That's an enticing price if Anandtech's guess[1] of $2500 for the (yet unreleased) Dell 5120x2880 monitor is accurate. The Dell display doesn't include a Mac computer inside it. If Dell had to recalibrate its price in response to Apple's announcement, would it be something like $1899 street price?
EDIT to add: I find it interesting to compare this new display announcement to the CinemaDisplay 10 years ago.
When Apple debuted the 30" 2560x1600 CinemaDisplay in June 2004, no other major manufacturer had a comparable display. Dell didn't introduce their 2560x1600 3007WFP until January 2006. Apple was the only player for that high resolution and that strength was reflected in the price: $3299. It stayed at that price for over a year (Apple finally lowered it to $2499 in October 2005). Today, Dell announced their 5k monitor 6 weeks before Apple. I guess it's getting harder and harder these days for Apple to create products that catches their competitors else off guard.
Edit: For all those down-modders out there, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not making any sort of environmental point. (Though I suppose a person might.) I own several Apple products myself (and probably soon a few more) and while I think the tech/consumer-electronics industry has a lot of work to do to even approach sustainability, I don't think there's any reason to single Apple out for criticism. I am a bit surprised, though, that nobody at Apple thought writing out the word "oil" with their products was a bad idea given their past troubles with Greenpeace.
27" Retina iMac at 5120x2880 which they are calling "5K"
edit: Dell previewed a similar screen last month[1] a "world first" but won't ship til December (5K iMac shipping today if I heard right?). No price on Dell screen, rumor was $2,500 but Apple's throwing in a computer for the same price so I doubt that will hold up.
Like many people, my vision took a hit when I turned 40, so I have to disagree with that statement. While YMMV, 1080p on a 27" monitor is not ridiculously low res for the average person.
Anything between 100-130 dpi is more than fine enough with me at my viewing distances.
Speaking only for my use case -- when I'm doing work, I'd prefer a >= 4K resolution that gives me more real estate over one that gives me denser pixels, which is why I would choose a 40" 4K monitor over a 28" 4K monitor, because the pixels on the smaller monitor are simply wasted on my aging eyes.
To me, the main beneficiaries of the new 5K iMac are designers and people who work with (or care a lot about) video and photography. I left gamers out of the list, because I don't know if the R9 M290X is actually powerful enough to drive a game at native res at 60fps.
> 1080p on a 27" monitor is not ridiculously low res for the average person.
OTOH, now I have to disagree with you a bit. I'm currently using 1080p on a 24" and while I'm ok with it so far (everyone else using the screen, ranging from ages 10 to 55 has no issue either), I would under no circumstances go lower than this. And it's not like my vision has improved since my 20's (in the 30s currently).
But, as the interested reader realizes at this point, it really boils down more to the defition of 'average person'.
> To me, the main beneficiaries of the new 5K iMac are designers and people who work with (or care a lot about) video and photography
Did you intend to leave out programmers? I'm asking because for instance, I prefer to do my readings on paper than on screen; simply because of the higher dpi/'ppi'. And after having worked a bit with a Retina display, I can't almost can't wait to do my work on one...
>> it really boils down more to the defition of 'average person'.
That's fair. On my 15" 1680x1050 MBP (~175dpi), almost anyone(different ages) who came to look at my screen would make some negative comment about having to squint to read the text, especially if I'm running Windows. My 27" 1080p monitor is lower density, but it's also about a foot farther than where a laptop screen would be for me.
>> Did you intend to leave out programmers?
Yes, but let me explain my logic: I think most programmers would rather have the equivalent of four 1080p screens worth of text editors and debugging windows than sharper text quality on a single smaller screen. Having both real estate and dpi, of course, would be even more ideal.
> but it's more important that it takes desktop computing is finally moving on from ridiculous low res displays.
The question is, how long will it take until high res becomes available broadly? Apple had to create their own¹ display here, and I doubt they'll share the secret sauce lightly. I suspect they're already holding back, since I'm in search for some Hi-Res desktop display for some time now. Almost everybody cheats by simply upping the display size, instead of the pixel density. And it's not like the retina display hasn't been around for 2 years now!
