Gadgets

Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow – TechCrunch

Published

4 years ago

June 17, 2019

Say goodbye to the trash can. Apple’s new Mac Pro is a more traditional machine that takes into account the specific needs of creative professionals, while enabling a layer of modular interactivity with other Apple devices that could totally change the way they work.

Looking so like a stainless steel cheese grater that it’s hard to imagine the likeness is not intentional, the new Mac Pro is designed to be highly modular and accessible for repairs and replacements.

It’s powered by an Intel Xeon processor of the latest generation with up to 28 cores, generously powered and cooled; this is paired with a Radon Pro 580X or Vega II (we’ll see how people think about the choice of AMD over Nvidia); with 12 DIMM slots that could conceivably hold up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM, that’s unlikely to be a bottleneck any more. But at the prices Apple charges, you’ll need to open a few new lines of credit for the privilege.

It’s full of PCI express slots: 4 double-wide, for expansion cards, 4 normal-width for smaller stuff, and one dedicated to an I/O shield with Thunderbolt, USB-A style connectors, and a 3.5mm audio jack. At least the company admits here that these interfaces are necessary for professionals!

It’s powered with a massive 1.4 kilowatt power supply — that’s three times what my desktop pulls — and cooled by a trio of huge, quiet fans on the front and a bunch of heatsinks (no word on fluid cooling).

The machine is meant to handle huge workflows — hundreds of instruments in Logic, multiple 8K and 4K streams for video editing and effects work. The crowd lost it when one demo showed a thousand audio tracks being played at once, using 56 threads — and not even stressing the CPU.

This is a far cry from the Mac Pros introduced in 2013; The futuristic design wowed on stage, but it soon became clear that function had followed form and these “pro” machines were less than practical. The unique design proved hard to adapt to the new, GPU-centric computing paradigm, and couldn’t provide the flexibility an ordinary tower does for users seeking unusual configurations.

As seems to be increasingly common at Apple, a bold design led to compromises elsewhere, and with the Mac Pro it took four years for them to admit the trash can was a dead end and announce that, after a final update, the cylindrical PC would be scrapped.

A year later the company explained that it was taking a workflow-centric approach to designing the new Mac Pro.

As John Ternus, vice president of Hardware Engineering, told TechCrunch last April:

We’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed.

Apparently they also checked in with industrial designers from OXO or something. It’s uncanny how much this thing looks like a cheese grater.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the Pro has looked like that; A well-liked previous iteration had a grater-esque style, but this new one takes things much further. There are of course some thermal benefits to having a perforated case, but surely there are other ways to accomplish that.

As we saw last year, however, the idea is to use the core Mac Pro as the brains and then customize the interface however you like. Thunderbolt connections can be used to connect other devices and monitors pretty seamlessly, so you can use an iPad to control the Final Cut instance or just use it as your preview window. The hardware was designed with this in mind but we’ll have to see how people actually use it — Apple wasn’t very proscriptive about these options.

The Mac Pro starts at a wallet-destroying $5,999, and you better believe that price will go up in a hurry as you upgrade components — which you’ll need to, since the base configuration is woefully underpowered for that price. Here’s hoping it’s as friendly to aftermarket improvements as the company says.

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Gadgets

Android phones get PC webcam capabilities in the latest beta

Published

18 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro camera layout. Between the first two lenses, you can make out sensors for laser autofocus and a color sensor.

Here’s a fun new use for your Android phone: A PC webcam! In the latest Android beta, plugging a phone into a PC will reveal a new option in the USB Preferences menu for webcam functionality. Just pick that option instead of the default “file transfer,” and the phone camera will register itself as a webcam. Then you can fire up Zoom and start video calling.

The Android build with this feature is “Android 14 QPR1 Beta 1.” Android’s getting confusing with all these overlapping betas, but the current stable version is still Android 13. Android 14, currently on its 10th beta/developer preview, will most likely be out alongside the Pixel 8 in October. Android 14 QPR1 is the quarterly release after the first stable build of Android 14, and it should be out around December. (QPR stands for quarterly platform release.) These happen between major releases, often marketed as “feature drops.” Right now, Android 13 is technically “Android 13 QPR3.”

Android's 14 QPR1's webcam settings. — Enlarge / Android’s 14 QPR1’s webcam settings.

Ron Amadeo

Android is technically copying this feature from iOS. In Apple land, this is called the “Continuity Camera,” and will work wirelessly between an iPhone and a Mac, which is pretty cool. As usual, the Android version is much more flexible since the feature presents as a generic USB webcam. It should work on almost everything, like Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, and probably Linux. You can even plug an Android phone into another Android phone and use the first phone’s camera as the webcam for the second phone.

