I’ve noticed similar “mini” news stories trickle out after Apple’s announcements. Does this happen organically, or does PR drop tidbits like this to select sources?
It seems like a very specific thing for a reporter to ask and find out about.
Look at the Tweet (X? Blurp? What do we call them now?) - it's got the spectrum of the panel, comparing previous and newer panels.
If you know what you're looking for in those, you can identify a lot of different phosphor configurations just by the particular shape of the RGB peaks - the older ones have a distinctive multi-peaked red emission that I've seen in various LED bulbs as well over the years.
I doubt Apple mentioned it to anyone. Applying a spectrometer to any new light emitting device is just the sort of thing some people enjoy doing.
They're officially just called "Posts" now. It's a hell of a downgrade from how distinctive the old terms were, no wonder people still call them Tweets.
Community Notes was also set to be called Birdwatch originally, continuing the bird pun theme.
Many people remain fascinated by Apple and the small choices that (traditionally) give their products a sense of careful and attentive design and engineering.
So there's both a supply of people eager to pick their products apart and a market of people eager to hear about all the little details and secrets.
While Apple probably does seed some stories intentionally, as their PR teams are sharp, they don't need to be doing so for swarms of these reports to pop up after announcements and first shipments.
It could simply be the people are now getting their hands on them and testing them for things that Apple didn’t specifically say in their announcements.
The M3 line with 256Gb storage had a single SSD NAND chip which made it measurably slower than the M2 series with the same amount. Although irrelevant for most daily work it was a regression which seems to be fixed in the M4 line. Even then, I presume such a bit of bad news would trigger people looking for 'the best spec' to buy the storage upgrade.
I'm pretty sure apple is just a marketing machine. They have pro apple posts and smear campaigns on all samsung forums. Main stream media marketing but also guerrilla marketing on forums, social media, even newspaper comments section. I only see this kind of thing from russian propaganda.
Interesting. As I understand it, shifting the red curve to shorter wavelengths, even by a seemingly small amount, would improve visibility. And something I've learned is that red vision varies by a fair amount from person to person.
>Is there vision tests similar to audio tests where they figure out one's individual responses to different wavelengths of light? Super neat.
Unlike consumer audio equipment where you can easily do a frequency sweep to test hearing, you'd need a specialist light source to do the same. Something like a tunable laser. You could probably use a prism to do a similar sweep from a white light source.
Does this mean better motion response times? The M-series MacBook Pro displays have notoriously smeary displays while displaying high-motion content, so this would be a welcome addition.
It shouldn't make a difference. The film is illuminated by a blue LED and constantly glows uniformly yellow, which is the same mechanism as the white LEDs in a traditional display (blue emitter illuminates yellow phosphor coating). The LCD filters this to make specific pixels and would be more responsible. I worked for a now defunct QD company.
The way I thought LCD/LED displays worked was by RGB filtering a uniform white backlight. Is it only this design that does fosforescence per subpixel? Sounds way more energy efficient.
So far, the answer anecdotally is no, at least not in situations where lit pixels are moved quickly into black areas. In practice, my obnoxious green text black background terminal was kind of gross to scroll, but haven't experimented much with others yet. Playing games has thus far been fine, scrolling in other contexts is fine for practical purposes. Happy to update this if you want after I ruin my new MacBook by experimenting more
LCD BLUs have a uniformly glowing background which is filtered by the LCD to make pixels. If there is delay in pixels updating, it would be the LCD causing it.
Who manufactures their displays? I'm guessing they have more influence in the design or manufacturing than most players, but is this just a matter of them telling Samsung/LG/etc "ok, we're going to use your quantum dot displays now"?
They source from a combination of Samsung, LG, and BOE (Chinese display manufacturer). The way the arrangement typically works is that manufacturers will send Apple preproduction samples and Apple will decide which are worth using for upcoming SKUs. The manufacturer will build out production facilities to meet that demand and whatever specs Apple wants. Apple may also help with investment or R&D to develop products to meet feature roadmap targets and increase supplier competition. It's a very dangerous game for the manufacturers.
Is there more to the thread or just this one tweet/X thing? Response times notoriously suck on MacBooks, it would be nice to see that remedied, anecdotally it doesn't seem like that's happened yet.
Edit: Nevermind, same tweet seems to have been quoted across a bunch of different other news sites. Apparently Blur Busters claims an improvement, I'll try it out and see how it is in some other contexts.
If you're not logged in to Xitter, navigating to a Xeet allows you to view the Xeet, but not the Xomments. Fortunately, there are open-source, self-hostable, privacy-preserving front-ends for Xitter, such as Nitter.
