NinerL

Seems like there's some companies rejoicing
 

people are mad because he did a complete 180, he has stated that he hates bixby, and majority of the people agree that it's an inferior personal assistant. so if the product is a complete waste of space, and you've made unfavorable remarks towards said product, why even enter into a sponsorship deal?

I think its a bit of both - a LOT of people, including management, have jumped ship in the past few weeks.

Apple is tired of subsidizing low cost phones. CDMA needs to die. 

... Aren't they all "guilty" of this? The phone technically does have X GB some is just taken by the OS. Android is the same... The phone does have the storage. Its just being used. Is the next case going to be against memory manufacturers when people realise their SSD/HDD isn't technically 1TB? Such a petty case lmao...
 
EDIT: Was totally hoping Brazilian Justice was a super ethical gang or strong advocates for hairless genitals

No, he didn't use the January driver. If he did, it wouldn't even recognise the card.
 
Here's what WhyCry (VideoCardz) said:
 

Nevertheless MS asked for it by stating that "NO RANSOMWARE CAN RUN ON W10S". Serves them right in my opinion. Maybe they'll tone down the overdramatic statements.

They mock Apple for removing the headphone jack, then go on to rip off their design, and finally they do some scummy sht and manipulate their benchmarks. 

IF they gave  5-year no-matter-what warranty, it would have been just fine, but with the 1-year limited hardware warranty, this is complete BS

Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior over the way it promoted its own shopping services over that of competitors, reports the Financial Times. This is one of three separate European investigations into the legality of the company’s trading practices.
The paper says that a formal announcement will be made ‘in the coming weeks,’ and that the search giant will be fined a billion Euros ($1.12B) by the European Commission …
 
The accusation was that when you search for a product on Google, the link to the product on Google Shopping is more prominent than those to other price-comparison websites. The EC has apparently now found the case proven, and will levy the fine. It is also likely to insist that Google rectify the problem by downgrading the visibility of Google Shopping links.
Google argued that online shopping was ‘robustly competitive’ and that Amazon was by far the most dominant player in the marketplace. As Business Insider notes, Google pointed to the fact that around a third of product searches are conducted on Amazon, against 14.3% on Google. The EC has seemingly rejected this defence.
The reputed fine is significantly less than the maximum possible. EU rules provide for a maximum antitrust fine of 10% of a company’s annual revenue, which would be around $7.6B.
The decision is likely to raise the same kind of split views seen when the EU concluded that Ireland had offered illegal state aid to Apple through a sweetheart tax deal, rendering the company liable to pay €13B ($14.5B) in back taxes.
It’s almost certain that Google will appeal the ruling to the European Court of Justice, a process which some say may take several years. Separate investigations continue into whether Google forces manufacturers of Android devices to favor the company’s own apps, and whether it abuses its dominance in ad sales by making it harder for advertisers to buy from rival ad networks.
 
Via: https://9to5google.com/2017/06/16/google-antitrust-outcome-eu-europe
 
That's a lot of money! They'll appeal the case obviously, but I reckon they're going to end up paying that 1 billion. 

because Apple can actually design an ARM CPU that kicks the competition in the ass? 

Qualcomm owns the patents.

Yeap, pretty much. Qualcomm's licensing practices mean that Qualcomm receive royalties on the sale price of the finished product, not the contribution of the patent.
 
For Samsung, it reportedly it dates back to 1993 when Samsung was manufacturing CDMA chipsets under licenses that it could only manufacture them for their own phones, and has continued since. Fast forward to 2013 and talks to reach an alternative agreement had disintegrated. 
 
By the looks of things this wasn't just a Samsung issue as Apple, Intel, etc joined FCC and the South Korean Regulators lawsuits/investigations around unfair market practices that stifle market competition as it was deemed that their patents fall under standard essential patents. 
 
Basically Qualcomm is being a bigger a**hole than Apple, and it stifling competition and innovation so that they can hold all the cards and monies. 
 
So for instance if Qualcomm charge a 1% royalty, and you sell a $20 modem with a Qualcomm patent to a phone company who then sell the phone for $1000, Qualcomm collect $10 instead of $0.20. 
 
 

Qualcomm owns the patents.

Qualcomm owns the patents.

And yet you care to comment in this thread.

Why is this not all over the news? It's huge news and yet it was not mentioned in MKBHD's nor Linus' video (WANK show) about iOS 11.
 
 
TL;DR:
Apple is moving away from from a really bad, 24 year old image format.
The new format is about twice as efficient as JPEG, and supports a lot of great features.
I am worried how this will play out because of licensing issues. Will this lead to another format war?
 
