend checking it out, even if you're not really into death metal.
They started working on a softer, more prog rock sound on the Damnation album. And their last three albums have been full-on prog rock. A lot of the old fans don't like those albums, but I love them:-)
Thanx for the education.I will check them out (esp. The more proggy stuff...;-) )
some actually take advantage of that wonderful 96 dBm of dynamic range (and even (much) more with 24 bit DVD-A/SACD recordings).
No music takes full advantage of 96dB of dynamic range, it would simply be way too dynamic to even listen to. 96dB is like the difference between an extremely quiet room (20-30dB) and a chainsaw at full tilt at 1m distance. Most rooms have somewhere between 30-40dB background noise, so to actually use all of that dynamic range, the peaks would have to hit over 130dB, which is louder than a rock concert.
24-bit has 144dB of theoretically possible dynamic range, which is even more ridiculous. To use that fully in a normal room, you would have to have peaks around 180dB, which is ~40dB above the threshold of pain, and would cause instantaneous hearing damage or even complete deafness.
I know all this; but thanks for the lesson.;-)
What I apparently should have said, to avoid triggering your "pedant" mode, is that they use more of the available 96 dBm dynamic range. I didn't mean to imply that any recording actually used it all (although things like the Telarc recording of the 1812 Overture ("Warning: Digital Cannons!" says the packaging) come pretty close.
And of course NO playback system can actually realize the 144 dBm dynamic range possible with a 24 bit recording. But, like the 96 or 192 Ks/s sampling rate that usually goes hand-in-hand with that 24 bit depth, it is nice to know that any dithering, bit-bobbling, or other artifacts are well below the threshold of hearing, and that "digital clipping" is of no concern; simply because you can easily cover any conceivable recording without having to compress or limit the dynamic range on the input (recording) end of things...
The point of 24-bit is not for playback, it's for recording and mastering. Every time your run the signal through another device, every time you apply an effect, every time you change the signal, you're adding a little bit of noise. That adds up over time. By using 24-bit, you make that noise accumulation quiet enough that it will not have an effect on the final 16-bit product.
24-bit is pointless for playback.
Again, I know all this.
Just like above, the main point of 24 bit depth is to allow downstream digital processing without having "math errors" stacking-up to the point where they are of any audible concern. But since DSP fun is done both on the recording and playback ends, I submit that 24 bit has advantages there, too.
My main quibble is actually not with the 16 bit depth for playback; but rather with that paltry 44.1 Ks/s sample rate. It's not that we need to record "music for dogs"; but rather that, with the sample-rate so low, the brick-wall Low-pass filters (whether digital or analog in nature) have significant comb-filter artifacts WAY down into the audible range. And that actually affects BOTH recording AND playback! Just because we can't really hear a stationary comb filter very well, doesn't mean it isn't there, and doesn't affect the overall sound.
But the main reason that I like (re)purchasing selected recordings in 24/96, is more about "future proofing" and "preservation". With those rates/depths, it is highly unlikely that any conceivable playback method or medium will come along in the next few lifetimes to make those recordings sound like wax cylinders... So, I purchase the stuff partially because I want them to continue to see the value in these restorations/conversions; so they keep doing them.
Slashdot Mirror
No I haven't, because it's not designed for the real world. You know, the one where Ethernet cables, and USB 2/3.0 devices, HDMI, and SD Cards still exist and won't be going away for at least a decade. This isn't like parallel, serial or SCSI ports whose days were very clearly numbered when Apple cut them off. Losing access to floppies was annoying but still grudgingly inevitable. But USB? There is no excuse for removing those. HDMI? It's still being actively developed! Their new MBP will be obsolete long before HDMI is.
You're an idiot.
Every single argument you now make was made regarding serial and parallel ports (SCSI never caught on in the PC desktop world like it did on Macs) when the original iMac threw them away in favor of USB.
Every. Single. One.
People who buy Mac laptops are very much used to using an adapter to suit whatever display they are hooking to. Not many displays, even now, are DisplayPort; so, Adapter. Yet no one (or nearly so) whines about that. They just purchase an adapter or two and get on with their lives.
And with USB-C to USB-A, there's even FAR LESS of an excuse, since the Adapters are readily available for a pittance (sub $10).
