sjwright

The original iPad was a first generation product; its status as a minimum viable product was only clear after subsequent product cycles.

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.

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.

> 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.

Replaceable batteries were superseded by batteries of sufficient capacity for 99% of users.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.

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.

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.

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.

> 128k MP3s

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.

MP3 encoding has come a long way.

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.

And more stress on the speaker/tweeter drivers.

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.

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.

Again yes, that’s exactly my point. They are double dipping on the good will; first as an employee perk, second on their corporate annual reports.