Tom's Hardware of Finland

Yes, pretty much all devices are capable of digital out one way or the other, but there’s something to be said for forcing people to do it in common listening circumstances.

It’s a pickle though because cramming a DAC into a pair of headphones (or worse yet, earbuds) over bluetooth is an awful solution.

Almost any time you plug an aux cable from your phone to a car stereo, tho, it’s getting converted from digital to analog to digital back to analog again. And… generally quite poorly along each stage.

So if your car stereo can play over USB, use that instead!

1 Like

Or just get a cassette deck lol

1 Like

ability to plug in whatever >>> audio fidelity inside the cabin of a car on the freeway

4 Likes

It’s really damning of pricing that both Nvidia GPUs and Apple phones are much, much better values used for top-of-the-line last gen stuff than new. You can get a 1080 and an iPhone X for less than a 2080 or an iPhone Ten Ess.

they both had an extremely strong last generation compared to the entire rest of the industry. Can’t keep that up forever (it’s not like they’ve lost their technical lead, they just can’t motivate the consumer cycle).

and in Nvidia’s case they’re a whole process generation behind apple (largely due to the difference in manufacturing a 5w part and a 250w part) so everyone knows they’re just waiting until AMD has something or their cashflow slows down (which it isn’t outside of consumer GPUs) to have another 50% improvement

1 Like

unless Ice Lake miraculously leads them to offer a quad-core in this form factor (which I agree, almost certainly won’t be revised again) I can’t see buying this (and even that is unlikely as they seem to have designed the cooling around the 7w TDP chips rather than the 15w), they’re even using Amber Lake and not Whiskey Lake so they don’t have in-silicon Meltdown fixes

also both the “Macbook” and the Pro without touchbar look so stupid now

uggggg I am sick of waiting for Apple and Intel to have a decent product lineup again

1 Like

plus the keyboards are anecdotally still fucked

and this is for a point update lol

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-10-14-1-update.263758/

I can’t take myself seriously if I’m concurrently running Windows on my desktop and notebook but I’ve had about enough Linux this decade, not sure where I’m at

might keep waiting for ARM Macbooks, I can probably drag haswell to 2020

1 Like

What are the advantages you’re waiting for that ARM Macbooks would deliver to you?

performance that isn’t flat since 2013 with worse reliability for more money

the new iPad is about 3x as performant as the new Macbook Air lol

The new big iPad is almost exactly 8.5"x11" and I will follow its siren song to the rocky shores of shitty multitasking

3 Likes

i’m a computer hardware idiot now, would the 6-core mini make a decent home studio machine for the next few years? i’m thinking i can keep bumping the ram over time since it appears serviceable again, and just use a usb-c external for storing samples/projects/etc

(i do not care about gaming)

1 Like

yeah the new mini seems fine with the usual provisos that it’s kind of a shame to get a desktop that can’t accept a GPU (TB3 bandwidth is heavily constrained and apple keeps making it really hard to use Nvidia eGPUs instead of AMD should you even want to go that route), it at least doesn’t have the “stuck on DDR3 and terrible at low TDPs compared to ARM chips” problem that Intel’s notebook chipsets have faced the past few years

in fact DDR4 prices are still so bad that getting memory from apple feels OK for a change

1 Like

also lol the new mbps are so bad that it’s impossible to find 2015 era ones secondhand for non-ridiculous prices. i’ve been crawling cl & fb marketplace for months now to no avail

i just want to live my life use this fuckin ableton push 2 i bought off some weed-addled dubstep producer for half what it’s worth. get one good deal get cursed 4 eternity by craigslist/dude’s 5 bob marley posters

5 Likes

the dissonance between available Mac software (still more broadly compatible with developer tools and regular office-y stuff and games and feels nicer and better-maintained than any other platform, even if the lead has progressively narrowed since 2006) and Mac hardware is so bad

it’s like 30% Intel’s fault and 30% engineering arrogance and 30% everything just feels like a worse value now than it did a few years ago

maybe they’ll take a fourth try at the keyboards

fwiw i played a show just fine with my push 2 on the last version of the xps15

1 Like

Yeah, I’m on a late-2013 quad-core MacBook Pro and I’m able to keep my buffers very small and chain a lot of stuff on a lot of tracks without getting anywhere near straining my CPU. FWIW I’m mostly using Kontakt, various effects, VCV Rack, and processed WAVs in Logic Pro. If you’re running a lot of really heavy soft synths, that could make a difference, and I’m not familiar with Ableton’s performance (though I’d assume it’s good).

1 Like

people talking about the CPU requirements of audio processing is still one of those things I totally blank out on

for years I mentally had it in the same space as people talking about how you need lots of CPU threads to encode video (no do it on the GPU dummy) but I gather there’s a lot of nuance there

1 Like