If setting it up yourself is too much work, you can use other public instances. One such instance is called xcancel. Load the Xeet as normal, then simply append "cancel" to the domain name before the period in your URL bar and hit enter :)
In the context of a boycott, using/promoting Nitter is at best neutral - you’re not directly engaging with the most hostile parts of the site, but still engaging with it and making it easier for others to do so, unnecessarily promoting the idea of X being a good platform to post on.
I suggest not making any effort to use the site - rather just ask people to primarily share content from X by copying rather than linking. This removes the need to interact with it both for yourself and (more importantly) for others.
Also, from my limited experience with a single OLED screen, it seems that most stuff was created for a certain kind of screen without as much colour fidelity, and now that stuff seems far more...obnoxiously "saturated"?...on an OLED screen.
OLED has had lower peak brightness than IPS. It may not be perceptually so because of no-backlight absolute blacks and higher contrast, but the difference starts to matter in broad daylight where OLED may not be bright enough, irrespective of matte vs glossy.
the pixel response and contrast absolutely are. Battery life is a little worse (especially in bright mode). OLED pixel response is around 100 micro-seconds compared to ~5ms for IPS, and each pixel dims individually allowing for actually good HDR
Doesn’t OLED pixel layout not line up with modern text rendering engines? At least that’s what I believe I’ve read from reports on banding around text on Windows in particular that makes long-running text work a problem.
Shouldn’t be an issue under macOS for the most part, which has used grayscale antialiasing for several years since subpixel AA isn’t of much benefit with HiDPI displays and complicates text rendering considerably.
If there are any problems, it’ll probably be with cross platform software that doesn't use native text rendering and assumes RGB subpixel arrangements instead of obeying the system.
Readit News
It seems like a very specific thing for a reporter to ask and find out about.
If you know what you're looking for in those, you can identify a lot of different phosphor configurations just by the particular shape of the RGB peaks - the older ones have a distinctive multi-peaked red emission that I've seen in various LED bulbs as well over the years.
I doubt Apple mentioned it to anyone. Applying a spectrometer to any new light emitting device is just the sort of thing some people enjoy doing.
They're officially just called "Posts" now. It's a hell of a downgrade from how distinctive the old terms were, no wonder people still call them Tweets.
Community Notes was also set to be called Birdwatch originally, continuing the bird pun theme.
X-crement
So there's both a supply of people eager to pick their products apart and a market of people eager to hear about all the little details and secrets.
While Apple probably does seed some stories intentionally, as their PR teams are sharp, they don't need to be doing so for swarms of these reports to pop up after announcements and first shipments.
I remember that was the case with ssds some time ago - some of the macbooks had a better one, some had a slightly worse one.
Is there vision tests similar to audio tests where they figure out one's individual responses to different wavelengths of light? Super neat.
It would be cool to simulate different people's vision, not just colour-blindness but the more subtle variations.
Unlike consumer audio equipment where you can easily do a frequency sweep to test hearing, you'd need a specialist light source to do the same. Something like a tunable laser. You could probably use a prism to do a similar sweep from a white light source.
Possibly yes.
I just set up a 4K terminal (542x143 chars) using the 'homebrew' theme (green on semi-transparent black) and did
prompt% ls -larS RemoteAstrophotography_com-M63-Stellina.zip | awk '{print $5}'
4514072533
prompt% cat RemoteAstrophotography_com-M51-Stellina.zip| base64
... and it is happily scrolling up the screen, lightning fast, way way too fast to read, and responding instantly to CTRL-Q/S. Seems ok to me.
Edit: Nevermind, same tweet seems to have been quoted across a bunch of different other news sites. Apparently Blur Busters claims an improvement, I'll try it out and see how it is in some other contexts.
If setting it up yourself is too much work, you can use other public instances. One such instance is called xcancel. Load the Xeet as normal, then simply append "cancel" to the domain name before the period in your URL bar and hit enter :)
I suggest not making any effort to use the site - rather just ask people to primarily share content from X by copying rather than linking. This removes the need to interact with it both for yourself and (more importantly) for others.
Dead Comment
Also, from my limited experience with a single OLED screen, it seems that most stuff was created for a certain kind of screen without as much colour fidelity, and now that stuff seems far more...obnoxiously "saturated"?...on an OLED screen.
If there are any problems, it’ll probably be with cross platform software that doesn't use native text rendering and assumes RGB subpixel arrangements instead of obeying the system.