A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most | Hacker News Reader

A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

social.treehouse.systems

395 points1915cb1f291 comments

Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”. Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898

EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here is the filing (priority) date and the grant (publish date).

It’s patents so it gets really complicated but essentially the later grant (after patent office/authority “review”) more or less makes the effective date the priority date - which to complicate matters even further can actually be the filing date of a referenced provisional patent that (in the US) can be as long as 12 months before the non-provisional (real) patent filing.

Clear as mud, right?

I don't know much about patents. Can you explain why this patent is avoided by other manufacturers, but other apple patents seem to be happily copied?

For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others

It's a classic risk vs reward calculation. Basically "does this impact/benefit the user experience and therefore marketability and potential sales enough to justify potentially 'going to the mat' in court if they call us out on it". Where "going to the mat" is absurdly expensive patent litigation up to and including building an outdoor ice skating rink[0] (in TEXAS) to potentially influence jurors in Marshall, TX (a 22k person town which happens to be home of the Federal Eastern District of Texas - a court known to be very friendly to patent infringement suits, AKA a "rocket docket"[1]). Not only is the litigation and associated stunts like ice skating rinks expensive, if you lose there can be significant damages - like in the Apple vs Samsung case where Samsung lost and was ordered to pay over $1B in damages. Then you get to decide if you want to keep paying legal fees to appeal, etc. It's called the Apple/Samsung patent war because this stretched on for at least seven years - likely to the tune of 10s of millions or even 100s of millions of dollars in legal expenses. Then, when/if you lose, you're usually ordered to also pay the legal expenses of the other party.

Apple vs Samsung was largely over key UI/UX components that are more or less standards for what users expect from a modern device. Samsung had to essentially calculate "do we try to work around these patents (and maybe get sued anyway) or offer a product in the marketplace that is markedly sub-standard vs a competitor product".

Somewhat paradoxically, at the "startup scale" when I've dealt with patent prosecution (filing patents - terminology is kind of backwards) I've been specifically instructed by IP counsel not to do in-depth patent searches for existing/competing patents. If it can be proven you knowingly infringed on a patent the damages increase significantly because it can then be considered "willful infringement". Good IP counsel often offers a service that (essentially) puts up a little bit of a firewall between the "inventor" and this issue - the firm does searches you're not privy to and usually channels some information to you while not disclosing specifics of the patent. This communication has the benefit of being protected by attorney-client privilege which is almost impossible to pierce.

For something like this I doubt many consumers are making a purchasing decision solely on what laptop speakers sound like. Most people don't really care, sure, it's a "nice to have" for your laptop speakers to sound better but from a sales and revenue standpoint the difference is likely minuscule.

[0] - https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-t...

[1] - https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/patently-unfair/

Samsung and notch are maybe copies Apple's ridiculous design (and some functional software) patents that they reasonably believed would never hold up in court.

This is another excellent point. The standard (traced back to Thomas Jefferson and in The Constitution) is that patents are intended to be granted on "inventions" that are "novel and non-obvious"[0]. Obviously, as shown in cases like this, that's highly subjective and as I've been educated, this all comes down to a jury (with the games of jury selection and all) - a bunch of random people off the street with no background or understanding of any of this - and that's just how the attorneys want it.

In modern times "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1] usually ends up having the opposite effect. Literally in The Constitution (a document from 1787) - Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[0] - https://ipwatchdog.com/2021/03/05/balancing-innovation-compe...

[1] - https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-1/...

The Apple/Samsung saga was about design patents, which are a completely different beast.

Things like the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle are under design patents and that's why Pepsi can't just 1:1 copy it without an expensive lawsuit.

Power engineers have been doing this for decades (a century?); estimating the temperature of a transformer or motor from a simple ODE to see if the relays need to trip. The parameters are derived from the electrical parameters of the transformer.

Aside from applying it to speakers, whats novel?

I'm not arguing the merits of this patent (see my other comments). I'm attempting to provide some background on how this messed up system "functions".

That said, this process is not "estimating" anything. It's taking high resolution direct measurements[0] of driver temperature with awareness of the frequency and amplitude of the audio signal (also factoring in crossover frequency) and doing a bunch of stuff (this is well outside my area of expertise) to essentially overpower the individual driver(s) well past their intended electrical and physical specifications.

If I ever ended up on a jury for this (I wouldn't - I would get dismissed after one question in voir dire) even I would have a tough time associating (and recognizing as prior art) what you described with this process.

[0] - I've since been corrected on this - it is an estimation (of sorts).

The "bunch of stuff" is precisely the part where estimation comes in. There is no direct temperature sensor to measure from, the only thing available is the voltage levels on the speaker. As the patent says it's a 2 level estimate: estimate of impedance from voltages -> estimate of temperature from modelling the speaker's physical parametrs as a function of the driving signal and impedance estimate.

With patents it's not the general idea that's being patented. The patent itself cites many earlier patents which operate around the same general idea just with slightly different implementations on how the control process is fed and how it reacts.

Appreciate the clarification - like I said this is well outside my area of expertise and my eyes glazed over pretty quickly in reading but at this point we're borderline in semantics.

Exactly. In this case it's a "process". Generally speaking my take is there's almost never entirely new process (or design or anything else) in any "invention" - humans have been at this for hundreds of years and there's almost nothing that's entirely new.

I don't think I've ever seen a filing without tons of references.

I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?

See my other comments about patents in practice. They don't matter until you end up in front of a jury (or settle with a troll, which is a different case). A jury comprised of 12 random people off the street, specifically selected by counsel to be as ignorant as possible on the subject matter at hand (easier to influence).

My original point - this isn't enough of a distinguishing feature to drive sales and revenue for any manufacturer to risk that.

Ok, you sold 1% more laptops because you have good speakers. Then Apple sues you and potentially wins damages on a larger percentage of ALL of your sales of that "infringing" product.

Not worth it, not even close. Not even worth it to try to circumvent and still risk getting sued.

I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few just care about crappy laptop speaker sound enough to write a driver modeling each device and speaker combination for a significantly wider variety of shipping hardware. But I suppose it's impossible to know without asking every manufacturer.

We're saying the same thing.

They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.

Hmm I don't think we're saying the same thing at all. I'm not saying patents are part of the reason companies don't care, I'm saying they didn't care before the patent and there is no reason to suspect the patent is the real reason they don't care since. If any part of the reasoning for why not has to do with the patent being there then it's not what I'm saying, even if it would sound similar.

Patents do matter, you can get a patent knocked out at several phases in litigation prior to actually arriving at a trial. That's not even assuming the defendant goes and gets a stay to IPR the patent.

If its really this obvious, it should be trivial to get this patent knocked out.

It's well outside your area of expertise which is why you started with a "well actually" post claiming the article is obviously false?

Common, his post generated an interesting discussion (and netted me 10 points).

"there's almost never entirely new process"

I agree, but in this case the only innovation I see is applying a known solution to protect large inductor coils (transformers, motors) to protect smaller, inductor coils (speaker drivers).

Apple can patent their actual model all they want (for example by adding the driven air as a cooling term), but the idea, generally, of building a model to estimate the temperature is prior art.

Yes. In this case it's maybe a little face palmy how fill in the blanks are... but heh.

It cites a Bang & Olufsen patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090257599A1/en) which implements voice-coil protection via measuring the resistance/impedance of the speaker while it's being driven.

It also cites another patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120020488A1/en) which implements control of a speaker via combination of impedance measurements of the speaker while it's being driven + a baseline ("binding") measurement of impedance + ambient temperature that is taken at device power up - ie generating a per device calibration curve.

From quickly staring at these, the Apple patents threads the needle by:

* Implementing speaker control using the output of a temperature model (which is fed by the resistance measurement), instead of "directly" operating on speaker resistance.

* Not implementing per-speaker calibration.

(Note! There are other cited patents that I didn't look at, this wasn't meant to be exhaustive, just illustrative... and just to generally satisfy an itch)

Speaker engineers have been doing this for decades too. Not necessarily by the specific method chosen by Apple (didn't read the patent), or with laptop speakers, but dynamic control of signals to achieve greater loudness within a specific power rating has been a thing for a long time AFAIK. Here's an example:

https://testing.eminence.com/d-fend/

Cool. The HiFi community has done such neat things.

Never underestimate a smart community driven by love (and dash psychoacoustic delusion ;) )

> Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”.

It is not exclusive. I cannot believe that there is only one way of doing something like this. They just need to care enough to put some R&D money into this.

Sure, but as I've noted elsewhere if it goes to court it ends up in the hands of a jury. Let's just say that 12 random jurors off the street aren't exactly the HN crowd. In fact, I doubt a single HN user would ever make it on a jury for anything technical unless they lied or deliberately mislead counsel during juror questioning.

"Juror number 7, what is your occupation?"

"I'm a software developer..."

"We move to dismiss this juror".

In this case it could probably be argued for cause due to prejudice which means they can do it all day.

A big part of the calculus here is banking on that.

Out of curiosity, why would they not want to select someone who's a subject-matter expert? Is it regulatory capture or is there a more innocent reason?

People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings.

...

Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish.

Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't responding to an officer who was a native Spanish speaker claiming that he couldn't understand that dialect. Note that this wasn't relevant to the case - it was trying to explain why the defendant wasn't responding to the officer.

The question of Spanish didn't come up in jury deliberations.

