patrick.net

As an added bonus some guy in Bangslore gets to listen in on your bedroom convos.

clambo says

The Home Pod prevously cost $350, but now it's reasonably priced at just $299; that's a big difference!
Now you can talk to Siri and ask her to play music or something; it's got amazing capabilities, but I'm not sure what they all are.
Apple products aren't expensive, they just cost more than some people can afford.

It's a fucking spy device. It's the telescreen from fucking 1984.

Stupid people buy this shit. Don't be stupid. I hate people that sell society into slavery. You're a fool to get this.

And Apple products saying they aren't expensive? Look, I work in this industry, I know about what the BOM (Bill of Materials) is on this, it's under $50, probably closer to $25. Apple has great marketing and they have inferior, VASTLY inferior, products. Apple OS is a KNEECAPPED Free BSD variant. Whenever I'm forced to work on those fucking machines, it takes me only a few minutes to get pissed off with all the basic Unix shit they ripped out for NO GOOD REASON. You don't even have remote display on the fucking things.

Apple users don't know what they don't have access to, so they're perfectly fine with it. I just ripped the audio from this:

https://rumble.com/v280olm-cnn-ratings-in-the-toilet-krystal-ball-tells-left-to-grow-up-and-back-maria.html

And then FTP'ed it to my phone using almost entirely standard tools that are default under Linux. It's a 3 hour podcast, and if I had an iPhone, I'd have to be listening to it on 5G, rather than just spending 5 minutes ripping it, and 5 seconds transferring it. Instead of using my old, nearly dead phone, I use for everything, I'd actually have to be using my good working phone.

I have a nest thermostat because I like the illuminated touch screen simple design. I have yet to hook it up to my wifi and never will. I like to think I'm holding it prisoner, and making it my bitch. I just need it to tell me the temp and control my AC, not tell the Commie Kill Joys my climate control habits.

richwicks says

few minutes to get pissed off with all the basic Unix shit they ripped out for NO GOOD REASON

You need to get a jailbroken one ... or work for the company. :-). Lots of the basic unix stuff is still there. You can even turn the paging swapfile back on if you want to. Maybe it doesn't have FTP, but it most definitely has ssh and scp, which are used to copy over built applications and debug directly using gdb right on the device.

Getting back to the original post, Home Pod seems rather ridiculous to me.

If I got for free I wouldn't use it. It must make complete sense to people to plug a microphone into the internet and leave it on 24/7. right?

Maybe it's a good substitute for a sound bar?

What does it do? It's a speaker that you can talk to? I already have dozens of microphones in my house.

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Just saw Apple's Home Pod for $99 at Best Buy.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-homepod-mini-space-gray

I bought a new Echo Show 5 for $49 last year on Amazon.

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Only an idiot would want this type of shit in their home. Sorry, not gonna lie about it. I was gifted a similar device at a company Christmas party some years ago. I did not hide my feelings about it. I even left it there at the end of the party.

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I am looking at a wealth of info on Apple like IPhone sales accounting for 60% of revenue and how it peaked around 2015.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

Apple may have a shrinking consumer base as people are looking for the cheapest electronic products.

Perhaps Apple can have a few cheap products and still make a profit like a cheap IPad and cheap MiniMac.

Maybe Apple can increase its services through Apple Store.

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richwicks says

It's a fucking spy device. It's the telescreen from fucking 1984.

I put a box over my Echo Show when I am not using it.

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My friend has the Amazon one, it's an Echo I think.
At his house Christmas Eve it was funny; as we were talking around the table it would sometimes overhear me and start doing something else and quit playing the music his daughter had asked for.
I guess the mic is sensitive or I'm a loudmouth or both.
I wasn't really seriously suggesting buying a Homepod; but maybe someone will find it useful.

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richwicks says

It's a fucking spy device. It's the telescreen from fucking 1984.

I put a box over my Echo Show when I am not using it.

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Unplug it, or put a switch on it, so you can power it on and off. You must cut power to it, to ensure it's off.

Believe me on this one. It's a spy device, it should never be on unless you are fully aware that you are being recorded.

Remember NEST? It was purchased by Google for 2 billion dollars. I knew people that worked there, and they OPENLY stated it was a monitoring device.

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Apple may have a shrinking consumer base as people are looking for the cheapest electronic products.