Let's look at it this way: No single collection of Ports on a Laptop can serve everyone; but with the USB-C/TB3 that's available through inexpensive (for the most part) adapters, almost any I/O configuration can be attained. That is simply not true with other ports. USB-C/TB3 truly is One Port to Rule Them All...
People are whining and whining about how the new MBPs are not "Pro" because they don't have USB-A Ports or SD Slots? Are they retarded???
When you can get:
(2) Thunderbolt 3, Daisy chain and power up to 5 Thunderbolt 3 devices
Two USB-C ports
(5) USB 3.1 Gen 1, Including two high-power USB Type-A ports for fast mobile device charging
FireWire 800
Gigabit Ethernet
mini DisplayPort
SD Card reader
Audio combo port For headphones or microphones
S/PDIF digital audio
Out of Just ONE of FOUR USB-C/TB3 Ports on the new MBP, what's not to like? What's not "Pro" about THAT I/O capability?
Oh, and the TB2 version is not only $60 cheaper (for one less port), but the graphic demonstrates just HOW much I/O this is... NO laptop is going to have all these ports. None. And if they do, that's IT; whereas the MBP still has THREE MORE USB-C/TB3 Ports left that you can "break out" to even MORE I/O!!!
And the simple fact is the USB-C/TB3 ports on the new MBP are actually more, not less "Future Proof"; because there will be adapters and docks available from a wide variety of sources for a very long time to come. So, long after the last VGA port disappears off the same laptop, you'll still be able to buy an Adapter that will nicely extract/recreate those signals and have the proper connector to hook-up to your wax-cylinder player...
And of course, Microsoft knows this, which is why they’re appealing to the market that Apple is slowly but inevitably leaving behind.
Really? Every Surface Pro/Surface Book ad I have seen touts only ONE feature: The touchscreen. BFD.
LOL. Right and apple never pads their PR bullshit
No. The SEC frowns on that...
My company offers them when its time to replace your laptop. Most of the managers have opted for them and the rest of us plebs opt for the dell precision.
There have been some growing pains, saw my direct supervisor return his for networking issues where for some reason they couldn't get it to work when the dock was wired to his home network.
The manager use them because they don't have to do any real work.
If the figures were really that great, why not provide them? Wouldn't that be a punch to the gut to Apple?
Exactly.
This "news" reminds me very much of the last time Microsoft was touting "switchers"...
macs are also becoming not very enterprise friendly.
With the soldered in storage being a big turn off for some usages.
The lack of server hardware / the min being a poor fit for the roll. Also apple does not let run mac os in a VM on non apple hardware. (it can be done but apple's license says no)
Apples lack of OS downgrade rights
Apples tendency to drop ports and more on the fly.
None of your examples are relevant to a laptop.
Uh huh. Sure. Please post a picture of you (or your "friend") actually using a Surface. No one would switch from a Mac to a Surface. They aren't even in the same space.
Remember the last time MS tried this fake "Switcher" bs? Turned out they were using paid shills and Getty Images for their "real" people...
I can tell that you're not a vi/vim user just by that comment, because tactile feedback on the ESC key is really important to a vim user.
Remember, the MBP already has haptic feedback built in, so using it for Touch Bar "kepresses" is only an OS-call away...
Which is why I'm absolutely, utterly, livid that Apple is pulling these shenanigans. They had a platform that I *enjoyed* using, and they are doing their damndest to sabotage all that in an effort to maximize their already ludicrous profits.
Have you used one in a real-world application yet?
Try it before you dismiss it.
And "Adapter world" is only temporary, until the world catches up to USB-C, which is already well-underway.
nd of course, you are now required to carry around a dead octopus worth of cables to cover all the possible situations you may need.
Show me another laptop with 80 Gbps of raw I/O bandwidth.
You just don't get it.
Isn't if funny how similar that word is to affluent. To be fair of my mistake, they both carry many similarities.
But in your case, apparently you're too stupid to know the difference.
Yes, but you aren't the target market for Apple, effluent idiots are. They just use creative types for their marketing to make the effluent idiots feel cool.
Interesting. Nearly ALL of my Mac-owning friends are engineers (mostly EEs), and I am an embedded developer myself. The other two that aren't engineers are an Ophthalmologist (who is also a software dev.) and a friend that is a CPA, JD and CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner). Only one other acquaintance is a "creative" type; but since he is a "signed" musician that makes his living with his Mac, I'm not sure he counts as an "idiot".
