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A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

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Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#251

Post by theshrike79 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #248
lostlogin wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A great example is an HP z laptop - good build quality, sort of the equivalent to an old T series thinkpad. Last year I abandoned a low spec z laptop day one of getting given it at work. The trackpad alone was so poor that the laptop wasn’t usable without a mouse. I am a longtime Mac user but I don’t think I was being snobby or difficult. I use a MacBook and have windows in a VM when needed.

That’s a great point. I’m always baffled by touchpads… does apple have some secret formula? Their touchpads are consistently excellent. Other vendors vary dramatically, even between models.

It's the magic sauce of software and hardware integration. Also the hardware is just bonkers.

I thought for the longest time that the whole trackpad clicked when you pressed down on it. Nope, it's just a taptic engine hidden in there. If you turn off the haptic click, it's just a flat pane of glass.

Then there's the palm detection, I've used Macbooks for almost a decade for work and I can't remember when was the last time I had a misclick on the trackpad when I was typing. I did have a ton of issues with Dell and Lenovo laptops. On Lenovos I just used the red nub and disabled the touchpad from BIOS =)

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#252

Post by mandarax8 »

raverbashing wrote: post #69
ansgri wrote: post #2

The post is interesting itself, but the addendum, > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a Where author recovers text from Firefox core dump, is just hilarious.

Yeah I was going to ask how does FF know about Mac speakers, but I was not expecting that (Neither that it would have kept the text there, I guess he was lucky)

The buffer could have been freed but not zeroed out maybe.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#253

Post by jeroenhd »

brookst wrote: post #162
jeroenhd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in laptop speakers do I think Apple is the very best. I'm sure their audio company acquisition helped them with that, I don't think any other laptop manufacturers have gone out of their way to buy audio companies just for their laptops. Apple's trackpad is also pretty good, but I prefer Lenovo's myself. Better hardware exists in every range (cheaper, faster, less power hungry), but Apple manages to put a lot of…

Curious what beats the M2 CPU for a lower price?

Many Intel laptops beat the M2 in pure CPU performance for several hundred euros less, in some models for almost half the price. The i7 12650H drains your battery much faster (and hotter) but beats the M2 in most real world applications. You also get other benefits (like easily upgradeable and cheaper RAM) for heavy workloads that make the price difference even greater.

Sadly, AMD has fallen behind Intel again, but their chips often pose just as good a performance-per-euro advantage.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#254

Post by freejazz »

zamadatix wrote: post #181
kkielhofner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the clarification - like I said this is well outside my area of expertise and my eyes glazed over pretty quickly in reading but at this point we're borderline in semantics. Exactly. In this case it's a "process". Generally speaking my take is there's almost never entirely new process (or design or anything else) in any "invention" - humans have been at this for hundreds of years and there's almost nothing…

I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?

If its really this obvious, it should be trivial to get this patent knocked out.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#255

Post by freejazz »

kkielhofner wrote: post #190
zamadatix wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?

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…

Patents do matter, you can get a patent knocked out at several phases in litigation prior to actually arriving at a trial. That's not even assuming the defendant goes and gets a stay to IPR the patent.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#256

Post by jeroenhd »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #120
jeroenhd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in laptop speakers do I think Apple is the very best. I'm sure their audio company acquisition helped them with that, I don't think any other laptop manufacturers have gone out of their way to buy audio companies just for their laptops. Apple's trackpad is also pretty good, but I prefer Lenovo's myself. Better hardware exists in every range (cheaper, faster, less power hungry), but Apple manages to put a lot of…

Yeah, shopping for non-Apple laptops is basically a big game of “choose your caveats”. That’s fine if you only need one particular quality of the laptop in question to be good, but I think most people are best served by well-roundedness. Your chances at getting something somewhat well rounded improve if you get up into MacBook price ranges, but even in that range there are a lot of machines with weirdly lackluster as…

Laptop manufacturers are absolutely terrible in this aspect. They flood the market with confusing models so they can push expensive, overpriced models around and keep minimal stock so sales are often at full price.

If you need a good laptop, you need to look towards the professional line. Not too professional ("workstation" laptops) but also not too amateurish (the cheaper laptops seemingly aimed at small business).

Thinkpad and similar product lines often deliver excellent value, especially in bulk, as long as you don't go for their bottom-of-the-barrel configurations.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#257

Post by 650 »

brundolf wrote: post #217

Love this PS: > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a, because after typing all that out as a quote toot and deciding that nah, I wanted it standalone, I clicked the "x" next to the quote box (which implies removing the quote association) and that didn't just cancel the quote, it deleted all the text. > So I attached gdb to the Firefox content process hosting this tab, took a core dump, and grepped it for the l…

Anywhere to learn more about doing this kind of stuff?

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#258

Post by amluto »

The idea of feedback-based userspace software thermal management like this seems suboptimal to me — the failure modes are nasty. (By feedback-based, I mean using V/I sense from the amp.)

The goal is to prevent the voice coil from overheating, ever. So some kind of calculation runs at some interval t, and it needs to ensure that, over the upcoming time t, the input to the amp can’t possibly overheat the coil, and of course it can’t use V/I sense data to do understand the upcoming heat input.

So, at best, one estimates the coil temperature and comes up with an upper bound on how much heat can be added over time t (either based on worst-case music, e.g. a 0dBFS square wave or based on the actual samples), and either allows the next group of samples to be sent to the amp or not.

But this is all a tradeoff with real-time performance and battery life. You want t to be long to minimize performance impact and power consumption, especially if user code is involved. But you want t to be short to maximize the ability to play loud music, especially if you aren’t looking at the actual upcoming waveform.

And you don’t want your speakers to burn out of you are doing something CPU intensive and your userspace daemon doesn’t schedule.

To me, this all suggests that an in-kernel solution could work a lot better. The kernel is involved in sending samples to the hardware anyway — it has the opportunity to look at those samples right then, calculate the integrated power (could be as simple as the sum of the squares or even just a constant!), and decide whether it’s safe. And fetch the V/I sense data to figure out the status, and reduce the volume if it fails. And if the kernel code pushing samples to hardware stops running for whatever reason, the sound is inherently muted as long as the hardware isn’t configured to loop '90’s broken CD style.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#259

Post by worldsavior »

650 wrote: post #257
brundolf wrote: post #217

Love this PS: > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a, because after typing all that out as a quote toot and deciding that nah, I wanted it standalone, I clicked the "x" next to the quote box (which implies removing the quote association) and that didn't just cancel the quote, it deleted all the text. > So I attached gdb to the Firefox content process hosting this tab, took a core dump, and grepped it for the l…

Anywhere to learn more about doing this kind of stuff?

Experience.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#260

Post by pitched »

650 wrote: post #257
brundolf wrote: post #217

Love this PS: > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a, because after typing all that out as a quote toot and deciding that nah, I wanted it standalone, I clicked the "x" next to the quote box (which implies removing the quote association) and that didn't just cancel the quote, it deleted all the text. > So I attached gdb to the Firefox content process hosting this tab, took a core dump, and grepped it for the l…

Anywhere to learn more about doing this kind of stuff?

For a quick starting point, try gcore[1]. Open the file it pops out into your favourite editor and hope that search works.

For gentler introduction, look for CTF sites. The one that gets recommended most is tryhackme.com. There are a bunch of great ones though.

1 - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/gcore.1.html

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