51–60 of 62 posts
after creating the world's best/most power-efficient mobile DAC and DSPs, one of the world's most popular music streaming platforms, one of the most power-efficient lossy and lossless codecs and the best truly wireless earbuds, I think Apple deserves to let a small bug that affects almost no-one live in production :D
This seems like a needlessly aggressive and poor take. Its a cool bug that they discovered; but going into "Apple's audio engineering team is, at least on some level, incompetent (or incompetently run; I'm not blaming the employees here, but rather the organization)" is just unproductively mean. "and obvious in a sine sweep frequency response test, which is the most basic test you can run end-to-end on a completed au…
> Because we don't have blatant, in your face off-by-one bugs in our DSP and we actually check the output to make sure it's good This makes me cringe. I consider myself an experienced software engineer, but I don't think I'll ever criticize other's code like that.
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> Because we don't have blatant, in your face off-by-one bugs in our DSP and we actually check the output to make sure it's good This makes me cringe. I consider myself an experienced software engineer, but I don't think I'll ever criticize other's code like that.
Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. This is an inexcusable bug since the most banale Q&A testing would have caught.
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> They should do their job. They did their job. They delivered a sound system that has been called the best available in any laptop. Nobody, and I mean nobody , noticed this bug in the last three years. Apple is doing just fine without your couch coaching about what they should have done. I might as well harass Apple for having 99% P3 color certification but not 100% accuracy certification.
Nobody noticed the bug in the last three years because it’s more recent. You can hear it clearly in real world usage compared to the M1. Harassing Apple over 99% P3 certification is not remotely comparable because that’s neither perceivable, nor incorrect behavior. It’s clearly a bug, an egregious one at that and it will be fixed no matter what you think about Marcans choice of words.
At Apple we would see this tone all the time from people on the VLC project. It got so bad that the senior people would refer to them as DCS, Drunken College Student. It got so bad that we mostly ignored them. It wasn't good for either VLC or QuickTime.
Interesting how rebuilding the support from the ground up allowed them to find a bug in the existing implementation. It really speaks to the quality of Asahi's work, imo.
Sometimes it's good to be strategic, but sometimes we also need real accounts of things.
Personally an overboiling sadness & frustration that the world is captured inside closed priorietary & ultimately horrendously compromising mediocre application-centric versions of computing is a lamentation I am deeply familiar with.
The message isn't happy or here to win popularity contests. It's earnest & frank & hard, reflects on the feeling that the world is trapped & kept away from understanding.
This is one manifestion of a long running gnostic battle, one humanity has been losing for a while now, and I see no obligation or cause to pretend like earning popularity-credits helps anyone. Earnesty & catharsis on the other hand reflect the real. They portray the struggle as it is.
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> Because we don't have blatant, in your face off-by-one bugs in our DSP and we actually check the output to make sure it's good This makes me cringe. I consider myself an experienced software engineer, but I don't think I'll ever criticize other's code like that.
Apple is nearing 3 billion dollar valuation. This is an inexcusable bug since the most banale Q&A testing would have caught.
I think you mean "trillion" there?
The hilarious part for me is when the author admits it's not something you would really hear in regular music listening except that it's really obvious in bassoon solos.
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Well, for audio bugs that actually matter , you can just listen to it, or if you want to get all sciencey, throw the output and input onto a scope and compare them, or send the input and output sample values into the analysis software of your choice. Code isn't necessary to judge the quality of an audio system. You can pretty much treat it as a black box if you want. The fact that no one has apparently even noticed t…
He posted a video in the thread comparing an M1 machine (they don’t have the bug) with an M2. It’s rather obvious in that simple sine-wave test. This isn’t one of those things like the difference between 128 Kbps MP3 and FLAC, where there is a difference but it can be kind of subtle depending on the listening equipment. It’s clear in that demo.
Clearly you don't.