After the case, I noted that while I didn't speak Spanish, I did understand French and could read ancient latin and greek... and took linguistics... and my mother was fluent in Spanish and understood several dialects (and used that fluency in a professional capacity) including Puerto Rican (where she had lived for several years). The differences between the PR Spanish and Mexican Spanish are things like the word for the fruit "orange" is a "china" ( http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartil... )... but we're getting to things like is it a water fountain? or drinking fountain? No - it's a bubbler ( https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you... ).

This got a scowl from the public defender because I had beyond common knowledge that that line of questions of the officer about if he spoke PR Spanish was trying to catch him in something that he could come back to later (which he didn't).

If the case had been decided on that he didn't understand the instructions of a different dialect (rather than he couldn't stand up, slurred his speech and had a strong oder of malt on his breath (note this was another bit that the public defender tried to bring into question as the officer said he smelled of alcohol which doesn't have a smell itself) my understanding of linguistics and language may have been grounds for disqualification and a mistrial.

---

Subject matter expert evidence should be presented - not something that someone has more than a layman's understanding of being brought into the jury room (as that could also be wrong).

Exactly. Attorneys from each side generally want to control the narrative/merits of their case as much as possible. When you're a subject matter expect juror they already have one juror who is less susceptible to their argument. When that SME gets in the jury deliberation room and is free to (essentially) present whatever they want/think/know with no monitoring, countering, argument, etc that's a "very bad thing" in the eyes of the attorneys. I have to imagine jurors are also much more likely to trust a fellow juror at face value than the attorneys and expert witness testimony that has an obvious slant to their side. A big part of their case usually comes down to "who's expert does the jury trust more".

Interesting with your "bubbler map" - in my childhood I moved from "outside the green in that map" to "inside the green in that map". Dialects are fascinating - the first time I heard bubbler to refer to a water/drinking fountain I had no idea what they were talking about. However, the inverse wasn't true - I said water/drinking fountain and they knew exactly what I was talking about.

The bubbler map is one of those most pronounced examples of a dialect in Wisconsin.

There's a radio program (incidentally from Wisconsin) on some NPR stations - A Way With Words. Upon looking it up, I'm pleased that it's still going.

https://www.waywordradio.org/

On the flip side of "I'm pleased its still going" is "way too many search results"

(think... search... ah ha! There's an episode I remember that had the book in question https://www.waywordradio.org/johnny-on-the-spot/ )

Dictionary of American Regional English - https://dare.wisc.edu

There are some maps that make Indiana look like polkadots for certain words. ... And remembering again...

https://www.daredictionary.com/search?rcode=region.IN

https://www.waywordradio.org/regional-term-pitch-in/ (in particular https://soundcloud.com/waywordradio/1322-callersabrina-pitch... )

Are parents disputes decided by a jury in the US? I know we have a different system in Germany and don't have juries to begin with, but patent disputes are generally handled by specific courts here and, given how specific and technical these cases can be, I wouldn't trust twelve random people to decide them.

You're really spelling out how toxic and evil the american patent system is.

Lol, does Apple also owns a patent that prevents other manufacturers from making something else than pieces of plastic trash devices ?

That’s not a patent. That’s a published version of a patent application.

The patent has actually been granted thought. It’s here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9131302B2/

It was the first result when I put together the right search terms to find it and shows granted. Good enough for me.

If you can find any differences in the claims or figures I'd be interested.

I’m not gonna go through and compare the wording, but the difference is that one set is enforceable and the other isn’t.

TBH, this is exactly the kind of innovation that patents are intended for.

So is the thesis here that there is no other way to have non-crap sound on a laptop than this Apple patent? No alternative? No patent-non-infringing approach?

Because if not, the real reason is as the author suggests: other manufacturers don't bother.

I have been working a long time - decades - in a part of the industry that is not just patent happy but patent berserk and it has never been my experience that other approaches are not available when a single approach is patent-walled off.

I’m not saying there might not be another way.

But iTunes and the other big music distribution power players have requirements and use encoding technologies based on loudness rather than power. [1]

This is why your playlists don’t require adjusting the volume between songs from different artists/albums/eras/genres.

So it is likely that Apple’s method works hand in hand with the technical constraints of iTunes requirements and other streaming encodings.

And why the threat of Apple’s patent may be providing a moat. Like Dolby, except that licensing patents isn’t a core revenue stream for Apple.

[1] TFA doesn’t cut a bright line between power and loudness within its argument. But that’s a critical part of contemporary audio engineering in today’s commercial music production.

What audio encodings are loudness rather than power based? Does that mean they don't encode waveforms directly?

> I’m not saying there might not be another way.

Are you ggp?

How many people are using their macs to listen to iTunes? I get YouTube, Netflix, anything you can watch on chrome, but iTunes is more of a phone, home pod, Apple car thing, and even then many people use Spotify rather than iMusic. Are other providers using QuickTime or similar encodings for non-Apple provided media?

It’s not Quicktime.

All the streaming services normalize music on loudness.

That’s why you aren’t constantly adjusting the volume of your speakers/headphones to compensate for the way each song was originally mixed and mastered.

Apple/iTunes got there first.

The author replied in mastodon:

> "Nobody else does it because Apple patented it" - except non-Apple phones do do it. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't invent this, even if they got a patent. Apple have a lot of BS patents.

Other comments here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064

In that discussion the author references that Apple only starting implementing this circa 2014/2016 - which happens to line up perfectly with when the patent was working it's way through the USPTO and granted. Generally speaking you can get early confidence on whether or not the patent is likely to be granted. Lexis Nexus and others actually offer specialized services to IP firms where they have the background and historical performance (office actions, grant rates, etc) of the random patent reviewer human at the USPTO that was assigned to review your application.

This data, in conjunction with any early "office actions" sent by your reviewer, can give you a really good idea of whether or not the patent will be issued pretty early on in the process.

Love this PS:

> This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a, because after typing all that out as a quote toot and deciding that nah, I wanted it standalone, I clicked the "x" next to the quote box (which implies removing the quote association) and that didn't just cancel the quote, it deleted all the text.

> So I attached gdb to the Firefox content process hosting this tab, took a core dump, and grepped it for the lost text. I wasn't about to write all that again from scratch.

Anywhere to learn more about doing this kind of stuff?

Experience.

For a quick starting point, try gcore[1]. Open the file it pops out into your favourite editor and hope that search works.

For gentler introduction, look for CTF sites. The one that gets recommended most is tryhackme.com. There are a bunch of great ones though.

1 - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/gcore.1.html

I have always noted this when listening to music on my M1 MBP. "There is NO way my tweeters aren't about to explode!" I recall how quickly the speakers in my Microsoft surface laptop self-destructed...

In my experience, the #1 prerequisite to driving a speaker this aggressively without destroying it is having a clean source of power. Hard distortion and clipping are what break voice coils in direct, physical terms. Thermals can be tolerated over brief durations.

I have found (in larger scale pro audio) that the amplifier topology can have a major impact on the amount of real power you can put into a loudspeaker. One of the most popular is Class D because it requires virtually no magnetics (i.e. no toroidal transformers). The tradeoff is that it needs to have a lot of safety nannies at the extremes and will have to attenuate aggressive program material. You almost always have to put a full-time DSP on these amplifiers.

Compare this to Class A,A/B, G or H topologies which can be pushed well-beyond rated supply amperage for brief durations (i.e. your lights will dim slightly, rather than the amp/DSP limiting its power draw). You can drive these with any kind of signal you please, filtered with nannies or otherwise. These topologies are where I go when I want to be able to reach to DC on a loudspeaker and am willing to replace the drivers if I bump a knob the wrong way.

We're talking about laptop speakers here, where power consumption is important.

In a laptop's energy budget, power spent driving the loudspeakers is probably one of the last concerns.

If you integrate the actual power consumed over the playback duration of typical program material, you would find figures that are essentially irrelevant compared to the cost of running the backlight or WiFi radios.

I saw a nice demo recently of the use of chargepump power control to stop the backlight dimming if the audio got too loud, a microcosm of the "PA so loud your lights dim" situation.

(no, I've not been able to find it to show hn)

While you're probably right technically speaking laptops compete heavily on battery life. I wouldn't be surprised at all if (like mobile devices) they're at the point of optimizing relatively minuscule points of power draw.

Like most things once you start looking at dozens of factors that are 0.5% wins each you end up with a substantial improvement that in the case of battery powered productivity devices is significant from a sales standpoint.

Screenshot says 1W or so. My laptop uses about 10W on light scrolling.

If your lights are dimming, you've wrecked your THD+N by feeding your amp AC for the period the power supply filtering caps are empty. (It's even worse than AC, transiently, because of the effect of trying to refill the caps while driving the amp).

Also, the tweeter killing effect is because of the harmonic effects of clipping, so if you're hitting the rail voltages with any topology you're going to have a bad time.

You are implying that there are 2 discrete states: fully charged and fully discharged. In reality, this is an infinite spectrum.

You will know when the capacitors are actually empty. When you flip on a 2-4kW pro audio amp, you can hear the electromagnetic forces for about a second. If you have a UPS on the same circuit, it will likely trip. That is empty. During normal use, there is no such thing as empty.

Most, if not all, of the class D amps at the large scale pro audio level have that DSP built into the amplifier itself. More and more speaker manufacturers are also selling their own amplifiers (not necessarily made in house) with limiting that takes specific drivers into consideration, along with FIR correction for the whole box.