Oh, and I don't know if you were trying to make a pun with "effluent" (sewage) rather than "affluent" (rich); but if not, you're the idiot...
Are you really comparing a MBP to a Chromebook like they serve the same roll? Really?
Maybe you're just an idiot for paying 3k for a web browser but there is no Chromebook that can do anything for me that my MBP does, other than browse the web.
If you don't do anything other than what a Chromebook does, then you're an idiot for buying anything OTHER than a Chromebook.
Your post illustrates your shortcomings and in ability to buy the right product, not any of the flaws on the current MBP
Mods? Parent is "-1 Insightful"???
If that doesn't demonstrate what is wrong with Slashdot's moder-haters, I don't know what does...
CSR 8670 doesn't guarantee that two audio streams fed to two unsynchronised devices are in sync during playback.
There's too many issues with Jitter and varying clock rate of individual sound cards (which is what the ear buds are).
Personally I don't think this can be solved without some shared clock between the two buds. Maybe a high power microwave signal as the clock source beamed straight though your head.
Considering the vertigo-inducing result that even a tiny bit of jitter and/or frequency-drift WILL produce in stereo audio playback, you might be right.
Like it or not, the only way Apple is going to be able to fix this (or at least spackle-over it nicely!) will be for them to declare one earbud as "Master", and have that do comm. of raw output data over to the other 'bud, with enough FIFO to allow them to present the output to the DAC sections in perfect sync.
But the trouble with all that is that you have a "Master" (the two earbuds are no longer "peers"), and the additional FIFO means additional latency...
Point of order... skepticism is NOT hate. It has been two years but Apple is the company whose CEO made fun of people that expect to use a computer longer than three years from date of purchase. Expecting a company with Apple's track record to care about a produce they have marketed for more than 30 seconds after the OEM warrantee expires is total fantasy.
And yet Apple has a pretty damn good record of supporting stuff long after the warranty expires, even in the U.S., which does NOT have strong consumer protections in that regard...
They wanted the earbuds to be independent, so they could operate in a solo situation, rather than have a Master-Slave relationship.
So, would this be Apple tacitly acknowledging that these things are guaranteed to quickly fall out and get lost?
No, it's because Apple acknowledges that there are use-cases for only using one earbud at a time, you insensitive clod.
If they did care, they could have used the CSR 8670 which supports device-to-device syncing and streaming, as used in the Earin and Bragi Dash products. Out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf operation as needed by the AirPods. But then, why use something everyone else uses (that works), when you can invent your own (W1) that doesn't? Because - courage!
I am quickly going to be out of my depth relative to a BT developer like you; but it looks like the CSR8670 uses AptX, which is not only proprietary (and licensed!) (whereas the W1 is backwards-compatible with BT 4.0, IIRC); but also does nothing to fix the connectivity problems rampant in BT headsets, whereas, if the reviews of the Beats 'phones that use W1 are correct, connectivity using the W1 is a large step above everyone else.
And from what I have read, the Bragi Dash is nothing to Brag about. In fact, the Bragi Dash website talks about troubleshooting intra-pair communications dropouts and other issues.
And I note that the Bragi does NOT use BT for the intra-pair communications; but rather what appears to be a proprietary comm. protocol. Although you say that there is a provision for "device-to-device syncing" in the 8670, unless you are talking about the AptX-low latency support, which only states an absolutely horrible 40 ms. of "latency" (which I don't know if that means that's as good as it gets for "device-to-device synchronization"). A 40 ms ear-to-ear delay would make the difference between a good, tight stereo image and something that sounds like it was played-back in a 20 foot hallway.
And besides, why would Apple put the nearly-obsolete 8670, which is BT 4.0 at best, into a product on the threshold of BT5 being approved?
If they truly cared, they would have figured out how to make wireless earphones work properly before removing the headphone jack from their phones.
Spoken like someone who has never created anything.
Vs the existing implementation of sending the audio to one and having it relay the audio to the other? Apple's method would have less latency and higher throughput but does that matter for this application?
They wanted the earbuds to be independent, so they could operate in a solo situation, rather than have a Master-Slave relationship.
