> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium. And then catches shit for being pretentious.
So, let's step through that once more:
- garbage is normal
- functional and interoperable is premium
- premium is pretentious
- also, add $1,000 for the name brand
The author simultaneously complains that nothing works, but refutes using the only thing that works because it represents training wheels that are too fashionable and ostentatious.
We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
Not everything at the <£100 price point is rubbish...
I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.
I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
Not to bag on Rockwell, I appreciate his reviews and viewpoints, but do you trust that he has the requisite expertise to correctly analyse the quality of such an adaptor?
I... don't. His write-up doesn't inspire confidence either - I have no idea how he has performed the measurements.
I know enough to know that audio measurement is a very tricky endeavour, and most other measurements put the lightning adaptor's output at a few dBA worse in SNR and dynamic range than the iPhone 6S' jack output (but otherwise similar). Both are easily worse than a good external DAC. Certainly not "better quality" than the inbuilt option as Rockwell claims.
It's good enough for almost everyone, and is likely to be capable of higher fidelity than most source material, but most agree that it is objectively a worse DA.
I have to agree with the other commenter here. I have not noticed any difference moving from iPhone 6s to 7 (with dongle) listening through my Shure 530 headphones.
I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.
Disclaimer: not trying to convince you, just sharing an anecdote like you did.
- I agree Apple pricing has gone out of control. I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone with a bigger display no matter what (XS Max). I mean okay, it's probably the best phone out there but come on. It's a mobile computing device, not a life's insurance bill.
- I fully agree MacBooks and desktop Macs haven't had good years in a while. IMO the MacBook Pro 2015 15" was Apple's laptop peak. They haven't produced anything worthwhile in the laptop departments ever since.
- Desktop Macs are a horrid mess where greed trumps everything else so much that even I who spent 6 figures on tech during my life cannot justify paying 5000 EUR for an iMac 27" 5K with maxed out specs (i7 CPU, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2TB SSD). Right now your only viable choice for a future-proof machine however is either the iMac 27" or the iMac Pro, and both are expensive as hell.
- macOS version, not sure, I started actively using it only a year or so ago so it feels quite good to me and is tons more predictable than Windows 10. You have to fight with Windows 10 to make it your own and not be barraged with popups. macOS in comparison stays out of the way.
---
To summarize, Apple has peaked, including in the smartphone and tablet departments. Upgrades are very smallish and iterative while the price tags remain huge.
The way I see it, Apple has been coasting for a while. They need to get back on track because inevitably somebody will try and displace them.
(As a random example, Xiaomi phones are probably the best physical designs and software experience I ever had. But I still don't trust Google's binary blobs and the general baseband processor stuff so I stay away from Android.)
>I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone
Yes, we're lucky that a lot of people in the world are not in a position to fight for higher quality of life for the resources coming out of the land near them or their labor, nor do we have to pay for environmental damage from manufacture and disposal of our devices, otherwise it would be much more than 1,500 EUR.
> At least on android you can get rid of most Google code with Lineage + microg
...as far as we know. What about the baseband processor that has access to everything at any time?
> Why do you trust the Apple ones then?
Becase they took a stand and refused to introduce a security backdoor in the FBI San Bernardino case. And because iPhone hacks cost more on the net compared to Android ones. This to me indicates that iPhones are harder to crack -- so the demand is higher, suppy is lower and thus the prices are higher.
All circumstantial evidence of course, but it's what we have to go on.
That doesn't mean much when flashing their ROM means voiding your warranty though. Also, their efforts don't really count in the very important areas like the OS security itself; Google reigns supreme there, mostly.
I am a former flashing-ROMs fanboy but the truth is, you are either stuck on ancient kernels or sometimes part with functionality you prefer to still have (like rooting).
It all depends on one's perspective. There was a time when a typical PC was $5000+ in today's dollars. We just got used to Moore's law bringing cheap disposables.
You're taking it pretty far off track. This article is about listening to music.
The "premium" only applies to new products. The author here tried using a CD player, so the storage (and novelty) requirements are pretty low. A $5 used iPod would work just fine.
"Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium."
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)
My kid has some wireless Beats headphones and she loves them because she likes how they look and they are very comfortable for her.
She might be able to find headphones that sound better, but she has never found any that also are comfortable and have good industrial design. At least not in the price range that Beats typically sell for.
