This is still the strongest apple advantage: design, engineering and build quality.<p>Recently I wanted to buy a second notebook so I could leave my MBPro at home in trips where I didn't want to work, but still had a machine that run linux and windows for some quick idea or even some light gaming.<p>Decided for a Samsung Galaxy Book Pro. Expensive machine, but slightly cheaper than a MacBook Air. good i7 11gen processor, excellent battery life, very light but with surprisingly good thermals, 1tb SSD, but unfortunately no option to have it with more than 16GB RAM.<p>Anyway, was very satisfied with it, and it was so light that I was even booting it with linux and doing some programming on it.<p>But, one day I just opened the lid by the sides, heard a crack, and the gorgeous OLED screen had cracked.<p>Of course I didnt abuse it, I just opened it, without excessive force or speed. But the screen is very fragile, the lid is paper thin, but not rigid enough, it seems, to avoid this problem.<p>And of course, Samsung says it was my fault, and I will have to pay the fix.<p>And yes, I know people have plenty of complaints about apple, but I never had encountered such an obvious problem with an Apple product. Have they not stress-tested this stuff?
Does anyone have a canonical URL to the previous month's scan of the LEGO mini-figure? I didn't see any navigation on the site unless there's a magic spot I missed or am inadvertently adblocking: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253441" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253441</a><p>This month's entry comes off way too much like advertising for my taste, with the flowery language like "magic features" instead of just "features", or the seemingly-unnecessary sales statistics in lieu of a technical description of the Airpods Pro: "In 2020, Apple sold 110,000,000 AirPod products. Talk about mass manufacturing."<p>Maybe it's just an unconscious tic when talking about Apple products. Even I have a hard time not saying "Boom" when showing off something cool :) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw</a>
I think the AirPods Pro were a regression from the OG AirPods for four reasons:<p>- Idle life took a huge dive from the originals. My OGs haven't been charged in something like six months, and the case is still at something like 20%. Meanwhile, the case holding the APPs would die in less than a week and the buds inside of them a week after that.<p>My wife's APPs have been lost for a while because of this.<p>- Noise cancellation performs worse than the original firmware. They have actually been outclassed by other offerings, such as the Sony WF1000XM4.<p>- The buds themselves have a design flaw wherein earwax will accumulate in its inner grille severely enough to significantly compromise bass response. There's a thread in MacRumors that's something like 36 pages long acknowledging this. Apple quietly fixed this in version 2 of the APPs (with the MagSafe case).<p>- The mic isn't as good. The original APs performed extremely well in wind and loud surroundings. I think the downward beam-forming mics were a big part of this. The mic on the APPs perform worse in these scenarios IMO.<p>I'm glad that Apple went back to beam-forming mics.<p>Regardless, I'm thankful for Apple for lighting up the true wireless headphone industry. The APs were a dream come true when they came out; nothing before it compared (and I had $600 custom IEMs that were waterproof and had a control scheme controlled by head nods). The APPs accelerated the creation of noise cancelling true wireless. I'm excited for the next iteration of these products.
This was SUPER interesting to see! I actually (for once) signed up for their next newsletter/scan. It asked me what they should scan next and I suggested cochlear implant processors. It'd be pretty cool to see!<p>The tech on those processors are pretty insane - and remember, Apple did partner up with Cochlear for the Nucleus 7 I believe for wireless streaming from the processor to an iPhone.
Amazing scans, the packaging of components internally is amazing.<p>Interesting how they switched from prox-based in-ear detection to capacitive skin contact sensor in the latest airpods.
Some small but important details about the product architecture that's changed over time somewhat:<p>- The antenna is sticking out of the ear, while the densest components are deeper in the ear, making them more stable. Now the battery is in the ear and PCB is out of the ear.<p>- They've added large external mesh over the world-facing mic to reduce windnoise during phone calls. This creates a sort of turbulence that prevents acoustic howling. The air is channeled into a secondary chamber before reaching the mic.<p>- The airpods had two Infrared Detectors to prevent being spoofed when resting on the table.<p>- the cases moved from a resistive magnetic hinge to an over-center spring hinge, that's why the newer cases feel less satisfying and fidgety.