I believe it's Apple will have a shrinking consumer base because Apple users can be so intolerable. The devices are very expensive, and at the same time, no better than something 1/2 or even 1/4 the price.

Apple had the "retinal display" - the display had such high resolution, that it far exceeded human perception, more pixels than your eye has visual receptors. What good is this? It serves no function.

I'm glad to see that 4K televisions aren't doing well, and 8K televisions never really made it out of the gate, although they were created. There's no point in making these devices. If you have a 4K television, I can produce a video for you to display on it that is 4K and 1080p. I'll bet my nutsack you won't be able to differentiate between the two. Maybe on a STILL image of text, you'll be able to see it. Possibly.

richwicks says

I'll bet my nutsack you won't be able to differentiate between the two. Maybe on a STILL image of text, you'll be able to see it.

You don't sound too confident by only offer one nutsack. I'd be interested in this if you would wager both nutsacks.

And I'd prepare a lot as far as watching the same videos in two different formats of 4K and 1080p.

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And I'd prepare a lot as far as watching the same videos in two different formats of 4K and 1080p.

Hertz. No human eye from 10' away wil detect the difference of 4k and 1080 outside of a working video editor. People notice hertz. Or basically movement. Movies and TV are not still images but a series of them. I can't stand newer TV's with higher hertz levels. It's so unreal and unwatchable. 99% of people would be just fine with 1080 and 60 hertz. 120 hertz or higher and I'll legit get motion sickness watching anything.

If you're into movies, sound is by far the biggest factor. That's where you sink your money. I can create a 200" movie screen and projector for $2,500 and it would blow away anything you'd see in a theater. You can spend $10k on a projector, but the money is in sound if I had my choice. Hoping to get about $20-30k in sound for the house. Indoors, outdoors and theater. Planning to set up a nice rack mount closet for power amps and all media shit.

Looking to pick 10#'S brain at some point as I know he built out a studio shed. As a drummer I'm going to need a ton of XLR wall outlets in the jam room. I track 12-16 mics on the drums alone. It will generally just be me, but the kids are getting into guitar. Which leads to bass, keyboards, etc. Thinking of 32 XLR wall outlets. I just want to label everything to a T including cords and the outlets. Plus the old bandmates come home from time to time and I'd like a good setup for jam sessions. If I get it right I might lease to locals to track or record everything. Small side hustle.

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richwicks says

I'll bet my nutsack you won't be able to differentiate between the two. Maybe on a STILL image of text, you'll be able to see it.

You don't sound too confident by only offer one nutsack. I'd be interested in this if you would wager both nutsacks.

And I'd prepare a lot as far as watching the same videos in two different formats of 4K and 1080p.

I worked for RCA. We studied this shit and if you think MP3 doesn't properly reproduce sound, you're wrong.

I know what extremely high definition video looks like, and I know why 1080p was picked. 720p was picked because it was "good enough". 1080p is for people with high visual fidelity, 720p is what most people are able to see. That's DVD quality. I can differentiate between DVD and HD, that is 720 versus 1080. You can differentiate between those.

I'm on a 2K monitor right now. For computer generated text it makes a difference, but not for a film. I've had a 4K monitor, which I got rid of, because seriously, it was so huge, and consumed so much of my vision, that I would literally not realize I opened up a web browser to the left or right, and open up a new instance.

I never thought I'd ever live to see the day that I didn't want more resolution, but I'm beyond it now.

I wouldn't want to go back to a 1080p monitor, but I probably could deal with it, but 4K, which is basically 4 1080p monitors, is too much. 2K is fine, maybe I could deal with 3K but I don't know if that's even produced.

You simply cannot see 4K. Perhaps in text you can, but it's beyond your visual perception. I think that monitors and television will settle on 4K, because this is on the edge of our visual perception, but not anything higher than that. Anything beyond that is more expensive, and useless. 8K quadruples bandwidth, and quadruples the complexity of the display, and so it adds to cost. You're not going to pay that unless you are buying it to brag to your buddies about the propaganda box you own. 8K has more pixels than you have receptors in your eye. Going beyond that makes no sense. You might POSSIBLY be able to differentiate between 1080p (1K) and 4K. Possibly. You almost certainly can tell with text as long as it's not moving.