A phone has a lot more thickness to work with than the top half of a laptop, so most phone cameras will outclass any camera that has been crammed into the paper-thin screen portion of a laptop. The hard part is coming up with a viable phone mount that puts the camera in the right location. You’ll also still need some kind of microphone, as you can’t use the phone’s mic yet. Hopefully that gets fixed in time for the stable releases.

Gadgets

Apple’s new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro reach doorsteps and store shelves

Published

19 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / All the colors of the new iPhone 15.

Apple

Today marks the in-store launch of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, plus the likely delivery date for at least the earliest preorders. Preorders went live a week ago, on September 15.

You’ll be waiting for a while if you want the Pro model and didn’t preorder, though.

In Chicago, delivery dates for new orders of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max from the online Apple store are currently estimated to be between October 23 and 30—more than a month from now. Next-day in-store pickup is still a possibility for most configurations, except for the 1TB iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus don’t seem to have the same problem, though. I was offered immediate shipping or pick-up for every configuration I tried. All these estimates could be different not long after this is published, of course.

It’s tempting to look at that information and conclude that the Pro models will be more popular during this year’s cycle, but that’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how many units of each model Apple has produced, of course, and it stands to reason that early adopters who jumped right on preorders last week are enthusiasts who might be more interested in the Pro models.

A handful of companion products to the iPhone 15 lineup are also available today, including USB-C AirPods Pro and MagSafe chargers.

We currently have the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max in hand and are working on a review that will go live next week.

In case you missed the announcement a couple of weeks ago, the iPhone 15 brings several of the “Pro” features from the iPhone 14 Pro to the current base iPhone, including the Dynamic Island to replace the notch, Apple’s A16 chip, and a 48-megapixel camera sensor that is used to facilitate 2x zoom, among other things. It also ditches the long-standing proprietary Lightning connection in favor of the industry-standard USB-C.

The iPhone 15 Pro distinguishes itself from the base model with a new configurable “Action Button” to replace the mute switch, a faster USB-C port, a more robust camera system, a faster A17 chip, which claims notably improved graphics performance, and a new titanium enclosure. The phones’ general sizes, designs, and shapes are very similar to what we saw last year.

Gadgets

Amazon adding ads to Prime Video in 2024 unless you pay $2.99 extra

Published

22 hours ago

September 22, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Next year, watching TV shows and movies on Amazon Prime Video without ads will cost more than it does now. In early 2024, Amazon will show ads with Prime Video content unless you pay $2.99 extra.

Amazon announced today that Prime Video users in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK will automatically start seeing advertisements “in early 2024.” Subscribers will receive a notification email “several weeks” in advance, at which point they can opt to pay $2.99 extra for ad-free Prime Video, Amazon said.

That takes the price of ad-free Prime Video from $8.99/month alone to $11.98/month and from $14.99/month with Prime to $17.98/month.

Here’s how that compares against other ad-free streaming service tiers:

Apple TV+: $6.99
Disney+: $13.99 (starting October 12)
Netflix: $15.49
Hulu: $17.99 (starting October 12)
Paramount+: $11.99
Peacock: $11.99

Amazon said it’s making this change “to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.” Prime Video is an expensive endeavor, costing Amazon $16.6 billion in 2022, with $7 billion of that spent on original content.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Amazon was considering introducing an ad-supported Prime Video tier amid high interest from advertisers. The company is already heavily invested in advertising, with its second-quarter earnings reporting advertising services growing 22 percent year over year to $10.9 billion. Amazon follows only Google and Meta in terms of digital ad revenue, according to Insider Intelligence.

Some Prime Video content already has product placement, and sports programming on Prime Video has ads. But bringing ads to the entire service gives Amazon the ability to generate more revenue from ads and from people who decide to cough up the extra cash to avoid seeing commercials.

Prime Video subscribers who don’t pay the extra $2.99 (and don’t just cancel their subscription altogether) are promised “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”

Amazon did not provide further details about the upcoming change. However, Max says it shows “about 4 minutes of ads per hour,” and Peacock shows up to 5 minutes per hour. A May report from Insider Intelligence citing data from advertising analyst MediaRadar said Disney+ shows 5.3 minutes of ads per hour, Netflix four minutes, and Hulu 7.3 minutes.

With current prices starting at $9.99 per month, Prime Video was one of the cheapest ways to get streaming TV without ads. While the changes put pricing for ad-free Prime Video more on par with its competitors, it may still disappoint budget-minded cord-cutters. Streaming services started off as a cheaper, simpler alternative to cable TV. But as an influx in services, changes in pricing, confusing bundles, and scattered content have proven, we haven’t gotten that far from cable after all.