I find it very hard to believe that Apple cares about what happens when one ear piece is lost or a battery dies, let alone that the ear pieces play audio in sync. Or, for that matter, anything else that affects the consumer.
You're so full of shit, it's running out your hater-ears.
Health benefits of leaving the planet confirmed!
Lived to 95. That ain't so bad.
How does being inside a vehicle make you a magnificent human being? More than the engineers that designed the craft? The technicians that built and maintained it? The scientists that made it possible at all? The community workers feeding the poor?
He was a passenger. So what?
You don't deserve to breathe.
He was the meat in an automated tin can that went to the upper atmosphere. Some accomplishment.
You don't even deserve to breathe.
I know not of this Opeth of which you speak, however. Should I check them out? I'm not too much of a Death Metal fan; but their Wikipedia page makes me think they are more akin to Dream Theatre (but maybe a bit less "Proggy"), which I quite enjoy in limited doses... As for metal for metal's sake, I'm more of a Rammstein fan.
Opeth are a prog metal band. They started out heavily influenced by death metal, so they interspersed heavy guitars and growled vocals with acoustic sections and clean singing. The contrast between soft/hard sections was their trademark. I recommend checking it out, even if you're not really into death metal.
They started working on a softer, more prog rock sound on the Damnation album. And their last three albums have been full-on prog rock. A lot of the old fans don't like those albums, but I love them :-)
Thanx for the education.I will check them out (esp. The more proggy stuff... ;-) )
some actually take advantage of that wonderful 96 dBm of dynamic range (and even (much) more with 24 bit DVD-A/SACD recordings).
No music takes full advantage of 96dB of dynamic range, it would simply be way too dynamic to even listen to. 96dB is like the difference between an extremely quiet room (20-30dB) and a chainsaw at full tilt at 1m distance. Most rooms have somewhere between 30-40dB background noise, so to actually use all of that dynamic range, the peaks would have to hit over 130dB, which is louder than a rock concert.
24-bit has 144dB of theoretically possible dynamic range, which is even more ridiculous. To use that fully in a normal room, you would have to have peaks around 180dB, which is ~40dB above the threshold of pain, and would cause instantaneous hearing damage or even complete deafness.
I know all this; but thanks for the lesson. ;-)
What I apparently should have said, to avoid triggering your "pedant" mode, is that they use more of the available 96 dBm dynamic range. I didn't mean to imply that any recording actually used it all (although things like the Telarc recording of the 1812 Overture ("Warning: Digital Cannons!" says the packaging) come pretty close.
And of course NO playback system can actually realize the 144 dBm dynamic range possible with a 24 bit recording. But, like the 96 or 192 Ks/s sampling rate that usually goes hand-in-hand with that 24 bit depth, it is nice to know that any dithering, bit-bobbling, or other artifacts are well below the threshold of hearing, and that "digital clipping" is of no concern; simply because you can easily cover any conceivable recording without having to compress or limit the dynamic range on the input (recording) end of things...
The point of 24-bit is not for playback, it's for recording and mastering. Every time your run the signal through another device, every time you apply an effect, every time you change the signal, you're adding a little bit of noise. That adds up over time. By using 24-bit, you make that noise accumulation quiet enough that it will not have an effect on the final 16-bit product.
24-bit is pointless for playback.
Again, I know all this.
Just like above, the main point of 24 bit depth is to allow downstream digital processing without having "math errors" stacking-up to the point where they are of any audible concern. But since DSP fun is done both on the recording and playback ends, I submit that 24 bit has advantages there, too.
My main quibble is actually not with the 16 bit depth for playback; but rather with that paltry 44.1 Ks/s sample rate. It's not that we need to record "music for dogs"; but rather that, with the sample-rate so low, the brick-wall Low-pass filters (whether digital or analog in nature) have significant comb-filter artifacts WAY down into the audible range. And that actually affects BOTH recording AND playback! Just because we can't really hear a stationary comb filter very well, doesn't mean it isn't there, and doesn't affect the overall sound.
But the main reason that I like (re)purchasing selected recordings in 24/96, is more about "future proofing" and "preservation". With those rates/depths, it is highly unlikely that any conceivable playback method or medium will come along in the next few lifetimes to make those recordings sound like wax cylinders... So, I purchase the stuff partially because I want them to continue to see the value in these restorations/conversions; so they keep doing them.