Trust me, you can't see it. My 2K monitor probably takes up at least 50% of my vision when I work on it. I can't see individual pixels on it. 1080p I can, but not on this. It's not flawed vision although I have that now, there's a limit to human perception. I've got a dead pixel on my monitor which is always full red, I know it's there, but I need to run a test to see it. I can't find it now. I can probably find it on an entirely black screen. Oh there it is, near the center of the screen off to the right, but I can only see it on an entirely black screen and it took me a good minute to find it.

I know what to look for, and it's still very difficult to spot. That's 2K. I doubt I'd be able to find a dead pixel on 4K much less 8K.

We have gone so far. We are at the point I thought we might be at in 2100, we've progressed FAR faster than I thought was possible. In 2000 years, displays will be no better than what you have today, if displays and civilization still exists. We're really at a peak. I mean, we really, honestly, are at a peak. We can't improve it. We can make better displays, but you can't see it. No human can.

Trust me, you don't know where we are at. You have more computing power than you can use, you have better displays than you can see, you have more storage than you can fill up - all for under $1,000 - and it will get cheaper. Whatever device you're using to read this, drastically outstrips the mainframe machine I used to use in college, that 3000 college students shared. It's amazing. You can do nuclear bomb simulation on it, and I don't care WHAT device you're using. You have no idea where we are. No concept. Our limitation is communication, and I'm working on that.

richwicks says

I wouldn't want to go back to a 1080p monitor, but I probably could deal with it, but 4K, which is basically 4 1080p monitors, is too much. 2K is fine, maybe I could deal with 3K but I don't know if that's even produced.

I record on my drone in 1080 or 2k even though it can do 4k. I've found 4k to just be a waste and it eats all your storage and video edit time processing. The micro SD cards can store a ton now, but then I need local storage along with it. I don't need $1-2k worth of hard drives. I droned a golf outing for a business association, so a good 2-3 hours of footage. 2TB for one day.

Same thing with my GoPro. It's a marketing gimmick. My 1080 projector in my basement looks amazing at night and when all the lights are off and no ambient light through the windows. Hence why I no longer go to movie theaters. Only been 3-4 times in the last 2 decades. Also remember most theaters are run by teenagers. I had one of the worst audio experiences at a theater near me. Waaaaaay too damn loud. Mixed like they gave a retard some acid. Thank god it was under 2 hours. Oh and previews at theaters can eat a steaming pile of shit. I want the ACTUAL start time.

Once you get a decent home theater there's no going back. It's not super expensive. My current setup is like $3k. If I went to theaters once a month with the kids it pays for itself in a year or 2.

WookieMan says

Hertz. No human eye from 10' away wil detect the difference of 4k and 1080 outside of a working video editor. People notice hertz. Or basically movement. Movies and TV are not still images but a series of them. I can't stand newer TV's with higher hertz levels. It's so unreal and unwatchable. 99% of people would be just fine with 1080 and 60 hertz. 120 hertz or higher and I'll legit get motion sickness watching anything.

Sounds like something is wrong with the setup. I've seen problems where there's a mismatch that results in a regular pulsing in playback speed. But, actually, that 120 Hz might be exactly what you want... If the TV hardware does only 120 Hz, it can play 60 Hz TV signals just fine by showing each frame for 2 cycles. If it receives a 24 Hz frames from a DVD player playing a scan of a film-based movie, it can play each frame 5 times and get the exact match. Contrast that with a TV that is wired at 60 Hz... how does it play a 24 Hz movies correctly? It has to mangle things by playing the first two frames for 2 cycles and the third frame for just 1 cycle, causing a pulsing.

The 120 Hz TVs, when receiving one of these pulsing conversions, can actually (usually) unwind the up-framing back to the 24 Hz original and then play those original frames perfectly at 120 Hz by showing each frame 5 times. The worst problems, however, occur when that 120 Hz TV gets it wrong and so winds up picking the wrong frames out of the 60 Hz stream! That is when you, as the user, want to turn off the feature and just have your 120 Hz TV play each of those 60 Hz frames twice.

