[UPDATE] Wonderlust – Apple September event; new iPhones and watches

[Retro_R]

1 hour ago, SlashedM said:

New AirPods with USB-C seem to be a half upgrade, IP54 resistance on both the case and buds, and ??? lossless audio for vision pro, only on the USB-C variant

Haha you beat me to it.

But i didn't see this article/press release. Now it's weirder because it doesn't do the full 24bits? Only 20? I don't think i've ever seen that before. I'm slightly more confused

[saltycaramel]

https://x.com/linustech/status/1701660709195841808?s=46&t=uhBUIuZsslNKMlHtFg23AQ

 

It’s funny cos’ it will actually play Death Stranding, but ok. 

[saltycaramel]

3 hours ago, Retro_R said:

Ok, i have some thoughts about the "new" airpod pros they kinda announced today. I say quote on quote new, because they're not really new. They're the same 2nd gen pros, but now with USB-C charging. Soo, what about the people who already have the 2nd gen pros with lightening? Are we just fucked and have to carry a lighting cable just for my airpods? "Oh but just buy another pair" i'm not paying $250 for the same product with a different port, and i think most people won't either. Will there be some type of replacement program for old ones? There was no talk of it and this is apple we're talking about, i dont think they're gonna do that.

 

But another thing. I was looking around through the airpods pro page, like a sane human would and i noticed something.

So these "new" airpods pro are lossless? But only with vision pro (as far as i can tell)? This makes no sense. Especially since the "last" 2nd gens were expected to be lossless, but they weren't. Now this "new" pair of the same pros are now lossless? But only with one product? I don't know if this is supposed to be like some thing where apple tries to make it's most loyal fanboys waste their money to like get the apple experience or whatever, but i feel even then it makes no sense. Like it can't do lossless on the mac either? Those both have the same processor, or i guess it's because of the other chip in it? But like then why can't the previous model do that too? they should both have the same chip. Maybe it does work on that model, but what i can see, it isn't. Like??

 

The lossless low latency mode is not exclusive to the usb-c case Airpods Pro2. It will work the same on the old lightning ones. The buds themselves are unchanged. 

 

As for why it only works with the AR headsets (first Vision Pro, then Vision Air, Vision Pro2, Apple Glass, etc.), and not with iPhones, my uneducated guesses:

1) iPhones connect to Airpods (potentially) across rooms, whereas the headsets are in a fixed ultra-short-range position, literally inches apart from the Airpods

2) the headset may be connecting to each (L/R) Airpod individually with a dedicated H2 chip for each one?

3) Adding one or two H2 chips is too costly to make it worth it for 90% iPhone users just to have lossless audio, but it’s ok on a niche extremely pricey device like the Vision Pro

 

Whatever the reason, at the moment the Vision headsets get this exclusive perk (lossless ultra low latency wireless audio) unavailable on iPhones and Macs. 

[saltycaramel]

3 hours ago, Retro_R said:

Soo, what about the people who already have the 2nd gen pros with lightening? Are we just fucked and have to carry a lighting cable just for my airpods? "Oh but just buy another pair" i'm not paying $250 for the same product with a different port, and i think most people won't either.

 

The old Lightning-case Airpods Pro2 have 4 (FOUR) charging options:

1) wired Lightning

2) standard Qi

3) Magsafe Qi

4) Apple Watch magnetic puck

 

3 of these are still perfectly current.

Just saying.

[SlashedM]

3 hours ago, Retro_R said:

Haha you beat me to it.

But i didn't see this article/press release. Now it's weirder because it doesn't do the full 24bits? Only 20? I don't think i've ever seen that before. I'm slightly more confused

I can get why it cant do 24Bit. Also just realized I may be wrong, seems the vision pro page only states that it needs AirPods Pro 2nd Gen, no word on whether USB-C is an upgrade for internals or not

[hishnash]

34 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

1) iPhones connect to Airpods (potentially) across rooms, whereas the headsets are in a fixed ultra-short-range position, literally inches apart from the Airpods

Yeah the range is the reason for this got such a short range and a predictable short range you can get a lot more bandwidth even over the ex frequency range used by the devices. 

[saltycaramel]

12 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Yeah the range is the reason for this got such a short range and a predictable short range you can get a lot more bandwidth even over the ex frequency range used by the devices. 

