201–210 of 301 posts
Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”. Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898 EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know of any other compressors/limiters that are monitoring temperature sensors connected to each driver and modifying the parameters of the compressor and amplifier in real-time based on audio signal level and carefully calibrated driver amplification and temp vs time. All in a way that (to the casual listener) isn’t noticed other than “Wow this sounds really good for laptop speakers”. A picture is worth a th…
Well, it is an original implementation, but you have to admit, it sounds pretty similar to optical compressor, just with temperature sensors instead of photocells.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software, surprisingly: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type... I'm aware of hardware solutions that do the same thing.
Isn't it for Linux? I thought Macs use MacOS. Again I feel like I'm reading something out of context.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used. I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.
Yeah, ok. I presume that by your standard anything less than FLAC on a Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus is unworthy your ears but for us mere mortals the MacBook M1 speakers sound amazing for music as well. It's a massive improvement compared to any other laptop speakers I've heard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See my other comments about patents in practice. They don't matter until you end up in front of a jury (or settle with a troll, which is a different case). A jury comprised of 12 random people off the street, specifically selected by counsel to be as ignorant as possible on the subject matter at hand (easier to influence). My original point - this isn't enough of a distinguishing feature to drive sales and revenue fo…
I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few ju…
They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except, you're proving mine. In a thread full of people gushing on Mac speakers, me saying it's an okay but overpriced machine is considered "hating for the sake of hating"
But that's not what this subthread is about. It was about different people having different priorities. fsociety remarked (quite correctly) that there are a large number of people who constantly feel the need to denigrate Macs, no matter the context—and you came in and said, basically, "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much." Were those your words ? No, but it sure sounded like it was your impl…
And in response I remarked (very accurately) that there's an even larger number of people who constantly feel the need to always gush over anything Mac. This very thread is full of such examples.
> "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much."
Misrepresenting much? I said it's an okay laptop. Gets the job done.
> You said they were ridiculously overpriced, which implies that no reasonable person could look at one and think it was worth buying.
That's true. I can get other okay laptops for perhaps half the price. But they won't be as sexy as Apples. They certainly don't have fanboys taking offense at someone saying they are just okay.
> You came into a subthread
I was the one that started the subthread, by daring to say that the M1 I use has a speaker as bad as any other laptop I used. Oh the horror.
Off topic: it's such a breath of fresh air to read this content without 1) having to close half a dozen popups and 2) all in a single post and not painfully spread out across multiple messages.
https://elk.zone/infosec.exchange/@marcan@treehouse.systems
There is popup about the preview, but that might be acceptable. There is zen mode to remove all disturbances on right bottom.
This becomes apparent when people join calls with others who are using MacBooks and iPads. Why does everyone else sound better? Why is my company-issued Dell/HP laptop equipped with terrible speakers and microphone? This can be fixed by giving them a headset. It sounds dumb but one thing that keeps me from dropping my Mac for a Lenovo 100% is the speaker quality. It's nice enough to play music at a moderate level on…
Until you plug in an external monitor and the MacBook Pro overheats and fans up so you have to close the lid which muffles the mic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about laptop speakers here, where power consumption is important.
In a laptop's energy budget, power spent driving the loudspeakers is probably one of the last concerns. If you integrate the actual power consumed over the playback duration of typical program material, you would find figures that are essentially irrelevant compared to the cost of running the backlight or WiFi radios.
Like most things once you start looking at dozens of factors that are 0.5% wins each you end up with a substantial improvement that in the case of battery powered productivity devices is significant from a sales standpoint.