I've also used a few that you can tell exactly what kind of power you're hooked up to (120v @ 25 amp perhaps) and it will draw just up to that limit and stop. Neat stuff

> More and more speaker manufacturers are also selling their own amplifiers (not necessarily made in house)

Indeed. I've had horrible luck with reliability of these products (i.e. loudspeakers with integrated class-D amplifiers).

I would strongly recommend going for external amplification wherever possible, especially if you are running cabinetry that weighs more than 100lbs.

A month ago, Hector did an amazing talk on Asahi that was essentially was a talk on "What it takes to make an open source project work": community, tooling, considering users (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COlvP4hODpY).

And one of the examples he gave regarding "considering users" was why they chose to disable speaker support until they could ensure user safety, as well as ensure a quality sound experience.

When discussing open source projects and communities in academia, we often try to categorize every aspect, as well as focus on projects that failed and why. I try to do the opposite and instead focus on what worked and why - and the Asahi project is a stellar example of how to do an open source project well on every level.

Off topic: it's such a breath of fresh air to read this content without 1) having to close half a dozen popups and 2) all in a single post and not painfully spread out across multiple messages.

Once upon a time this was called a “blog post”.

Doesn't do targeted ads, so doesn't have to have an EU cookie popup.

Doesn't have an app, so doesn't have to try to make you install the app.

Doesn't do registered users growth hacking, doesn't have to have sign-up dialog.

The problem is, if and when they decide to monetise this thing they will have to have all of these because the money people and the analytics will tell them they have to.

Everything is much more fun when it's paid by someone else, that's why the old web was so nice. The content was produced for free and the distribution was handled by VCs. Today, these VCs are recouping their investments.

> Everything is much more fun when it's paid by someone else, that's why the old web was so nice.

What are you talking about? The old web was filled with ads. They just weren't tracking you every nanosecond of your life.

Google's AdWords was launched in 2000. DoubleClick that Google acquired in 2008 was launched in 1995. Ad exchanges are from 1998. And so on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_online_advertising

> They just weren't tracking you every nanosecond of your life.

Exactly.

But only some of that was paid by ads.

> But only some of that was paid by ads.

Ah yes. They were paid by altruists who had the foresight to know that 30 years later they will be able to track everyone and collect their dues.

Those who relied on making profits were decimated as VC funded user experience was much superior. It was an era of land-grab.

Those who relied on anything were decimated in the bubble of 2001.

Also, you're pretending that all of those sites were making a profit, or operated under the assumption of making a profit. There was a lot of money thrown at any and all internet companies by the end of 1990s. It's just that the market was much smaller.

Distributing a static HTML page content does not need a VC. Nginx on an RPI on my home connection does provide sufficient level of performance and availability. If I need more because my content is way popular, I guess a monetization scheme (asking for a tip) might cover it ?

If you are not getting paid for your servers you are the VC/Angel.

A bit of a difference in motivation between a hobbyist and a VC.

Agreed! Here you are more a patron or sponsor who's disinterestedly giving spare money for something you think is good for the rest of the people.

Although the Angel investor expects a few shares of a company, I like the analogy of an 'angel sponsor'.

How does that make them the VC/Angel?

They provide the capital required for that venture.

So if I order lunch, am I providing the capital required for the venture of ordering lunch? Is there anything in the universe that's not venture capital?

When all you know is a hammer...

No. If you are s 14 years who is into hobbits and you are writing a fan fiction, your mom is a venture capitalist when feeds you and gives you pocket money which you used to buy a domain. She can be a venture capitalist or angel investor depending on her expectations. I guess it also can be a case of racketeering if she does that you just shut up, then you are the VC investing in your own stuff with the money you extorted by being a really annoying kid :)

Anyway, it doesn't matter. The gist is, someone else than the user paid for the experience without immediate expectation for profit from side channels and that's how we had free and awesome things.

Most of the time, it wasn't other people. People were paying for their own hosting for their own purposes, much like how I order lunch.

No, you miss the point. Because of those who were paying their own hosting the rest was able to have free and awesome stuff. The paying out of pocket to show your own stuff to other people was the act of funding a venture. Some ended up turning these into profitable businesses.

I just think it's weird calling hobbies "venture capital". But if that's your thing, at least now I understand it.

I really hope you're right but I don't think it will play out that simply for mastodon. I have high hopes for it, hopefully these problems are solved but with this rate of growth, what will happen when there's a big political event that used to cripple Twitter back in the day? I don't think tips will cover it.

Mastodon (and the general "fediverse") is an inefficient disaster by design, but if you ignore that and go back to old-school forum software, your Raspberry Pi will be just fine for a few hundred concurrent users (and way more for read-only traffic).

> If I need more because my content is way popular, I guess a monetization scheme (asking for a tip) might cover it ?

Hetzner will give you a powerful server for ~30 bucks/month and includes 20TB of bandwidth for free (and overages are charged at ~1$/TB, almost 90x less than AWS). That's enough to host and serve a lot of content.

No, all the bloggers I was reading on the old web were paying for their hosting a few bucks a month and no VC were involved.

Some of them included ads but they were mostly in a sidebar.

They were paying for the costs? Then they were the VC. Some of them actually grew to be huge and wealthy.

me paying $5 to wordpress: i'm a venture capitalist now mom

(seriously, this is a very silly way of using terms to cover extremely small amounts of capital)

The size of the capital doesn't change the reality of the financial structure.

I don’t think I understand the argument that you’re making.

Are you saying that anyone that pays for anything is a venture capitalist?

That doesn’t seem like a very useful definition, so I think I’ve misunderstood you ’:-)

> «if you use money — you are a capitalist»

Did you mean paying for PHP site hosting instead, or paying to remove ads on the WordPress.com SaaS?

You equate VC with tracking and then equate VC with anyone that provides money whatever the intention. By that logic, you imply that anyone providing money (including a mom for his 14yo son) will track everyone and gather a lot of stats and push an app ? Remember WhatsApp did cost a few bucks a year and was self sufficient, it was bought by fb not because of cost of operation but to ensure market share.

> Doesn't have an app

It does have an app. See https://joinmastodon.org/apps for not only the official app, but also literally dozens of third-party apps.

> The content was produced for free and the distribution was handled by VCs

And even that, content distribution was handled by a volunteer happy to chip in a few bucks to pay for shared hosting.

Content distribution (and infrastructure in general) nowadays is cheaper than ever thanks to technological advances (today's entry-level MacBook is more powerful than a lot of servers from 10 years ago).

There is absolutely a way to distribute content for very cheap nowadays if you know how to - you just have to avoid the rent-seekers like cloud providers.

On that vein, I recently joined home-barista, an old school web forum for coffee geeks.

That site is seemingly frozen in time from the early 2000s. There are no trackers - there's no need, since it is already filled with a self selected group. The ads are just simple banners. And best of all it filled with a group of passionate, kind and helpful folks. A simpler site from a simpler time. One of my favorite haunts on the web.

> Doesn't have an app, so doesn't have to try to make you install the app.

Well, it does, but does nothing user hostile with it, so doesn't gain anything from coercing them to install it.

You might like it even more when reading through elk.zone

https://elk.zone/infosec.exchange/@marcan@treehouse.systems

There is popup about the preview, but that might be acceptable. There is zen mode to remove all disturbances on right bottom.

The post is interesting itself, but the addendum,

> This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a

Where author recovers text from Firefox core dump, is just hilarious.

That's an incredibly useful trick and now I wonder if there is a small Windows utility that makes it easy to recover similar ghost data?

GDB and grep but built for windows.

Or you could use Cheat Engine if you have a fear of terminals.

> GDB and grep but built for windows

Beat me to it. Windows would be intolerable for me without MinGW/MSYS[0]. (Sure, there's WSL2, but that's not quite the same, and I was using MinGW and friends long before it existed.)

[0] https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-introduction/

FWIW, ripgrep has a native build for Windows which is much, much faster than using grep or rg via WSL2. (I'm not sure how it compares to grep from MinGW/MSYS2.)

Windows Sysinternals

gdb is a general-purpose debugger. The equivalent tool for Windows is windbg [0] which is free and extremely powerful, though famously arcane. You can certainly do this with it.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

https://x64dbg.com/

The task manager had the option to dump the memory of a process. It's been a while since I last used Windows though, so I don't remember whether that does, in fact, dump all of its pages.

That part also grabbed my attention.

How would I do the core dump? (How do I attach gdb to Firefox? Doesn’t it need debug data from the compiler like what you get with gcc -Og?)

You can attach gdb to any process. Debug information is not needed unless you want nice things like knowing which lines of code you are stepping through.

On macOS most binaries now use the hardened runtime which prevents attaching a debugger by default, so you can only attach to arbitrary processes when SIP is disabled.

You can use 'gcore' (from gdb) to dump the process memory (on Linux) - it tries to create a core file as if it crashed, without crashing it. It's not 100% reliable it sometimes fails - not entirely sure why - but often works.

Then as above you dont really need to understand the memory or variables with debug symbols (though on Linux they generally are available.. and increasingly on the newest distros will automatically be downloaded by debuginfod). You can jsut grep for the text you are looking for and likely it's roughly together in memory.

How do you attach gdb to a running process?

gdb <path> -p <pid>

Yeah I was going to ask how does FF know about Mac speakers, but I was not expecting that

(Neither that it would have kept the text there, I guess he was lucky)

The buffer could have been freed but not zeroed out maybe.

