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bydo

>Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos

>Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos

>An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app

>More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app

>Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish

>On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline

>Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)

Most of them make sense; the M1 has the Neural Engine and ISP, and Intel Macs don't.

Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.

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>Not sure what's stopping them from enabling additional text-to-speech languages or rendering a globe, though.

Text to speech uses Neural Engine as well. Rendering Globe likely uses newer version of Metal only supported on M1.

But only for those languages?

Feels like the kind of thing where maybe there was an architectural initiative to move from a cumbersome speech data format to something more elegant that required the Neural Engine. Since they already had the old languages in the old format, they kept that data around, but for the new languages opted to only ingest the easier-to-work-with format.

But hey, I’m guessing and you’re Saurik: I have a feeling you know more about this than me and may have considered and dismissed this possibility for a good reason.

Sure? It suggests they have a new TTS engine which they used for the new languages, but they kept the old engine around for Intel macs rather than dropping existing functionality.

Last point is nice. Intel? Nah, that's so last millenia. No new Metal for you. Whole lineup is outdated now. More money please

It’s not unusual for features of graphics APIs to be limited by the hardware rather than software; especially Metal which is a very low-level API that more-or-less directly exposes the capabilities of the GPU. Since Apple switched to an in-house GPU architecture for the M1, it’s not surprising that there are some features Apple’s GPU supports that AMD/Nvidia cards don’t. For instance, Apple’s tile-based-deferred-rendering pipeline allows fragment shaders to easily read back the previously color of a pixel in order to implement custom blending effects — an operation that would be prohibitively expensive on other GPUs.

Apple publishes a full compatibility matrix showing which features are supported on each GPU hardware family: https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.p...

My point is, everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff) or switching to fallback version of said affects.

Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware

> everyone else does support older hardware, usually by disabling newest nicest effects (like ray tracing stuff)

Isn’t that effectively what they’re doing here? They’re not taking away anything that people are using now - just saying that, for example, you aren’t getting the new ability to copy text out of images which is a cool feature but not a game changer or something anyone has existing habits around.

It seems far less of a gripe than, say, when they required GPUs capable of running a desktop compositor or dropped 32-bit support.

Oh yeah, Apple are relentless in their push for new platforms and abandoning old stuff. Maybe too much in the Metal sphere of things where there have been some big changes - Metal 1, Metal 2 their "modern" platform they we're pushing for starting at A12 and really now from A14-M1 and the future.

> Not caring to do such thing is, probably, intentional push for customers to update their hardware

Not really. Apple has always had a policy of only supporting features that perform as intended.

Low fidelity “fallback” versions are simply not part of Apple’s approach to design.

"Perform as intended" would imply an intention, which is what GP is talking about. Low fidelity is a reality of rendering on older devices. Apple should intend to render on them.

Certain features will obviously not work across devices but that is an artifact of the big change in device architecture.

The mentality that you're suggesting is akin to saying (for example) that desktops won't be supported on any display smaller than a given Retina resolution. That would be anti-consumer and totally unacceptable.

Hypothetically, the suggestion from Apple that they would stop supporting features on laptops that are currently for sale because they are "fallback" devices would be the height of arrogance and would piss off a lot of smart people who have each spent thousands and thousands on Apple devices over the past decade.

Perform as intended implies design. Low fidelity doesn’t deliver the design.

There is no reason Apple should make things that don’t work as designed.

> saying (for example) that desktops won't be supported on any display smaller than a given Retina resolution.

Yes, this is an absurd exaggeration, because in fact we’re talking about a few new features that are not central to the user experience.

> That would be anti-consumer and totally unacceptable.

It would, which is why they don’t do it, and why it’s not representative of anything.

It’s unclear what point you are trying to make other than that they could make bad design decisions if they wanted to, but in fact don’t.

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