From a Google search[0], it looks like they've put two LEGO sets under the scanner before, but I can't find them. It would have been cool to see an archive...<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ascanofthemonth.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ascanofthemonth.com</a>
I'm curious how the newest airpods compare to the pros when it comes to bass. I had first gen airpods, then I bought a set of pros, but the bass was so weak I thought they had to be broken. Turns out it's just an artifact of how they were designed. Some people are okay, but a <i>lot</i> of people feel the same way I do. I ended up returning them and now I'd like to know if the g3 airpods are comparable to the pros, or comparable to the g1/g2 airpods.
I imagine it may be hard and they don't have incentives to "fix it", but I think the single most important disadvantage of airpods is the battery life... no matter how long it lasts, there's no way to replace it, so they became essentially discardable items. [1]?<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence</a>
Super cool scans and captions! I wonder if there were any substantial internal changes between the first and second generation AirPods (besides changing the chip). The article unfortunately does not include a scan of the 2nd generation.
Not an audio expert, but I really wonder why they need a microphone for their adaptive EQ. I understand home speakers/theatre systems need to compensate for a room's shape and contents, but do human ear canals vary that much to need a mic?<p>I think it's pretty neat how sophisticated this adaptive EQ system is, but tbh, I haven't noticed much difference between this mic system and the "dumb" adaptive EQ that companies like bose/ikea etc do (Basically turn up base at low volumes, down at high volume to not clip).<p>Very cool stuff!
I don't really care about AirPods, but that webpage fucking <i>rocked</i>. Rotating the scans as I scroll? Nice. I'd look at scans of anything on that website.
Does anyone know who is behind this site? I couldn't find anything poking around, and for such a cool website to (in my mind) blow up so suddenly is very surprising, with very cool content as well. I'd be interested in following anyone who is doing this.
My self, my best friend, and an apple employee I know, all bought the new Airpods 3rd gen and all returned them. Of course that's just my small circle but 3 for 3. I guess any friend that bought them and was happy with them probably didn't say anything. The 3 of us that did have issues went back to 2nd gen.<p>For me, I hate pinch to control, I love tap to control. Tapping takes 1 free finger. Pinching takes 2. Another friend said they wouldn't stay in her ears, kept falling out. The 3rd friend just said they didn't fit as well. Didn't go into details. Just returned them.
<i>but we wonder if voice pickup would have been better with the microphones pointed out of the bottom of the stems.</i><p>Wonder no more, it would not. This arrangement (aka beamforming array) is common for improved noise reduction.<p><i>The downward-facing microphone has made its return [...] could the downward-facing mic deliver better audio quality?</i><p>The 3rd gen AirPods have no active noise canceling, hence one mic arrangement. So, nope.
Absolutely love the AirPods family of devices I have own every single one of them but sadly the AirPods Pro are not compatible with me because of the tips which hurt my ears.<p>Currently using the new Gen 3 and they are amazing! I do have a full life inside Apple ecosystem besides my Gaming Rig and Gaming Laptop.
So do airpods actually sound better than the standard wired headphones? If they don't, this is a lot of fancy engineering for some pretty bad headphones. Maybe they just didn't fit my ears or something, but I've always hated them.
Sounds like a weird PR stunt. I'm really curious who is behind those CT scans, is it a CT manufacturer, a metrology lab or a 3d viz software company?
My former coworker worked on airpods. Most of RnD for them was made in Apple's Shenzhen RnD centre which existence Apple for long time tried to hide.
This is such cool content but the way it's presented is so fucking frustrating to me. I wish the narrative wasn't so intrinsically tied to the actual data. I hate that I can't blow up and rotate the models side by side, the whole thing feels so shallow. Now to be clear in an absolute sense this is a good article, this is cool content and the scrolling as something other than scrolling works better than in most instances.<p>My criticism is that the format does a disservice to the data, it's not the best way to present something this cool.