Plug: Could have maybe used https://github.com/eras/memgrep/

Patents are interesting. IIRC, Apple has a patent on a method of creating a fast Gaussian blur by combining multiple low-radius blurs to create a large radius blur in real-time.

I remember looking into this because I was so confused how Apple could create a fast real-time Gaussian blur with a large radius with no latency.

Even game developers fail to do this, utilizing other blurs like box blurs instead to create the effect.

Turns out this approach is mathematically equivalent or such a close approximation that it's visually indistinguishable.

Not related to laptop speakers, of course, but just a thought that came up as I was thinking about patents on small but important concepts.

I have a question, suppose I came up with something similar or even identical on my own, wrote the code and published it, and I have no clue that a patent exists, am I liable in any way?

Isn’t absurd that algorithms and mathematical solutions can be patented?

Yes, that's how patents work. I believe patents normally expire ~20 years after being filed. The idea is to incentivize people/companies to invest the resources in solving really hard problems, knowing they'll be able to make back their investment in the time before it expires (at which point everyone can then use it)

Software patents are controversial because of the rate things move in software; a software discovery from 20 years ago is likely worthless by the time the patent expires. I think the window should be shorter for software (5 years? 3 years?), just enough to make back the investment but not milk it until it's dead

But as they go, this kind of real problem-solving is one of the more defensible kinds of software patents imo. Many software patents out there are things like "do X but store it in a database", which is obviously nonsense

Broadly speaking there does exist a defense of "innocent infringement." You can use that keyword to read about it more yourself.

IANAL but I believe it only reduces your damages in an infringement suit. It's considered your responsibility to check if something infringes on an existing patent. Yes, I know there are patents on absurd things like doubly linked lists, and the whole thing is a bit of a mess, seemingly created to give lawyers a job and present a barrier to people who can't afford to do patent discovery and all that.

As for it being absurd.... I don't know.

Would you prefer that companies never file patents, revealing their algorithms and mathematical solutions, so it never becomes public knowledge (and useable by everyone once the patent expires), and they just keep it indefinitely as trade secrets?

Because that's the alternative :(

Where do they use it? The control center pulldown shade in iOS?

iOS has blurs almost everywhere, not just control center.

There are others, that was just one example that came to mind

Right, I guess my point is, they probably use that algorithm wherever there's a blur. Not just in one specific place.

Another good way to speed up a gaussian blur is to first run a 1xRadius kernel and then a RadiusX1 kernel. This changes it from O(Radius^2) to O(Radius*2) more or less.

I wonder how they model the energy output of the speakers. In principle you could have a function that calculates the energy of the spectrum and integrate that over time. If you put out too much energy, what do you do? Reduce the overall volume, apply a frequency cutoff, or a low-pass-filter? I feel there are so many variables here, and it is going to be hard to replicate what Apple does.

I know the Asahi-Linux people are very correct, but I'd be tempted to just throw the Apple libraries into Ghidra and see what they do.

And a completely unreleated thought, maybe it is possible to remove the safetly limits on speakers of other brands and apply the same strategy to get better sound?

That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..

An audiophile opinion: there are so many good cheap systems out there, why would you mistreat poor hardware this way?

- Any number of excellent in-ear monitors under $100 - Truthear Zero ($50)

- Quite a few good-to-excellent headphones under $200, and under $50 if you can run a convolver equalizer for them - Superlux 668B ($35)

- Several excellent powered monitor speakers regularly on sale under $450/pair (JBL 305, 308, Kali LP8v2)

Laptop speakers are for getting your attention from across the room so you can plug in something appropriate.

Maybe we just don't want to constantly wear crap on our head?

Counterpoint: your neighbors don't want to hear the crap on your laptop speakers

I’m confused - are you suggesting that people use headphones instead of small laptop speakers to not annoy their next door neighbors?

They probably mean 'neighbors' as in people nearby in the same room. This is indeed a good use case for headphones/IEMs.

Both. A lot of folks live in apartments, condos, dorms where the walls aren't good at sound insulation. Putting in your IEMs gives you better sound and isnot going to disturb anyone.

I live in a house with many rooms, and other people I am related to. If I want to listen to music or have a conversation, my selection of audio device is dependent on the time of my day and my consideration for other people, as well as the desired quality level.

I have a proper home theater system, but I wouldn't use it while my wife is taking a nap. I have a nice stereo setup in the living room, but I wouldn't use that while people are talking in the kitchen unless I just wanted some background music.

And I have both IEMs and over-the-ear headphones because wearing either for too long can make my ears unhappy, but in different ways.

It's often said that the best camera is the one you have with you.

To be honest I'm not sure what the parent comment was expecting, this is kind of a normal audiophile response. But it shows that the engineering that apple does with their speakers is not made for audiophiles, it wows people who are used to other laptops.

    > And a completely unreleated thought, maybe it is 
    > possible to remove the safetly limits on speakers 
    > of other brands and apply the same strategy to get 
    > better sound? 

    That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile 
    shows up to give some thoughts..

Probably want an audio engineer instead of an audiophile hobbyist, for a more proper and informed opinion. =)

However, as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good sound from bad hardware (or excellent sound from good hardware) via DSP is definitely a thing! In fact, it's essentially the reason why anything sounds any good at all these days, and why things like tiny laptop speakers and tiny portable Bluetooth speakers can sound halfway decent. Even inexpensive factory car audio can sound great these days, because you can throw a cheap DSP chip in front of not-very-special speakers.

I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.

Hobbyists can do this as well. You can buy e.g. cheap speakers, measure their output with a microphone, and create a DSP profile to fix much of what they're doing wrong. The underlying principle here is that "good" sound is absolutely measurable, and it essentially is nothing more low-distortion playback that is tonally correct. The results can sound excellent. Here's an example of the process: http://noaudiophile.com/Micca_Club_3/

However, there are some physical limitations to this. Much of the sound we hear is reflected, not direct, and therefore part of a speaker sounding "good" is that it is emitting "correct" sound in a wide enough angle. If a speaker is shooting correct sound directly at you, but various and incorrect sound off at various angles, the result will not sound great because what actually reaches your ears is going to be a mixture of good (the direct sound) and bad (the indirect, reflected) sound. If a speaker is bad at this, that is not something that can really be fixed by DSP, so you need to get some elements of the physical design correct in the first place.

The software power management aspects of Apple's secret sauce ("you can dump more than max power into the speakers for x milliseconds, but after that, back off") are also beyond the limits of simple DSP solutions. There would presumably need to be some kind of stateful solution there like Asahi is doing.

There are also other things that Apple does in hardware. Their 16-inch laptops actually have six drivers. Two tweeters, and two pairs of dual-opposed woofers. Dual-opposed woofers give you twice the sound pressure and drastically reduce distortion caused via vibration. This of course takes more room, more hardware engineering, more expense, and isn't something we can software our way around. You actually don't see this in commercial subwoofers until you get up around the $2000 price level, though you could also build one yourself for much less if you don't mind DIY work. https://us.kef.com/products/kf92-subwoofer

Also, one of the hilarious things about this hobby & engineering science is that 98% of that insane hardware & software engineering work is only necessary because we're trying to cheat the laws of physics in order to deliver decent sound from tinier and tinier speakers.

If you're willing to go in the other direction, and tolerate bigger speakers, you can have very very enjoyable sound from the sorts of dumb big-box speakers folks commonly had in their living rooms up through the 1980s or so.

I've got room for the big boxes. Does anyone sell reasonably affordable ones these days?

Thrift stores, generally.

I was afraid of that. I can re-box them to look nice, but that would be yet another project...

Most of the fun old speakers from the 1980s and earlier had paper speaker cones, which actually sound(ed) really nice.

However, the paper from the speaker cones and the rubber surrounds have nearly all rotted away at this point. If there are capacitors in the crossovers, those may need replacing too.

So unfortunately resurrecting old vintage speakers (a noble and worthwhile thing!) from thrift stores is often more involved than refinishing the box.

However if you're willing to put in some legwork, scroll through lots of crap, and deal with safety concerns, you can get some nice higher end gear on Craigslist. (A decent seller will understand you need to demo the speakers to make sure they work)

Yes and no, depending on our definitions of "big" and "affordable." What's our version of big and affordable?

If we say "affordable" is about $500-$1000, all in...

For amplification you can get a factory refurbished Denon or similar 5.1 receiver for under $200. This is what I usually recommend because it will give tremendous flexibility over the long haul and honestly, receivers/amplifiers all sound very similar if not identical.

As far as widely available brands, Sony and Polk sell some nice affordable tower speakers for a few hundred dollars. Those put out enough bass to be fun on their own without a subwoofer, depending on what you're looking for.

I actually tend to not love these quite as much as some of the old 80s style "monkey coffin" speakers but that's probably nostalgia talking. There aren't many of those around any more, affordable or otherwise. The cheapest are the BIC EV-15s, which have ridiculous 15" red woofers, but sound pretty nice and the grill covers do a good job of hiding the red woofers.

There are also a lot of great bookshelf style speakers and Wirecutter does a great job maintaining a leaderboard of sorts. Compared to what most people want these days, maybe these are considered "big." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bookshelf-sp...

So...

You can have a nice, simple 2-channel stereo system with a receiver and two tower speakers for as little as $500. It will sound great with nearly zero complexity and you can stop there. That is enough to be happy until the end of your days!

You can substitute bookshelves for towers, but practically speaking you'll probably need to buy speaker stands as well and at that point you've spent as much as towers would have cost.