It's either that, or they're simply scooping up all or a significant amount of the available supply for themselves.
¹To some extent, i.e. at least the controller chip
Safari is able to cheat by interfacing more with the OS than V8, which has to be able to run on more platforms. It's the same reason IE beats it out in certain benchmarks.
To be honest, this makes near 0 difference in javascript performance, which is entirely good codegen (and making things like DOM traversal really fast).
In fact, for average website javascript, the fastest "not horrible" codegen will win, because they run for such short times.
There's no way that the FTL JIT gets involved on "typical javascript" which wouldn't run long enough.
They even say so on the blog post for the FTL JIT:
"Websites today serve large amounts of highly dynamic JavaScript code that typically runs for a relatively short time. The dominant cost in such code is the time spent loading it and the memory used to store it. "
Instead, it's more likely they have some weird benchmarks that they win on.
Everyone has their favorites, and reasons they claim they matter.
While it's been about year since i looked, most of them are just not large enough amounts of executing code to be reasonable benchmarks to argue about (they try to increase workloads bby increasing iterations, etc).
In truth, i can't fault anyone for the benchmarks they choose (except maybe regexp-dna), most are testcases extracted from the websites/programs they care about.
But this does not actually make them good benchmarks to optimize for, just good things to make fast.
The difference being, you want to pick representative benchmarks such that if you optimize for them, ideally all the cases you care about are made fast, not just the ones in the benchmarks.
For example, regex-dna (part of sunspider) is a benchmark about regular expression searching in DNA sequences (which is "not common" in webapps). To make it fast, most browsers have dedicated regular expression compilers tuned to it.
This is pretty much worthless for webapps as a whole (the kinds of regexps involved do not generalize to the ones used in web apps), but it makes sunspider fast.
Hmm. iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2, iPad Mini 3, iPad Air, and iPad Air 2. Wasn't one of the key insights that Steve Jobs had when he returned to Apple that they had too many variations of their products with no obvious differentiation? As much as I love their products, it seems like they're rapidly slipping back down that slope...
The mid-'90s Apple product line was an unholy mess. There were dozens of Performas and PowerMacs with random 4-digit model numbers. The PowerMac 7600CD might be succeeded by the PowerMac 7300, which would be sold as the Performa 5200 in another part of the world... [1]
An incrementing product revision number is a bit boring, but certainly nowhere near those depths of marketing misery.
[1] This example is semi-fictional because nobody could possibly remember the actual model numbers from that era.
Eh, I can see that argument with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+, but in this case we're just talking about keeping older products alive at a lower price point.
No, there are a set of ipads that cover the price range from $249 to $800+, every 50 or $100. Every step up has a clear benefit -- Faster, bigger, more storage, cellular.
I'm more worried about the original iPad Air still in the lineup. I've got an ipad2, and it's feeling old and slow (without having a newer one to compare to). That's not going to be a long term good purchase.
I agree, but as a counterpoint, part of the argument was that they couldn't afford to spread their design resources too thin.
Now they could afford to, but they don't. Yes, it takes effort to keep those old lines running, but the guys doing that needn't even talk to the ones designing the new versions and the software running on it (those older generations get left behind, OS-wise, don't they?)
I guess the counter argument to that would be that those products are all clearly differentiated by their names and appearances. The iPad Mini 1-3 all look identical barring close inspection, and their names give no indication of what the differences are other than that one has a higher number.
Perhaps that was a luxury offered by the fact that the iPod had no meaningful competitors to speak of (and would be strong today if Apple hadn't cannibalized the product line).
Also, today cases and accessories rely on Apple form factor as a platform on which to build - and that's a huge market, and important for consumers and 3rd party vendors... I'd like to think my iPhone6 case (if I owned a 6) would fit the next year's model.
iPod nano with 5 different form factors in 8 years? Ain't nobody got time for dat no more.