Why we have 240 Hz for video playback I will never know. That's most likely marketing. I suppose for video games it would allow a wider variety of frame rates for when the computer hardware can't deliver a full 60 Hz. For example, on a 60 Hz monitor a game that can't keep up would drop all the way down to the next diviser 30 Hz, whereas a 240 Hz is already operating at 1/4 divisor to show 60 Hz and could drop down to 1/5 (48 Hz), 1/6 (40 Hz), 1/7 (34 Hz), or 1/8 (30 Hz). But the right solution for this is to have a truly variable rate monitor, which is what we actually do have today.

richwicks says

I'm on a 2K monitor right now. For computer generated text it makes a difference, but not for a film. I've had a 4K monitor, which I got rid of, because seriously, it was so huge, and consumed so much of my vision, that I would literally not realize I opened up a web browser to the left or right, and open up a new instance.

This sounds like a "you problem." You can get 4k monitors that are only 27-inch. With proper software, things should scale so that the text is not microscopic.

As far as I can tell, the only people wanting a 1080p or a 2.5k monitor are those wishing low resolution for playing games at faster frame rate or those wishing to really save that last penny or those whose software and/or other hardware aren't configured correctly.

richwicks says

1080p is for people with high visual fidelity, 720p is what most people are able to see. That's DVD quality. I can differentiate between DVD and HD, that is 720 versus 1080. You can differentiate between those.

DVD is 480 (or 576 for PAL). A Blueray player will up-sample the 480 to 720 as an option, but it's 480 sitting on the disk. The width of the signal is more than a standard 640x480, though, if the original was a widescreen aspect ratio.

The huge benefits moving from VHS tape to DVD were going digital (for accurate pixels) and the 5.1 sound.

richwicks says

I'm glad to see that 4K televisions aren't doing well

Surely you are joking... or hallucinating.

On Amazon I went to TV section and filtered by year 2022 (most recent year available) and resolution 1080. There are 49 results. If I set the screen size to 60+ there is one TV listed ... and that TV is just mis-filtered as it's a 4k TV (marketing people probably decided to list it as multiple resolutions to check more boxes).

Repeat the same process with 4k and there are 312 results. Adding in the requirement of 60+ inch screen size and still 189 results.

So, for any screen size there are more than 6x the 4k offering. For larger TVs (you know... the ones people actually want if they have a decent size living room) and the only offerings are 4k.

I agree with you that 8k seems useless.

richwicks says

Apple had the "retinal display" - the display had such high resolution, that it far exceeded human perception, more pixels than your eye has visual receptors. What good is this? It serves no function.

Really? You can't handle a 960x640 pixel display?
Original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3Gs had a resolution of 480x320, which was slightly more than 150 tricolor pixels per inch. The iPhone 4, with it's "Retina Display"™ doubled that in both dimensions for 300 pixels per inch.

That display was phenomenal. I would know, since I worked on the Photos and Camera app(s). Anyone looking at text could see a huge and immediate advantage. For photos, the advantage depended on the quality of the original photo.

300 PPI sounds like a lot, but remember that you typically hold the phone pretty close to your eyes. In fact, I find it sometimes useful to hold the phone really close to my eyes so that that 3.5-inch diagonal looks like a 60-inch TV from across the room.

The 3rd iPad was Retina™ as well. With the 9-inch diagonal size, people held that a bit farther away than the phone, so going to the higher resolution had less of a benefit, but still a huge benefit.

The laptops went Retina before the iPad, I think. People at work who actually used their laptops jumped at them with vigor because, again, text is so much more readable. Laptops jumped from roughly 110 to 220 PPI.

I stuck with non-retina with a 2x 24-inch monitor setup (1080p) on a desktop machine. Other programmers switched to laptops and repurposed the 2x 24-inch as secondary to the main laptop display. They could build by remotely logging into the desktop machines, but that had its own issues. The first Retina desktop option we could get was the 27-inch iMac, which has only 1/2 the CPU power of the pro desktop machines, but there were programmers that switched to that even though it saw their compile times slow down.

iPhones and iPads are now commonly 3x and 4x higher resolution than the originals. Resolutions north of 400 PPI. There actually is a benefit to this! The benefit is "resolution independence." The graphics system that people program to has used floating point for decades. (Literally since 1988 Display Postscript™ pioneered by NeXT.) But with lower resolution devices, you had to carefully lay out graphics to align properly; otherwise, you would get a blurry mess. Simple concepts like centering something had to be fiddled with after dividing by 2. Now we can take full advantage of the floating-point graphics system because the resolution is high enough to not look blurry.