 

The unexpected advantage of face-mounted spatial computing: turns out ears are closer to eyes than they’re to hands..

[saltycaramel]

Are the AV1-obsessed crowds here happy that Apple Silicon (the A17 Pro and, hence, probably the M3) is finally getting hw AV1 decoding?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Now iOS has to support 3 different screen styles on a large scale for several years to come. 

• Standard rectangle
• Notch (+ smaller notch)
• Dynamic Island

It's going to be interesting to see how fragmented the OS and app experience will get because of this. 

[saltycaramel]

12 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Now iOS has to support 3 different screen styles on a large scale for several years to come. 

• Standard rectangle
• Notch (+ smaller notch)
• Dynamic Island

It's going to be interesting to see how fragmented the OS and app experience will get because of this. 

 

The safe area for apps doesn’t include the notch/island anyway…

 

Obviously the Dynamic Island users are getting some exclusive optional features…the good thing this year is that even the vanilla 15s are getting the Island…unfortunately the next iPhone SE won’t get it, I think..

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

1 minute ago, saltycaramel said:

 

The safe area for apps doesn’t include the notch/island anyway…

 

Obviously the Dynamic Island users are getting some exclusive optional features…the good thing this year is that even the vanilla 15s are getting the Island…unfortunately the next iPhone SE won’t get it, I think..

Fragmented as in how many of the heavily advertised features will be locked out.

 

That being said...there's probably no reason why a dynamic island features couldn't be modified to be a "dynamic notch"...mhmm..

[hishnash]

41 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

It's going to be interesting to see how fragmented the OS and app experience will get because of this. 

Apps that use system frameworks more or less get safe area support for free, most apps do not have any reason to disable the top safe area so they will avoid any notch or other issue automatically. 

[captain_to_fire]

Is there a way to get rid of the dynamic island from screenshots? It's so fucking ugly!

[hishnash]

12 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Is there a way to get rid of the dynamic island from screenshots? It's so fucking ugly!

Within an app you can capture a screen grab of the entier apps UI but at a system level no the screen shot is of the display output (so includes the island)

[saltycaramel]

21 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Fragmented as in how many of the heavily advertised features will be locked out.

 

Some of that is kinda by design, to entice upgrades to the latest phones.

 

On the other hand Apple also needs to foster developer support for the feature, and that requires a wide user base. (otherwise the feature will be end up being killed, see the Touchbar or 3D Touch)

 

I think keeping the Dynamic Island exclusive to the Pros for 12 months was fair game, now it’s already on all the latest phones. And on last year’s Pros. (incidentally, Pro iPhones have bigger sales numbers than vanilla iPhones)

 

Apple still sell the SE, 13 and 14/14+, so the day every iPhone available on the Store will have Dynamic Island is still a couple of years down the line, but it will come. But by then there will be new exclusive features for the latest Pro phones

[captain_to_fire]

This is perhaps the most cringe part of the Apple keynote trying to placate everyone that they're now Eco friendly but no mention of easier repairs. I mean look at the like/dislike ratio. Apple must've paid a lot of money to these actors lol.

 

Also at around 3:43 the lady said that they aim to "permanently remove carbon in the atmosphere". Anyone who studied high school science knows that you can only reduce atmospheric carbon but you cannot permanently remove it because every animals including humans breathe out CO₂ as a byproduct of metabolism. Hence it's quite misleading. Heck even decaying matter like a dead tree or a dead deer emits CO₂ and CH₄.

 

[captain_to_fire]

10 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Within an app you can capture a screen grab of the entier apps UI but at a system level no the screen shot is of the display output (so includes the island)

No wonder iPhone 13 screenshots are better

[captain_to_fire]

Now that the A17 Pro supports Ray Tracing, does it mean that by next year Macs with the M3 chip will have something similar to DLSS?

[Dracarris]

18 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Now that the A17 Pro supports Ray Tracing, does it mean that by next year Macs with the M3 chip will have something similar to DLSS?

Ray Tracing and DLSS (or any kind of AI-backed upsampling technique, for that matter) are unrelated/orthogonal, AFAIK.

However it should mean that M3 Macs will have native RT support, which is nice, I guess.