There was a clear difference between these products,despite the "iPod" label. Can you mix an Nano with a Classic ? A shuffle with a touch ? now ask most people the difference between an iPad Air and another iPad Air 2 ? touch id ? really ?
Uses HTTP adaptive streaming that's built into Quicktime and iOS natively. It's the same technology that MLB/NFL/NHL use to do live-streaming of games to their apps on iOS.
There is a way to get VLC to open the stream, but I haven't had to do it personally.
Apple's new campus is powered by the outrage and impatience of people that won't download VLC or ffplay to watch their two-hour commercials before they're available on YouTube.
I guess the sarcasm isn't appreciated, but HLS is a simple enough protocol that an intern could implement it. It trades latency for cacheability, which greatly reduces broadcasting costs. The only obvious reasons to not support it are political.
This creates a social class system surrounding Apple products - only those who are privileged enough to be on the Apple ecosystem are allowed to watch Apple events.
While they could definitely make all of their events streamable on a wide variety of devices, this tactic makes everyone not in the ecosystem feel as though they've been let down by the technology which they own.
It also ensures that the audience is more Apple-centric, and the first to hear the conference lectures will already be biased in favor of Apple given that they are already Apple users.
Your reply wasn't a technical one regarding the question, but I think you've been unfairly downvoted as there is actually truth in what you're saying. These are exactly the types of conversations that marketing teams at Apple would have about creating the perception around their brand.
Note: before a fervent product enthusiast thinks about hitting that downvote button, I've typed this comment from my very own MBP.
Thanks - I appreciate that you're sticking up for healthy debates. While I understand that my view might not be universal, I think all too often the average HN'er is feeling that it is ok to downvote someone they disagree with. It's our diversity of opinions that contributes to the growth of our community.
By the way, I do 100% love Apple products - all my electronics are Apple except my work computer. But there is a definitely a good reason behind why they don't let non-Apple users watch the keynote.
I don't think one is even possible until Intel releases Thunderbolt 3.
Transferring True-color 5120x2880 at 60 fps requires at least 25GBit/s connection, and no existing connections (on shipped computers) can handle that. The best ones currently are Thunderbolt 2 with 20 GBps, and DisplayPort 1.2 with 17GBps.
Only just a few weeks ago, DisplayPort 1.3 was released, which tops 32Gbps, and upcoming Thunderbolt 3 is promising 40 Gbps. Those two are finally making honest-60fps 27" Retina Display possible, so it should not be long until we see one. (Though of course that will require Apple to update all Macs with Thunderbolt 3 or DP 1.3 ports first)
Your screen (and popular image formats) are 8-bits per color channel. Modern digital sensors can do 12-14 bits of useful data per color channel typically (16 for the really high end stuff).
To even save or display the image from these sensors you'd have to compress the 12/14-bit color range into 8-bit anyways. Single-image HDR is simply the ability to tweak this transform to your benefit.
Yeah they just irrelevant jokes and laugh at each other so you can't actually hear what is going on. They have really gone downhill with their live coverage.
That's an enticing price if Anandtech's guess[1] of $2500 for the (yet unreleased) Dell 5120x2880 monitor is accurate. The Dell display doesn't include a Mac computer inside it. If Dell had to recalibrate its price in response to Apple's announcement, would it be something like $1899 street price?
EDIT to add: I find it interesting to compare this new display announcement to the CinemaDisplay 10 years ago. When Apple debuted the 30" 2560x1600 CinemaDisplay in June 2004, no other major manufacturer had a comparable display. Dell didn't introduce their 2560x1600 3007WFP until January 2006. Apple was the only player for that high resolution and that strength was reflected in the price: $3299. It stayed at that price for over a year (Apple finally lowered it to $2499 in October 2005). Today, Dell announced their 5k monitor 6 weeks before Apple. I guess it's getting harder and harder these days for Apple to create products that catches their competitors else off guard.
[1]http://www.anandtech.com/show/8496/dell-previews-27inch-5k-u...