That depends on your definition of functionality. Don't assume the purpose of Beats is to produce accurate audio. If the purpose is to make people feel good because they own the same headphones they saw some celebrity wear, they are apparently quite functional.
They added weights to their headphones to add a "quality" feel to them, because they were made of plastic and usually high-end headphones use metal in some places like the mounts and the headbands.
Did you really just call apples products interoperable? maybe among their other crap, but sure as hell not among other devices. Which are all interoperable among themselves btw.
And yet every time I go to a presentation or a lecture people ask to borrow my MacBook for it because their Windows or Linux laptops can never even connect to their projectors or Bluetooth speakers on the first try. Often they cannot at all connect.
Yet the MacBook connects to everything on the first go with zero fuss.
So yeah, I am calling part of Apple's functions and devices interoperable. Why aren't you? These are observable facts in the wild and it happens every day somewhere around you as well.
Hah. This is the opposite of every single experience I've seen at my work, where both PCs and Macs are supported. Usually the Mac person plugs into a projector and it doesn't work, or they don't have their adapter. The HP works every time.
Well if they don't have their adapter that's not really a problem with the Mac's compatibility now, is it? They simply forgot a very important piece that will help them achieve the goal. I don't blame my TV for not getting a signal from my PC if I lose my HDMI cable.
I know my experience is anecdotal. So is yours. Just shared what I've observed 30+ times now.
Fewer and fewer people can even recognize quality anymore. People mistake popularity for quality. They blindly trust brands. They accept things not working or falling apart. Companies have picked up on this, and don't have to invest in quality anymore. Prices get lower, then everyone has to not invest in quality. People would rather buy and throw away a $50 pair of shoes every year than buy a $200 pair and have it last 10 years.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Yes okay, its about having the choice and the option. Its rooted in the fundamental instinct to cling to freedom and seek it out.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
I understand the need for people to feel like they have a choice by using free software (the choice to modify it if they want to), but at this point it is just an illusion unless you are prepared to dedicate a huge amount of time. If you practically couldn’t do it even if you wanted to, does it still mean you have a choice?
It’s a different time today than it was 40 years ago when RMS modified printer drivers, and software is much more complicsted than it used to be.
Theres a degree of philanthropy to free software contribution. Yes, there are often hacks and workarounds for problems in code that don't require dedicating the substantial time to learn a codebase and fix the problem forever, but if you do fix it you aren't fixing it only for yourself, but for everyone else who encounters that problem.
I've made dozens of contributions to esoteric projects - from music players to game emulators to HTML template libraries. It does take a ridiculous amount of upfront reading of code to become comfortable enough with the environment to make the change, but I at least only try to fix problems I see as impacting more people than just myself.
Sometimes I wish it were easier to just sit down, take the highest rated bug on a project, and spend all the time it would take to fix it. Its a shame I wasn't lucky enough to be born into wealth so I could just do that all the time. So instead I hope to get there sooner rather than later, where I can amass enough wealth to stop wasting my time on CRUD apps for some business interest and actually do something meaningful.
> Sometimes I wish it were easier to just sit down, take the highest rated bug on a project, and spend all the time it would take to fix it. Its a shame I wasn't lucky enough to be born into wealth so I could just do that all the time. So instead I hope to get there sooner rather than later, where I can amass enough wealth to stop wasting my time on CRUD apps for some business interest and actually do something meaningful.
This really hits the nail on the head.
Since I became a father of three, my time priorities have shifted quite a lot, and I’d rather spend it with my kids than nose in code that should work but isn’t.
A perfect example is trying to get Nextcloud or Lychee working. After literaly days trying to get it working right, I just gave up. All I want is to share pictures of my kids with my family, but due to bugs or config, I have to wade through someone else’s code?
Philantropy is for someone else’s benefit. If it was just at my expense, that would be one thing, but it’s at the expense of my kids too. And that’s something I can’t justify.
Totally depends on what you're thinking of modifying and how you want to modify it. Some experience gained through one modification also carries over to others, even when done on different programs. I've done modifications that only take a few minutes, and I have my systems setup so it's really, really easy to pick a package by name to modify it and distribute the mods to all my machines, complete with version control. I very much appreciate the ability to modify the free software I use.