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

Now that the A17 Pro supports Ray Tracing, does it mean that by next year Macs with the M3 chip will have something similar to DLSS?

Yes we fully expect M3 based apple silicon chips have hardware RT acceleration (they have some of the best APII support for this)
Something very interesting in today's presentation was the fact that apple told us that metalFX a 17 uses the neural engine for upscaling, in the past we were always led to believe that metalFX was more like AMD solution and p shaders however they said explicitly in today's presentation that on A17 the neural engine is driving the upscaling so yes on M3 we should expect MetalFX to be similar to DLSS.  

[LAwLz]

10 hours ago, Retro_R said:

Soo, what about the people who already have the 2nd gen pros with lightening? Are we just fucked and have to carry a lighting cable just for my airpods? "Oh but just buy another pair" i'm not paying $250 for the same product with a different port, and i think most people won't either. Will there be some type of replacement program for old ones? There was no talk of it and this is apple we're talking about, i dont think they're gonna do that.

This is how technology goes. Or well, how basically everything goes. 

AMD doesn't give you a new CPU just because they release a new one. Apple won't give you new earphones just because they release new ones.

You buy what you buy, and then you have that. If something new comes out, then you have to buy it again to get that.

 

I think you can buy new charging cases for Airpods, so Apple will probably start selling those soon. At that point, you might be able to buy just the case (seems to be 80 dollars for the current one) and just replace that. I wouldn't expect them to give you a lower price just because you own the old ones though.

 

 

  

3 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Now that the A17 Pro supports Ray Tracing, does it mean that by next year Macs with the M3 chip will have something similar to DLSS?

Ray tracing and DLSS are two separate things.

But from what I've gathered, Apple already has something similar DLSS which they call "MetalFX".

[RejZoR]

@LAwLz

I mean, you can also buy USB cable that has Lightning with USB-C adapter (or vice versa). It'll be cheaper than whole AirPods case and when you stop using Lightning entirely, you just keep the adapter on and it'll just be USB-C connector in the end. That's how I bridged the gap between USB-C and microUSB years ago. I still have powerbank that has microUSB input, but I can use the same cable to charge my USB-C smartphone from it. When I'll have no microUSB devices left anymore, I'll just leave the adapter on at all times and it'll just be USB-C cable. It's not ideal, but it's cheaper, works and is not wasteful as cable will remain in service.

[Obioban]

It's funny-- I primarily want one so I can start recording spatial video/taking spatial photos. Feels like in the future this is going to be one of those inflection points where photos without it look like... what black and white photos look to us today. Kids will imagine the world used to be 2D, like kids today imagine the past in black and white.

 

A little early for me to upgrade, but my wife if due for $1000 off from AT&T-- so will upgrade her, and all the family photos/videos will be taken with her phone.

 

A17 is a pretty massive upgrade on the GPU, but it mostly has me excited for the implications to the Mac processors. Hardware AV1 (I assume that'll include an encoder on the Mac side), hardware ray tracing, and 3nm should all be significant benefits on M3. I would guess a base M3 family computer is in my future, and M3 Pro or Max MPB for me.

 

I want an A17 (AV1) ATV update!

 

... that environmental impact was painful to watch.

[Paul Thexton]

10 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Now iOS has to support 3 different screen styles on a large scale for several years to come. 

• Standard rectangle
• Notch (+ smaller notch)
• Dynamic Island

It's going to be interesting to see how fragmented the OS and app experience will get because of this. 

If only Apple published some kind of Human Interface Design guidelines where considerations like this can be accommodated to instruct developers how best not to accidentally create a poor user experience across different devices.

[Paul Thexton]

7 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Now that the A17 Pro supports Ray Tracing, does it mean that by next year Macs with the M3 chip will have something similar to DLSS?

MetalFX already exists. Oliver McKenzie gave it a favourable review for Digital Foundry, Apple being Apple it isn't clear if any of the ML functionality of their silicon is involved. or if it's purely compute on the GPU, as they simply haven't talked about the low level implementation.  As far as anyone can tell, it's purely implemented as a shader on the GPU.

 

The TLDW if you can't be bothered to watch the video is that MetalFX compares favourably to DLSS in terms of image quality, and definitely ahead of FSR2.