If you're willing to spend a little more and add a subwoofer or two and tolerate more complexity, you can have something extremely good and full-range for $500-$1000 total.

There are options such as DIY that can deliver much greater price/performance, and are a lot of fun if you're into that and don't mind buying up half of the wood clamps at your local Harbor Freight. Very roughly speaking the DIY flat pack kits will give you about 2-3x the price/performance of commercial speakers.

This is great advice, thanks. :) The DIY route is immediately tempting, and I have a wood shop so I'm not afraid of hacking problems away in a medium-density fiberboard fashion, but I am looking to avoid new projects!

I hear you on the bookshelf speakers. My desk speakers are a couple of Edifier S1000DB's (cheap Mackie CR3's before that) and for work stuff that's fine. I never thought about sticking them anywhere else, but that might be enough; my living room is small.

Definitely some stuff to chew on. Thank you again!

Happy to help. Good luck to you! It's a fun hobby, potentially a rabbit hole, but also a fun rabbit hole... and also it doesn't need to be a rabbit hole at all.

If you decide to look into the DIY route, PartsExpress and DIYSoundGroup are two of the most popular sources for affordable flat-pack kits.

Speakers don't change; if you find old ones they work the same way, though they might've broken or rotted by now.

KEF Q150 is a good home size speaker. Don't touch their higher end products, Britain is the home of horribly expensive audiophile snake oil.

Total audio noob here: are you talking about hardware or software DSP? If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC, how would I go about "tuning" the speakers?

    are you talking about hardware or software DSP?

You could do it either way. Hardware solution like a MiniDSP, although it appears they have unfortunately discontinued their more affordable products. Or a software solution like EqualizerAPO (Windows) or SoundSource (Mac).

    If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC

Quick summary.

1. You need a calibrated microphone like the uMik from MiniDSP or one from Dayton Audio. That's about $100, though, so that sort of kills the value equation in a lot of situations.[1]

2. You then measure the speaker's output with something such as a free tool called Room EQ Wizard: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

3. REQ can then output the necessary DSP configuration files, that can be then be used by a MiniDSP, EqualizerAPO, etc. Or it can just tell you the necessary corrections that can then be manually typed into anything that supports parametric EQ settings.

Here's a video fully demonstrating all of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1aYsjPc2m4&t=2s

____

[1] There are community efforts to take these kinds of measurements and open source them so everybody can benefit. The largest I'm aware of is these open-sourced headphone measurements (which require a different sort of measurement rig) and corrections: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...

For speakers, there are the measurements and EQ corrections published by places like AudioScienceReview.com and NoAudiophile.com

If you do software EQ and use other peoples' measurements you can do this for $0, without the grunt work of measurements.

Thanks a lot, will look into EqualizerAPO.

> You need a calibrated microphone

Ah, of course, it's a chicken and egg problem... :)

edit: typos

The way I got started was using the measurements + corrections from NoAudiophile.com -- so I cheated and sidestepped the chicken/egg. =)

His corrections for cheap Micca speakers were my gateway into hi-fi. For under $100 I had true hi-fi sound at my desk. However, he's not active any more, and most of the speakers he's measured are no longer available.

> If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC, how would I go about "tuning" the speakers?

Blatant plug: https://github.com/erdewit/HiFiScan

Thanks, will give it a try.

> as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good sound from bad hardware (or excellent sound from good hardware) via DSP is definitely a thing!

Acknowledging this lifts you out of the category of "audiophile" into "person who actually knows about audio" ;) There's a lot of what I can only describe as outdated prejudice about what can be achieved with class D systems. Your explanations in this thread are excellent.

> I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.

Correct, especially in mobile phones. My employer has some products in this area, e.g. https://www.cirrus.com/products/cs35l41/ , which has exactly the sort of speaker protection under discussion done by on-chip DSP.

What a nice thing to say! Thank you so much. I was having a terrible day and this really brightened it a bit.

> I'd be tempted to just throw the Apple libraries into Ghidra and see what they do

The Asahi people usually reverse engineer things like the audio system by running macOS under the m1n1 hypervisor, which lets you inspect interactions with the hardware using a Python API

The other question is how much is done in software vs hardware? I can imagine an opamp doing the integration to kick in a volume reduction to avoid damaging the speakers when there's been too much power pushed, and Ghidra could never show you that.

It does appear it's done in software, this post is talking about the Free reimplementation: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type...

(Nobody does maths with opamps any more, it's less area and lower power to ADC the signals you want and do it in digital. It's also much easier to tune)

Hi, I wrote the Linux kernel drivers for speaker output on the new ARM64 Macs, so I can shed some light on this.

> I wonder how they model the energy output of the speakers.

Simple. The speaker codecs (special made for Apple, but e.g. compatible to https://www.ti.com/product/TAS2764) give you current/voltage measurements you can calculate the power from. It's what they call I/V sense.

> In principle you could have a function that calculates the energy of the spectrum and integrate that over time.

Right. You don't want to do the calculation in frequency domain since that would be wasteful. You can integrate the power of the samples straight away (here by multiplying the instantaneous voltage and current, if we didn't have that, we could at least estimate it by assuming a constant resistance of the speaker coils).

> If you put out too much energy, what do you do? Reduce the overall volume, apply a frequency cutoff, or a low-pass-filter?

You model the coil's temperature. If it comes near a dangerous level, you reduce the volume on the particular speaker. You don't need to worry too much about this since usually you don't hit the limits, you are merely guarding against especially nasty sound input.

> I feel there are so many variables here, and it is going to be hard to replicate what Apple does.

We don't need to replicate what Apple does. Though we are stealing the parameters for the coil temperature model Apple is using (at least for some machines).

Thanks for the answer! You guys are doing great work with the Linux port.

You can run some empirical tests to find a safe limit.

This becomes apparent when people join calls with others who are using MacBooks and iPads. Why does everyone else sound better? Why is my company-issued Dell/HP laptop equipped with terrible speakers and microphone?

This can be fixed by giving them a headset.

It sounds dumb but one thing that keeps me from dropping my Mac for a Lenovo 100% is the speaker quality. It's nice enough to play music at a moderate level on my desk while I work on my corporate machine.

This could probably be fixed by buying an external speaker but...

To go the whole distance the wrong way, you could make nearly all of it external.

All the peripherals, wifi and Bluetooth on a USB dock, and run the monitor off a thunderbolt GPU. Think you’d then just be using the two ports and the CPU. The ultra non-portable laptop.

Until you plug in an external monitor and the MacBook Pro overheats and fans up so you have to close the lid which muffles the mic.

What year is this? I have not heard of these issues substantially affecting any modern ARM Mac.

This hasn’t happened since Apple ditched x86 processors.

It's because of the AMD GPU in this case presumably, if external displays trigger it.

Sidenote: on recent(those with T2 and newer, so ~2018) laptops this doesn't merely "muffle" the mic, there's a physical hardware disconnect happening with the lid closed [1].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-microphone...

When I first got my current MacBook Air the sound totally surprised me. It seemed like it was coming from places to the left and to the right of the actual device. I kept moving my head around that space to try to find the weird source of the sound! It truly blew me away. But then that sensation disappeared. Now I don't notice this? I like the AirPod head tracking, but this "spookily surround sound" that I noticed at first was very fucking cool!

M1 Air user here too.

I am convinced there must be some kind of ‘spatial’ processing going on, even though I’m as certain as I can be that I’m listening to a plain stereo source, Spotify web version on Firefox.

Why does it sound like a particular instrument is up in the air to my right? I’ve found myself getting up and looking for the source of a sound before realising it was in the music.

On the M2 series laptops (Air and Pro) they tout "Support for Spatial Audio when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos on built-in speakers", but it's not on the M1 laptops.

Sorry to be the um actually guy, but every supported MacBook [0] (including some Intel ones at least on Monterey - like my 15” from 2019) will do a transaural rendering over the laptop speakers for Dolby Atmos content.

The tech needed to do that doesn’t require fancy silicon, though it does seem they restrict the headtracked binaural (over headphones like AirPods Pro).[0]

Though you can plug any headphones in and, at least in Apple Music, force it to do a binaural rendering (without headtracking) on any headphones.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182

This would not matter to the parent poster listening to Spotify, which is not a Dolby Atmos source.

On the M2 Air (and new design MBP), speakers bounce the sound off the screen. I think if you were to remove the screen and listen to those speakers in open air it'd sound quite odd.

Probably they're pre-distorting the sound so it's correct only after bouncing off the screen, kind of like how VR distorts the image to account for headset optics undoing that distortion.

I had an M1 Air before the MBP release. The sound was good, but the sound stage is eerily wide on the M1 MBP (and presumably the M2 Air), compared to the normal side speakers.

Does the laptop have knowledge of the screen angle, or does its calculations just assume an 'average' angle? Or does it not matter too much (it seems like it would to me)?

Yes, modern MacBooks have a sensor for detecting screen angle

They do, and it's also used for Desk View when you use an iPhone as your laptop's webcam. This undoes the perspective of whatever is in front of your laptop, basically like an overhead projector: https://www.macworld.com/article/1371720/continuity-camera-m...

Pretty cool that speakers are driven in part by software that knows the screen angle. Add in the position of your head and you'll be able to do amazing things with those speakers. Sad that you can't get studio monitors that are integrated enough to do this on the fly (or can you???)

What a great way to describe it!

> the sound stage is eerily wide on the M1 MBP (and presumably the M2 Air), compared to the normal side speakers.