Makes me wonder if the guy wants (subconsciously or not) to have more problems with technology he’s using just to have an opportunity to tinker with it to make it better. Certainly seems like the type.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
Probably, I have spent 100s of hours to make my iPhones better when in reality they would have worked just as well without the modifications. I frequently see people complaining and finding issues just so they can try to fix it, rinse and repeat.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
After re-reading the blog, I feel a bit bad about the negativity I and others expressed here. If you do read this xylon, don’t take it to heart! Also thanks for sharing your circuit, it certainly provoked an interesting discussion.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Android may be "open source", but it means little if you're not a company wanting to write their own clone, or a security researcher.
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
Is it actually open source in that you can actually submit a fix though?
Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)
I think it is just a matter of what one is most comfortable with.
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
I envy the people who have the free time to tinker but what they keep forgetting, time and time again, is that they are the minority. Many people have happy family lives and prefer to spend most of their leisure time with people -- or non-tech hobbies. I do enough programming already, thank you.
(EDIT to add: and not everybody is in perfect health shape as well, so they use their free time to recharge -- not to work some more. Stress and overworking come with an army of health issues. Climbing a hill with a 50kg backpack, to give an analogy, is not as easy as it looks like from the side.)
I respect smart hardware technicians but he lost me as an audience with his Apple hate.
+1 on "hate doesn't work". Just adding a perspective that you might be missing. The stuff that OP described doesn't really feel like "work" to him. To him its the exact thing you described - it helps him recharge - so that he can go back to "work" the next day :)
[P.S. "I do enough programming already, thank you." doesn't help as well. To get an idea of how sad it is to read, imagine if someone tells an artist "I do enough painting already, thank you.". People love to do different things, and that is okay.]
Yep, I know it helps them recharge. But I find it sad how oblivious they sometimes are that others might be so beat up that they need an almost passive recharge. :(
As for my programming, I actually do some small work outside of work hours on my own enthusiastic basis. But I have to tell you, even this minor 4-5h a week thing took me years of recharging and healing before I felt the passion for the first time in years and years.
(As an aside, we the techies need non-tech hobbies but that's just an opinion.)
Same thoughts except with my Android phone and Bose QC.
Wireless, noise cancellation and never any problems with explosive noise.
Also it is indeed 2018 so what's he doing with ripped CD's, there are a lot of streaming services out there right now.
This is fine if you're "stuck in your ways" (I want to use a less loaded term but can't come up with one) and have a collection of music you enjoy and have stopped keeping up.
It's not even keeping up with current music; as I go from my early to my late 30s, the pop landscape has gone from parseable to alien. But there's still good music coming out and older good music you didn't know about. Hell, I only discovered the gigantic German composer Paul Hindemith six months ago.
Either stuck in your ways, or want to save money. Streaming services are not free. Sure, it's a small amount but I simply don't want to add to my monthly costs. Still, streaming is much more convenient and in the short term, saves on disk space.
I still use streaming to discover but buy to own for disconnected times, which are usually intentional. For example, I don't want touch interface or internet connected anything while driving.
From what I can tell, the streaming catalog is still a small subset of the CD catalog, so if you're into discovering new music, you're restricting yourself by only using the former.
Good news - you can do both! I use Spotify for regular everyday listening and finding new artists/new albums by artists I like, and I collect vinyl for fun and to support artists more directly.
It's a well documented issue. Maybe your headphones and/or ears just aren't sensitive enough to notice the issue. Plenty of people don't see the difference between flac and 240p youtube uploads, after all.
Hmm, did you make the 240p vs FLAC strawman deliberately? Or is the bug (as you're able to reproduce it) really that bad? I know OP was using high-end headphones but I expected at least a slight hissle.
(My attempts to reproduce were with a PX80, S2PGFY-003, JBL Pulse and Bose Companion 50. I included the speakers because I couldn't get the headphones to do the trick)
I'm not sure why Apple is receiving any sort of praise here. I was constantly assaulted by an "explosion of noise" glitch when working with Logic Pro in OS X. I could have the system volume level set to the lowest possible setting (25% of 1 notch), and yet I'd still occasionally get deafening explosions of noise as if I had the system volume set to the full 16 notches. The explosion is just short enough that there's zero chance of you having any hope of ripping your headphones off as quickly as possible to spare your hearing. No, by the time you hear the explosion, it's already too late. I did in fact start losing my hearing from this and completely gave up on making music.
That sounds like a hardware problem or drivers issue. If it was a software problem, why give up on music when there are other options both free and paid like Reaper, Ableton, etc. which run perfectly fine?
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Well, at least it usually simply works.