 
 
Long version:
 
Don't know how many people here cares about media formats, but I care a lot.
At the WWDC a few days ago, Apple quickly mentioned that they will start using HEVC for video recording. In the same segment, they also mentioned that they will start saving pictures taken on your iPhone as HEIF files, encoded with HEVC. The move to HEVC for video is not that interesting, and hopefully Apple will move over to AV1 once that is released, but what is important and interesting is HEIF.
 
HEIF (pronounced HEEF) stands for "High Efficient File Format". It's an image container format with a ton of very great features. Apple will start saving pictures taken with iOS devices' cameras as HEVC encoded image inside HEIF files. MacOS High Sierra and iOS 11 will support it.
JPEG is old and should have been replaced years ago. Google tried with WebP but the lack of support in OSes and applications lead to it just creating headaches for users and it has mostly faded away into obscurity. With Apple's tremendous control over their iOS ecosystem, it is very possible that they will implement convertion from HEIF to JPEG/PNG in an elegant way which is transparent to the users. Once the new format has gotten traction, more and more OSes and applications might start adding native support for it and it might become a true replacement for JPEG.
 
It's important to understand that HEIF is a container, not a codec. The specifications does however include special instructions on how to encapsulate HEVC images into HEIF-complaint files. Apple has stated that they will start using HEIF as a container, and HEVC as the codec for images saved within the HEIF container. What this means is that it should be possible to save AV1 encoded images inside a HEIF file in the future.
 
To break it down:
HEVC - A codec. It specifies how to make that 1GB video into a 500MB video, without losing too much image quality.
HEIF - A container. It's like wrapping paper for your files. It allows you to put one or more files, which may have different codecs, inside a single file, and it tells your programs how to interpret these files. For example .mp4 is a container, and it makes it possible to bundle the video file and audio file into a single file which your video player understands how to play.
HEVC as an image format - Since HEVC is meant for video, it does not include any of the features needed to be used as a still image format. HEIF fixes this by including special specifications on how to encode a single image using HEVC into a HEIF-complaint file.
 
 
 
HEIF container info and benefits:
Developed by MPEG, so it is not Apple exclusive. It's developed by the same group that created .mp4 (MPEG) and is an ISO standard. Extremely flexible (this can also be a drawback as we have seen with MKV, since supporting it can be complex). Support for multiple images in the same file (for example, if you burst shoot on your phone then all images can be saved in the same file, instead of individually). This also means that you can save an entire gallery as a single file. Wanna send 10 images from your trip to your mom? Send her a single file containing all the images, instead of 10 individual files. "Derived images" support, which means you can do non-destructive images editing. When a HEIF image is edited, the standard allows for the modifications to be saved as transform operations, in the metadata, instead of as a brand new image. This means that you get to keep the original image intact, as well as a modified version in the same file (with extremely little overhead). The types of native edits you can do are fairly limited (cropping, rotation, overlays and image grids), but it is possible for programs to write their own instructions. This could remove the need for special file formats such as Photoshop's psd. It is possible to have multiple images in the same file mix together to create a single image that is presented to the user. The most common example of this will most likely be HDR images. Right now, when you take an HDR photo you either get multiple, separate images (for example one low exposure, one with high exposure, and one that's mixed together) or the low and high exposure images are thrown out and you only get the mixed one. With HEIF, it will be possible for a HDR shot to output a single file that contains all three aforementioned versions, while only being a single file and only needing to save data for the high and low exposure shots. Support for several different metadata types (including Exif and XMP) and can be extended to support more. Other types of media such as video, audio and subtitles can be saved inside the HEIF file as well. This is very hand if we want to use it to replace animated gifs. Thumbnails can be embedded into the same file as the master image. I am not sure how this will work, but my guess is that it will be possible for applications to request only the thumbnail image, instead of needing to download the entire file to access the thumbnail. If this is the case, then it will be very useful for developers. For example websites would no longer need to save thumbnails and full resolution images as separate files. There is a field for "looping". This is useful if you want to create looping animated images (think like gifs), but you can also write a number to this field which means the animation will only loop for a certain number of times.  
As you can probably tell by the long list, this format has many benefits over jpeg, gif and PNG which are the three most common image containers (and codecs) used today. It is clear that MPEG looked at what features are needed in modern devices and wanted to create a format that supports all of them. Not only that, but a lot of the specifications are very flexible and open, which will allow future changes or third party developers to adapt the format to suit their needs (such as Adobe embedding Photoshop transformation information inside it).
 
But like I said, HEIF is just the container. Apple also said that they are going to encode the images in the HEVC format. Why?
 