Thank you for giving me the new language to express this! :) ;p x

I still don't get it why, because they drive them past the nominal volume limit?

MacBooks definitely sound much better than anything else I've tried. Just bought a new ThinkPad P14s and despite featuring the Dolby logo, speakers there are just unusable - I can barely understand words in YouTube videos sometimes, and it's not related to volume. (Still using T430 for bedtime YouTube.)

Because they both build tuned and big enclosures into their speaker assemblies, and also use the whole body of the device as an acoustic chamber. That’s why.

MacBooks have margin so there is room for engineering time.

Also, companies like Lenovo care about their primary customer - enterprise. Apple designs for the end user first.

Is there anything that’s made better for the enterprise market?

Network switches and wifi access points come to mind, and that’s it?

Laptops for the enterprise markets are better for the enterprise market.

They are often relatively easy to repair (at least for the most common repairs). They offer 5 years and longer warranty contracts with on-site repairs. They offer driver and software package for automated deployments and more.

Most of these things are not important for the consumer market but very important for the enterprise market. There isn't a product that is the perfect fit for all markets.

Lwkl summed it up well. A great example is an HP z laptop - good build quality, sort of the equivalent to an old T series thinkpad.

With two Phillips screwdrivers, you can disassemble and replace most parts within 15m.

When I did this work, the other key thing was OEMs would guarantee image/driver compatibility for 4 years. I don’t think they do that anymore, but the hardware is very stable - consumer PC hardware will often have variance based on cost and supply chain.

Enterprise doesn’t want surprises and cares about total cost. So keeping it boring and predictable rules the day. Depending on scale, repairs are important because at some point it’s much cheaper pay for service by the drink vs warranty.

> A great example is an HP z laptop - good build quality, sort of the equivalent to an old T series thinkpad.

Last year I abandoned a low spec z laptop day one of getting given it at work. The trackpad alone was so poor that the laptop wasn’t usable without a mouse. I am a longtime Mac user but I don’t think I was being snobby or difficult.

I use a MacBook and have windows in a VM when needed.

That’s a great point. I’m always baffled by touchpads… does apple have some secret formula? Their touchpads are consistently excellent.

Other vendors vary dramatically, even between models.

It's the magic sauce of software and hardware integration. Also the hardware is just bonkers.

I thought for the longest time that the whole trackpad clicked when you pressed down on it. Nope, it's just a taptic engine hidden in there. If you turn off the haptic click, it's just a flat pane of glass.

Then there's the palm detection, I've used Macbooks for almost a decade for work and I can't remember when was the last time I had a misclick on the trackpad when I was typing. I did have a ton of issues with Dell and Lenovo laptops. On Lenovos I just used the red nub and disabled the touchpad from BIOS =)

Are you using Windows or Linux on your P14s? Lenovo relies a lot on software processing to make ThinkPad speakers sound reasonable; without the drivers + configuration UI installed, they sound tinny and horrible.

On Windows, the EQ settings can be tweaked if you have the Lenovo audio drivers installed along with the "Dolby Access" UWP app.

Not sure if something equivalent exists on Linux.

Actually, FreeBSD. This makes sense. :-D

I don't think this is always the case. My old T460p had crappy speakers that were facing downwards (leveraging flat surfaces). My newer T14 G1 and X1C G9 have great speakers. I usually have them at ~55%, never more than 75%.

In the end, these are just laptop speakers. I wouldn't listen to music on them anyway.

It's because "volume limit" is fuzzy. It's more like cpu turbo boost - if you put a lot of frequency energy into the speakers they will overheat, but not instantly. Most vendors just say "In worst case (square wave) you can shove 2W continuous energy into the speakers and they'll probably be ok", but this is saying "you can spike more energy into the tweeters/woofers for a short time, but they'll heat up. Make sure they don't go over 140C. Oh, and by the way, my woofers and tweeters have these gains, so you can balance them properly rather than just guessing"

If you look at Marcan's video stream you can see how the system watches the temperatures of the coils https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjuYJjkGhRo&t=22214s

> why, because they drive them past the nominal volume limit?

Yes. For almost everyone almost all of the time, louder=better (until you get clipping or you hit uncomfortable levels of dB at the ear). In this case, there's a safety system that prevents the speakers overheating and self-destructing, which allows them to be louder most of the time.

Actually, I did indeed blow out the left speaker on my back then new MacBook Pro late 2016 - no tweaks to the hardware or software. It happened while I was experimenting with Ableton and the synth operator. I think I held a pure sine tone at either 66.6 Hz or 82.222222 Hz for an extended period at near-maximum volume, possibly with some frequency modulation. Sadly, the speaker became permanently distorted as an aftermath of that little mishap.

This is curious reading since my Intel MacBook speakers crackled all the time as it grounded through me.

Before anyone jumps in to say the issue is grounding and that it's your fault for having bad wiring: ground wires are not installed by default in all countries.

If you live in one of these countries, in rented accomodation, there's not much you can do about this.

And yet, most electronics are fine. It seems like MacBooks are some of the worst though, giving you shocks and crackling audio.

No grounding on Mac adapters by default, they’re only 2-pin. The 3-pin is available separately.

Oh so this is why I feel a slight tingling every time I touch my Mac while it's charging! I was looking for this info for quite some time, thanks

Looking at the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit, I'm guessing the only places where the Mac adapters do come grounded by default are countries that use the UK plug (BS 1363) [1], at least for plugs shipped after 2010 [2]:

https://www.apple.com/us/shop/product/MD837AM/A/apple-world-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets:_Br...

[2] https://support.apple.com/three-prong-ac-wall-plug-adapter

That sounds like a QC issue. Have you sent it in for repairs?

Intel MBPs are notorious for this longstanding issue. You can get multiple hardware swaps from Apple and will probably find no improvement.

My layman understanding is that it stems from an issue in voltage management, both on the power rail itself and on the software side.

Certain types of CPU load trigger heavy crackling and popping in the speakers. Having the iOS simulator open makes it particularly egregious in my case.

Add to this that the two prong power bricks mean the chassis grounds through your hands in (worse in low humidity), and in the right building it's a lot of worrying symptoms all at once.

The only time I've ever had the problem, across Intel and M1 Pro Macs, is with the iOS Simulator open, so I assumed it was an OS mixing bug related to some magic the simulator does

Is this post part of a longer one? Because after reading it I still don't understand a thing.

Did they mean it's done in software (i.e. not hardware)?

It’s a mix of hardware and software. Hardware monitoring and software control, if I understand things correctly.

Software, surprisingly: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type...

I'm aware of hardware solutions that do the same thing.

Isn't it for Linux? I thought Macs use MacOS.

Again I feel like I'm reading something out of context.

Some people like to run Linux on their Apple hardware because they like the quality of the hardware but don't like Apple's software decisions.

I get that, but I don't get why this is "[a] reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most". Because Macs' speakers sound great even in MacOS.

So it's about control, the preference of reigning in Hell to serving in Heaven.

I think the context that you're missing is that the author of the post is one of the main developers for the Asahi Linux project that is porting Linux to the Apple M1/M2 family of Macs. They're trying to implement for Linux software support for all the Mac hardware capabilities that macOS already supports. Since the speaker safety model is apparently done in software under macOS, an equivalent needs to be reverse engineered and implemented for Linux in order for Linux to be able to use the speaker hardware as effectively as macOS does.

Thank you. Now I understand.

I wonder if malware could bypass the speaker safety daemon and potentially damage hardware or even start a fire? Looks like Apple is relying too much on TrustZone and Secure Boot to prevent physical hardware damage?

Also, Apple can now say that jailbreaking the devices could present a physical safety issue. So one more reason for making jailbreaking illegal?

There are and always have been lots of ways for malware to damage hardware.

"Modification can lead to danger." has been an excuse used against end-user modification for as long as the concept of legal liability has existed.

It's why most things have "warranty void if removed" stickers and warnings against messing around all over the place. Once anything is intentionally moved out of spec, the manufacturer wants nothing to do with it (and rightfully so).

1. The consequences of playing loud sounds with no protection are unlikely to involve open flames. You're just going to fry speaker coils, after which they won't sound good (or make much sound at all).

2. Apple doesn't implement TrustZone. They don't even implement EL3 (the exception level typically used for TZ) in their Arm core designs, just EL0 (userspace), EL1 (kernel), and EL2 (VM monitor). They appear to have completely rejected the concept of an above-the-OS supervisor responsible for security and other system maintenance tasks, which is the idea behind things like TrustZone and Intel's insane System Management Mode.

3. One of the fairly novel things about Apple's Arm Macs is their secure boot infrastructure. Although it's clearly derived from iOS secure boot, it has been greatly extended, in part because (contrary to what you assume) Apple doesn't believe Macs should have to be jailbroken when users want to run something not signed by Apple. See this for more details than you probably require:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/startup-disk-securi...

So, no jailbreak is required to boot Asahi Linux, or any other unsigned OS. Note that while Apple's documentation refers to booting an unsigned "XNU kernel" (XNU being the macOS kernel), the binary doesn't actually have to be XNU. In Asahi's case, it's a bootloader which loads another bootloader which loads the Linux kernel. (IIRC - I might have that chain a bit wrong.)

Also, if you want to take the time to read through all of that link, you'll find Apple did put a lot of thought into making it possible to bypass while simultaneously keeping it quite robust against malware. Barring truly horrific implementation flaws, it should be impossible to remotely automate the bypass, and the procedure is designed to provide some level of warning to victims of social engineering. And, it's a per-OS preference, so you don't have to reduce the security of your macOS install at all if you just want to play around with Asahi on a different partition.