I agree with Rich that 8k TVs make no sense as televisions, but when desktop computer OSes make the move to resolution-independent graphics the price of 8k video components will approach the low prices of 4k and we'll see a plethora of 8k TVs. Consumers will buy them for TV purposes because manufacturers will market them and sales people will pedal them. But programmers will love them!

SunnyvaleCA says

Sounds like something is wrong with the setup

It's not. It's a matter more of opinion than fact. It's like saying Monet is better than Van Gough. A higher hertz rate is nauseating to me. No one can change that in my world. I'll literally do other things at a friends house if they have something on the TV at a high rate. No camera person wants high hertz on what they're filming. It's similar to awful HDR photography and layering. I'm not talking computer screens either. Talking TV's that come out of the box and they're shit because of the hertz rate.

There are freaks out there, but I think Rich is saying is 99% of people if they didn't know the resolution wouldn't have any idea if it was 1080 or 4k. Random thought, but genetics, I can hear bats loud and clear. Most people can't. It's awful FYI. My uncle tested headsets for Motorola for decades because he could hear extremely high frequencies. So they'd adjust the design to reduce the top end frequency so as not to freak out us random weirdos that can hear it. It's miserable... Massive tinnitus at 39 years old. I'll likely go deaf at some point in the future.

Phone, tablets and computers don't move me resolution wise. I'm in the Apple eco system. Shit on me I don't care. Since the 7 or around then I've noticed no difference in resolution on the phone at all. The camera is about the only thing visually that got better over the last 5 or so years. I've stopped bringing my cannon camera on vacations. I love having better lenses, but it's not worth the hassle when I can do it with my phone in 2 seconds and nobody would know now.

WookieMan says

Since the 7 or around then I've noticed no difference in resolution on the phone at all. The camera is about the only thing visually that got better over the last 5 or so years. I've stopped bringing my cannon camera on vacations. I love having better lenses, but it's not worth the hassle when I can do it with my phone in 2 seconds and nobody would know now.

Well, actually, the iPhone 7 was the first 3x resolution. Only a handful of phones have a higher resolution than that, and not higher by much. The expensive version of Android phones have resolutions matching or exceeding those of the iPhone. I give examples with the iPhones because that is what I know and also the lineup isn't quite as confusing. With Android phones I would have to say "the 2x resolution phones were better except for xyz and pdq phones made by zzz that were technically 2x but had other crap the screwed them up." It would extend the length of these already very long messages.

As for cameras... I have a Canon 1D II (now retired). I shoot with a 5D3 and some sort of European version of the Rebel on my long lens. The crop of the Rebel is no problem since I'm wanting all the length I can get. The 1D II is truly the most fun to shoot with, but the two camera bodies together are lighter than that battle axe. Mostly, though, I've been using the iPhone camera because it is so convenient and does an adequate job most of the time.

WookieMan says

A higher hertz rate is nauseating to me.

I have heard of other people that have problem with higher Hz. Maybe you are subconsciously hearing a high frequency buzzing? Is it the TV itself, or that something is being shown that is at 120 Hz? I ask because if it's the former (120 Hz TV but playing 60 or 24 Hz material bugs you) then you are in big trouble: if for no other reason than marketing, the market is moving towards the bigger number.

richwicks says

Trust me, you don't know where we are at. You have more computing power than you can use, you have better displays than you can see

I understand as the eye has limitations such as it can typically view 30 frames per second, and up to 60 frames per second.

So the technology may not offer more benefit when presenting a lot more frames per second.

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I understand as the eye has limitations such as it can typically view 30 frames per second, and up to 60 frames per second.

Go play a video game at 30 FPS and then play at 60 FPS. 60 is a very obvious difference in smoothness. Having written a bunch of games in my youth, trying to achieve the 60 FPS was a major — but important — challenge. Of course 30 FPS played just fine, but the overall feel of smoothness was much improved at 60.

Can the humans really benefit going from 60 to 120 FPS? I have no idea. If there is any benefit in that regard, I'm sure it's incrementally much less improvement than that between 30 and 60. But my point about 120 frame rates was related to being able to properly show 24 FPS rates of film-based movies. Notice how 24 is a multiple of 120 but not of 60.