HEVC as image format benefits and features:
Again, this is an ISO standard and is in no way limited to only Apple. For still images, HEVC is on average twice as efficient as JPEG. This means that your images will either be half the size they would be if they were in the JPEG format at the same quality, or you can increase the quality, or a combination of both. Samples can be found here. Since it is a video format, it can be animated and it will be far better than gif at it. It supports more colors and is much more efficient. There are two comparisons between HEIF/HEVC and gif in the link I posted above. Can be lossless (and thus, it can replace PNG too). It supports transparency. The same hardware acceleration used for video playback can also be used to decode and render images. This means that decoding the images will use less power and be faster than JPEG, gif and PNG. Even on devices which does not support hardware acceleration of HEVC, the fact that it is HEVC and based on slices allows decoding to be heavily parallelized, and more flexible. So while you might not save any power, it will still be fast to decode. It will also be possible to prioritize individual slices which may be more relevant to the user than other slices, instead of the standard "always render from top to bottom" we have today with JPEG and PNG.  
The one thing that worries me, is that HEVC is a licensing nightmare. Compared to H.264, the per-unit fees are in some cases 10 times as high for HEVC. There is no annual fee cap anymore, as well as a 0.5% royalt on revenue generated from HEVC video services. All of those things combined meant that for Mozilla and many other companies, moving from H.264 to HEVC would increase their yearly licensing cost by about 10,000% (100 times as much). For companies like Netflix, Amazon and Google which relies even more on video services, the cost increase would have been even larger.
In fact, HEVC licensing is such a big issue that Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix (and many more joined later) all got together to create a new format (AV1 which I mentioned earlier) which will be open and free to use. Apple however, is not in this alliance. This move, is signaling that Apple are not interested in moving to the free and open AV1 format.
 
AV1 might be supported in HEIF in the future, but changing formats is not some small task and I doubt Apple would want to change from HEIF/HEVC to HEIF/AV1 in a year or two. Since HEVC and AV1 are also competitors, we might run into a situation where MPEG, the creators of HEIF and HEVC will make it more convenient to use HEVC over AV1 inside HEIF.
So what we might get is a format war between Apple and MPEG with HEIF/HEVC vs essentially the rest of the industry with a superior video format, but no image format alternative. Even if another standard using AV1 for images gets developed we will end up in a situation where we got two competing formats trying to solve the same issues (and HEIF/HEVC will have 1-3 year head start).
 
 
Thoughts?
Personally I think it is great that we are finally seeing a large company move away from JPEG in a graceful way. My only problem is that it is relying on HEVC which I consider essentially dead because of the AV1 codec which will hopefully be finalized in late 2017 (Q3 or Q4), with hardware support for it released in 2018.
What I want to see is HEIF extended to support AV1 so that we can get the best of both worlds. Sadly, that will probably not happen and in that case I hope that AOMedia will reinvent the wheel by creating their own image format.

Just so that everyone knows, Kaspersky does raise some valid complaints and the title is really biased and misleading.
I highly recommend reading the full article with an open mind.  

You mean like a normal PC?

$2,700 for the top model and no dedicated GPU

Thunderbolt 3 allows native support for dual 4K 60 Hz monitors. I'm sure 4K monitors will just keep getting cheaper in the years to come. Also, if a device with Thunderbolt 3 is connected to a monitor that uses Thunderbolt 3, it can also charge the device without the need of the charger.
Data and charging in all one cable without the need of separate docks that are expensive.
We're talking about what's available now. It's kinda like a smartphone OEM releasing a flagship phone nowadays and don't support 4G LTE which is ubiquitous and say it's fine just to have 3G and wait for 5G later on. While 3G is still perfectly usable, LTE is just a fair expectation to flagship phones. Same goes for computers, the best available I/O at the moment is a fair expectation for mobile computers at that price.
I'm sure someone will. You're basically justifying Microsoft's deficiency here.
Yes I know and for the nth time, Thunderbolt 3 controllers aren't expensive. https://ark.intel.com/products/series/87742/Thunderbolt-3-Controllers

A system that looks premium but has inferior hardware to a non premium system improves the user experience?
That's like saying my Asus U38N - which looks and is built like a premium - provides a better experience than my HP Pavilion DV6 3010AX (and in my Mum's case, the HP Touchsmart TM2 that it was supposed to replace). Despite the U38N relying on 3GB of usable RAM (1GB shared) and an A8 4555M instead of the 3010AX's 4GB RAM (+1GB DDR3 vRAM+64MB DDR2 vRAM) with a Phenom II N970 and MR HD5650+HD4250.

Edit: Laptops mentioned; https://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks/U38N/ , https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Pavilion-dv6-3010AX.34174.0.html (upgraded to Phenom II N970), https://support.hp.com/in-en/document/c02544058 (upgraded to a 240GB SSD+8GB RAM)

OpTic number #1, this years cod will be boots on the ground.

$1,000 and only 4GB of ram? LOL? 

$1,000 and only 4GB of ram? LOL?