Even more interesting - the low-security "unsigned" boot path is technically still signed, in a very useful way. Attesting that you'd like to boot an unsigned "XNU kernel" stores the "XNU" binary's cryptographic signature in Apple's Secure Enclave. Every time you boot it, its signature is checked to make sure it hasn't been modified since you authorized it. Which means... if that binary is a loader which does its own cryptographic signature check on the next stage loader, which does its own check on the next stage (or Linux kernel etc), you've built your own secure boot chain on top of Apple's, without having to ask Apple to sign anything. Pretty cool.

My Mac speakers sound like shit because running a loud filter sweep in VCV Rack will break them and make them sound buzzy forever.

That sounds like something a warranty repair should cover.

It's so frustrating even pursuing that with Apple for these very common issues. They'll gaslight you with the friendliest of words and nicest of smiles until you just give up and bugger off for good.

On the contrary, in my experience the Genius bar has a test device that does a sound sweep and any failure at all they hand you a replacement on the spot.

This happened on my late 2013 MBP. I left some stupid YT video playing for hours and I think the DSP engine finally tripped and fell at some point.

The idea of feedback-based userspace software thermal management like this seems suboptimal to me — the failure modes are nasty. (By feedback-based, I mean using V/I sense from the amp.)

The goal is to prevent the voice coil from overheating, ever. So some kind of calculation runs at some interval t, and it needs to ensure that, over the upcoming time t, the input to the amp can’t possibly overheat the coil, and of course it can’t use V/I sense data to do understand the upcoming heat input.

So, at best, one estimates the coil temperature and comes up with an upper bound on how much heat can be added over time t (either based on worst-case music, e.g. a 0dBFS square wave or based on the actual samples), and either allows the next group of samples to be sent to the amp or not.

But this is all a tradeoff with real-time performance and battery life. You want t to be long to minimize performance impact and power consumption, especially if user code is involved. But you want t to be short to maximize the ability to play loud music, especially if you aren’t looking at the actual upcoming waveform.

And you don’t want your speakers to burn out of you are doing something CPU intensive and your userspace daemon doesn’t schedule.

To me, this all suggests that an in-kernel solution could work a lot better. The kernel is involved in sending samples to the hardware anyway — it has the opportunity to look at those samples right then, calculate the integrated power (could be as simple as the sum of the squares or even just a constant!), and decide whether it’s safe. And fetch the V/I sense data to figure out the status, and reduce the volume if it fails. And if the kernel code pushing samples to hardware stops running for whatever reason, the sound is inherently muted as long as the hardware isn’t configured to loop '90’s broken CD style.

There's no distinction between "user" and "kernel" that would mean kernel code gets scheduled more reliably than realtime userland threads. Or even that it necessarily has better access to the audio hardware.

If it's really really important then you'd want to move it to a custom core on the SoC of course, but that'd make a Linux port harder.

> There's no distinction between "user" and "kernel" that would mean kernel code gets scheduled more reliably than realtime userland threads.

The distinction is that the kernel submits buffers to hardware, so it can do safety-related checks synchronously. If it doesn’t get scheduled, nothing plays, and the tweeters don’t burn out.

This can be done in userspace, too. Something in the kernel (ALSA? A driver?) could call into what would be, in effect, a userspace audio codec driver. That userspace driver would do its safety checks and then send the buffer off to the codec for playback.

It’s a bit sad that x86’s abysmal context switching performance has helped nerf microkernel and userspace driver development for years. Fortunately we’re talking about ARM64 here. (On modern systems, the tens of thousands of cycles x86 spends doing nothing useful when context switching or handling interrupts don’t matter as much as they might have when CPUs we’re slower.)

I wonder how much energy/CPU all this uses compared to not monitoring and compressing the sound channels per speaker. It seems like “don’t run the daemon and let it go to -14db” is a valid option if it’s problematic though. I don’t really listen to music, I’m just looking forward to terminal dings and conference calls without headphones so will lean towards battery life.

I've noticed that my M1 MBP provides a seemingly implausible degree of stereo width (the left and right channel sound as if they are at a physically more extreme angle relative to your head than they actually are) but only if you are in the right place relative to the laptop. Also, if you play a pure R tone, you will hear it in the L speaker (wlog). This leads me to suspect they are doing some phasing tricks to increase the perception of stereo (again, assuming you're in the right place relative to the laptop).

I've given this 3 reads and I still don't understand what he wants to say and I'm producing music since 2001, not a professional level, but still :) Is it a software or a hardware trick by Apple? I'm totally confused :)

I've assumed that Macbook Pros sound great because Apple put decent speakers into it and the alu-body picks up resonances much better than plastic ones.

I was expecting to learn more about the hardware (planar magnetic speakers as far as I know). There's surprisingly little info on this.

The article gives an answer to "louder" question but not "better" one.

As far as I have understood the screen after the text, Mac speakers are not 1-way but at least 2-way (every channel contains a speaker for bass and a speaker for higher frequences). That is the answer about quality of sound, there are no speakers which can play both highs and lows in nice quality.

> during the dubstep parts of the song, the snares sound nice and crisp. At those points, the tweeters are probably putting out 2-4x the amount of power they could handle without melting - briefly. But then when the nasty clipped lead comes in, that overloads them a lot more and the safety daemon clamps down on the tweeter volume.

That's called compression.

Came here to say that. It's essential in every step of music production and playback, but mostly available to end users either on relatively expensive sound mixing stations in the entertainment industry or under ambiguous names, like "enchance sound" or "sound safety" for home usage.

Or it's just a limiter.

Limiter is merely a very fast brickwall compressor.

Tbf, there are varying levels in complexity, and it is near impossible to limit in a way that is foolproof without severly crippling volume.

I don’t know of any other compressors/limiters that are monitoring temperature sensors connected to each driver and modifying the parameters of the compressor and amplifier in real-time based on audio signal level and carefully calibrated driver amplification and temp vs time.

All in a way that (to the casual listener) isn’t noticed other than “Wow this sounds really good for laptop speakers”.

A picture is worth a thousands words and seeing temperature in anything having to do with compression should jump out any anyone familiar with these concepts as something novel/interesting.

More here:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898

Well, it is an original implementation, but you have to admit, it sounds pretty similar to optical compressor, just with temperature sensors instead of photocells.

I'm definitely not trying to argue the validity of the patent, just saying that if you're trying to argue against the (beyond broken) patent system there are far better egregious examples of completely ridiculous patents that have been granted.

Oh, please don't get me wrong — I'm in awe of this system and definitely think it's worth the patent! I just pointing out that it is essentially the same overall principle, but it doesn't make it any less awesome.

Kinda off-topic: I remember reading that Apple laptops from 2021(?) onwards got a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) upgrade, making their DAC a pretty decent option with which you can avoid buying an external one.

Anyone knows how much truth there is to the above? I'm sure the answer is more nuanced than that and depend on various factors.

Amp, not DAC.

The DAC was always good. Audiophile DACs are scams and are worse quality than the $9 official iPhone headphone adapter, and probably had smaller QC budgets than it does.

The amp can make a real difference because they don't always support high-impedance headphones.

Dell bundles Waves MaxxAudio Pro with its laptops and apart from cheesy stereo widening it does the job of boosting bass and making the sound louder.

Theoretically it's possible to replicate it using Windows filter drivers. It's something I would like to do - some multi-band compressor is what's probably needed.

281 Comments and no one has yet touch on what I thought was the more important topic;

>Oh yay, HN found my post. I don't do HN any more, but to answer some of the comments there:

We now have fewer expert on HN and HN is fast becoming another Reddit.

I keep trying out Android phones and Windows laptops but the hardware are always inferior to Apple products. The competition has caught up and even surpassed Apple in Software but Apple has a big lead in chips, speakers, build quality.

Curious to know, which competition caught up Apple on software?

I think it's more that Apple has dropped down to normal reliability levels. With Apple's focus on shipping a new OS every year no matter what, they have started shipping broken features by default, and you just have to hope they get around to fix the bugs next year.

Mountain Lion please, 3 years in a row.

My new battle is that Apple Mail search just stops working. Quitting and reopening doesn’t do anything. When it works, it’s almost like crafting the ultimate regex at times.

Man I switched from Windows and Android to all Apple recently and it’s a pretty good improvements overall. Competition isn’t caught up, they’re falling behind.

One thing though, software quality has been falling down a lot, including Apple’s

Only in laptop speakers do I think Apple is the very best. I'm sure their audio company acquisition helped them with that, I don't think any other laptop manufacturers have gone out of their way to buy audio companies just for their laptops. Apple's trackpad is also pretty good, but I prefer Lenovo's myself.

Better hardware exists in every range (cheaper, faster, less power hungry), but Apple manages to put a lot of good stuff together. You can beat the M2 in CPU performance for less money but your battery won't last as long, you can beat the screen quality if you pay extra for the better screen, you can buy a usable GPU with your laptop if you want to play games but don't get the machine learning boost, there are so many deliberations to be made.

Yeah, shopping for non-Apple laptops is basically a big game of “choose your caveats”. That’s fine if you only need one particular quality of the laptop in question to be good, but I think most people are best served by well-roundedness.

Your chances at getting something somewhat well rounded improve if you get up into MacBook price ranges, but even in that range there are a lot of machines with weirdly lackluster aspects.

Laptop manufacturers are absolutely terrible in this aspect. They flood the market with confusing models so they can push expensive, overpriced models around and keep minimal stock so sales are often at full price.

If you need a good laptop, you need to look towards the professional line. Not too professional ("workstation" laptops) but also not too amateurish (the cheaper laptops seemingly aimed at small business).

Thinkpad and similar product lines often deliver excellent value, especially in bulk, as long as you don't go for their bottom-of-the-barrel configurations.

Curious what beats the M2 CPU for a lower price?

Many Intel laptops beat the M2 in pure CPU performance for several hundred euros less, in some models for almost half the price. The i7 12650H drains your battery much faster (and hotter) but beats the M2 in most real world applications. You also get other benefits (like easily upgradeable and cheaper RAM) for heavy workloads that make the price difference even greater.

Sadly, AMD has fallen behind Intel again, but their chips often pose just as good a performance-per-euro advantage.

€700 Beelink gtr6 (latest ryzen) NUC/mini-pc beats my m1 pro

Most laptop speakers can be significantly improved by applying a calibration profile using a program like Fxsound. Took mine from "godawful" to simply mediocre.

I’m always amazed how big the soundstage is on a MacBook Air. Sometimes in certain content I hear things coming from left and right of me, as if it’s surround sound.

IDK, it pales in comparison to any decent monitor speaker. Even the cheapest.

Laptops unfortunately always sounds "from inside a cardboard box".

I think your experience might be outdated. My M1 Mac's screen broke recently and I'm forced to use it with the lid closed and an external screen until I get a replacement. I'm using the cheapest external screen I can get because I don't like using external screens and am just bridging the gap until I get a new laptop. The monitor speakers are absolutely horrible, frankly I don't understand why they even added them. If is some cheap BenQ, not sure the exact model. The Mac speakers on the other hand sound good even with the lid closed! They sound miles and miles better than the external screen speakers to the point where I use them over the screen ones.

Bought an M1 for my SO two years ago. You can tell she's playing sound through it from another room, even the TV built-in speakers sound better. I am not dissing Apple devices in particular, but rather all laptops. With speakers so small, there's only that much one can do.

But then again, criticizing Apple hardware is a downvote bonanza every time, because Apple users need to feel like a particular demographic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Perhaps you're being downvoted because saying "tiny laptop speakers worse than big, expensive, dedicated studio monitor speakers" doesn't add anything to the discussion?

Any 14"+ Apple laptop since 2019 sounds much better than any other laptop that's ever been in the market. The 2019 15" and all 16" models even more so.

They're so good that before covid we stopped using the Jabras at the office for confs and started using the laptops.

They're good enough for lightweight music playing and even watching some TV.

No, they don't compare to monitor speakers. No, they don't compare to my 7.1.4 surround system. No, they don't compare to any decent room-sized stereo or surround setup. They are still pretty great.

>They're good enough for lightweight music playing and even watching some TV.

This is such a low bar.

I have a 2019 16" MBP. The speakers are good for a laptop. That's it. I'm connecting the headphones or external speakers for any listening requirement. A $30 pair of Logitechs destroys the built-in speakers.

>No, they don't compare to my 7.1.4 surround system.

I'm having trouble reconciling the number of people in the thread who will do things like implement an entire Atmos home theatre setup (which is awesome, but in a lot of ways excessive), and yet are saying "MBP speakers are all you need!"

I'm trying to understand which of these is true:

- You can't interpret text; or

- You just don't like anyone who has anything good to say about Apple or their products; or

- You're just not very smart at all.

> This is such a low bar.

Low bar for what?

> The speakers are good for a laptop.

We're talking about laptops. That's the whole point!

> I'm having trouble reconciling the number of people in the thread who will do things like (...) and yet are saying "MBP speakers are all you need!"

Who's doing that?

M1 air, 13, 14 or 16 inch?

Studio monitor speaker (speaker for monitoring what you're creating, eg https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-studio-monitors-and...), not speaker-in-a-monitor

Oooooh, whoosh. Sorry! Yeah in that comparison of course laptop speakers pale in comparison. My girlfriend has a home studio and I wouldn't dream of comparing the sound of her monitors to my laptop speakers. But I wouldn't expect them to be comparable. In the context of the post talking about laptop speakers I think you're better off using the built in M1 speakers over almost any other kind of a built in speakers like a TV or external monitor speaker or a cheap set of external speakers not meant for audio production.

There is a difference between "monitor speaker" and "speaker built-into the monitor". The parent might have had the former in mind.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_monitor:

Among audio engineers, the term monitor implies that the speaker is designed to produce relatively flat (linear) phase and frequency responses.

Yep I misunderstood their comment completely. I think you're right and that's what they had in mind. In which case they're right but I think are making a comparison that is not exactly useful.

I disagree. The new 16" Macbook Pro design introduced in 2021 has fantastic speakers. They sound extremely good, and I'm not sure I would hear the difference to my 3.5" studio monitors in a blind test (assuming you volume match them).

I don't know how they are doing it, but listening to those speakers seems unreal. I opened the Macbook to look at them, the speakers look pretty big and they seem to have a long resonance channel, and I think they are glued to the aluminium chassis which appears sturdier than any previous Mac I've opened.

They are optimized to sound best when you are sitting in front of your laptop, and the volume is of course limited, but there is nothing "cardboard box" like about the new Macbook Pro's speakers.

> I'm not sure I would hear the difference to my 3.5" studio monitors in a blind test (assuming you volume match them).

I promise I could tell the difference if you are feeding the same signal into both and it features anything < 100hz.

The MBP speakers are nearly impossibly good, but they are not and never will be a match for dedicated studio monitors, pro audio, home theater, or even DIY contraptions. There are fundamental physical limits to how far this suspension of disbelief can be taken. We are pretty much at the limits of this trickery right now.

> I disagree. The new 16" Macbook Pro design introduced in 2021 has fantastic speakers. They sound extremely good, and I'm not sure I would hear the difference to my 3.5" studio monitors in a blind test (assuming you volume match them).

That's rather hyperbolic. I think superlatives such as "fantastic" and "extremely good" should be reserved for stuff that's truly exceptional. I have a 14 inch M1 MBP and yes, the speakers are surprisingly good for what they are, but comparing them to monitors tells me your love for this product is clouding your judgement. Or that your hearing isn't all that great.

If you look at my post history you'll find comments complaining about the shitty webcam and the poor software quality. I just happen to think the speakers are one of the best parts of this machine, and when someone compares them to a "cardboard box" I felt like hyperbole was warranted.

I'm not sure if the 14" sounds the same, I've never heard it.

Anyway, these speakers are the first laptop speakers where I don't hear any obvious distortions. I haven't done any listening tests, but subjectively these speakers feel closer to monitors (at low volume) than to other laptop speakers.

And they have slower chips and smaller screens than deaktops, and lack ergonomics keyboards. Useless products.

Well, yeah, and a bicycle goes slower than a sedan and you have to pedal it constantly to keep it going.

Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work.

Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else.

The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing over Macs.

The speakers are amazing on my M1. I'm constantly surprised how beefy bass and clean sound they can produce. Don't recall them being so great on my previous MacBooks though.

I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used.

I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.

Yeah, ok. I presume that by your standard anything less than FLAC on a Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus is unworthy your ears but for us mere mortals the MacBook M1 speakers sound amazing for music as well. It's a massive improvement compared to any other laptop speakers I've heard.

Different people are going to have very, very different standards for what sounds good in speakers.

For me, the MacBook Pro speakers sound great. My HomePod mini sounds fantastic. Because a) they're literally the best speakers I have ever owned, and b) I have never made Getting The Very Best Sound a priority; it just doesn't matter that much to me. Most of the time, I listen on AirPods.

For other people, music and high-quality sound are more of a way of life. They probably own speakers that cost high three figures (or more) individually. They are more likely to find the MBP speakers to be subpar. I'm guessing you fall into this category. And that's fine: it's just a question of different priorities.

The important thing, for people on either side of that fuzzy line, is to recognize that the other people exist, and in the latter case to recognize that the former group is by far the larger one, and most people in it haven't really heard what day-to-day audio is like from really high-end speakers.

I am going to be less generous and suggest that some people just want to hate on macs for the sake of hating on macs. Sticking it to the “man”.

I’m a bit obsessed with audio.. and I never expect my laptop speakers to match the quality of my fancy headphone setup that probably nets for about $4K.

They are no high-end speaker, but compared to any other laptop speaker I have heard they are amazing.

They’re “louder and better״ for techno fans who like the sssssst ssssssst ssssssst.

Meta comment: the UI of mastodon is really bad.

Can't speak of other elements, but the color combination is definitely burning my eyes.

I wouldn't say it's bad, it looks above average for an open source project but definitely could use some improvements. What I hate about it is that it's not plain-looking (like HN, which has its own charm!) or very polished (like twitter, instagram, yooutube)

The speakers of the mac mini sounds absolutely horrendous!

Ok, buggy software might explain why my M1 speakers, and the motherboard had to be replaced within a year?

Or just a case of bad hardware from the factory. QC is run by humans and sometimes out of spec (aka busted) hardware makes it out of the factory. Was your replacement covered by Apple care?

Yeah it was still under warrantee, but it's just a hassle, because the solution was to replace the board + speakers. Which means restoring a backup and a week without my main machine. Just weird they had to change that, as it just sounded as if the speakers were blown up

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