HiWire

Weird Al - Nature Trail to Hell Blue Öyster Cult - Burnin' for You

MacBook Pro (the final announcement for the week) The M4 Max has up to 16 CPU cores (12 performance, 4 efficiency), 16 Neural Engine cores, and 40 GPU cores, 546GB/s memory bandwidth. Up to 128GB of unified memory and 8TB of storage. I guess the MacBook Air will be updated later... they are doubling the base M3 MacBook Air RAM to 16GB at the same price. The usual Apple hyperbole of insane performance and long battery life, at extreme prices. Your mileage may vary.

Apple just announced the updated Mac Mini. This is the first M4 Pro - up to 14 CPU cores (10 performance, 4 efficiency), 16 neural cores, and 20 GPU cores, 273GB/s memory bandwidth. It almost looks like a credible, tiny Mac Studio replacement - the new M4 Pro Mini can be equipped with up to 64GB of RAM and an 8TB SSD. In terms of I/O, the M4 Pro has Thunderbolt 5 ports as well as optional 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The only thing missing is Wi-Fi 7... for some reason, the Mini still has Wi-Fi 6E. I suspect native AV1 video encode is coming in a future Apple Silicon processor, but decode is sufficient for now, as the codec is not even mainstream yet. The base Mac Mini is a good value. I'm not sure why the M4 iMac is so limited. Perhaps they intend to sell a more powerful iMac with a larger display later.

Maybe. They just announced new M4 iMacs, too. Nothing much to report other than the elimination of USB-A ports and the possibility of a 32GB RAM upgrade and 2TB SSD. The M4 has up to 10 CPU cores (4 performance, 6 efficiency), 16 Neural Engine cores, and 10 GPU cores, 120GB/s memory bandwidth.

Omnipolar speakers from Schmidt Audio in Canada - the Ubiquitous v2.2:

Happy Birthday!

I underestimated the remaster's volume - I do think they turned it up, but there is no trace of clipping or distortion - Hearts got really loud in the end, as it should! And Brian Bromberg covers Earth, Wind and Fire's Shining Star on Wood II.

Yes - 90125 A perennial favorite... either my hearing is getting worse, better, or I've turned the volume up (long overdue haircut?)... it's more compelling than ever. The 2004 expanded and remastered CD.

John Denver sings Black Sabbath's War Pigs (but not really):

Happy Birthday!

What kind of electronics was the Utopia plugged into? Did you bring your own gear?

Happy Belated Birthday!

Allah-Las - Zuma 85

Jack of All Trades (2000) Bruce Campbell does it again! It's in a shorter format than The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (22-minute episodes), but brilliant, nevertheless. American secret agent Jack Stiles is sent to the fictional French-controlled island of Pulau-Pulau in the East Indies in 1801 by President Thomas Jefferson to stop Napoleon and various other threats to the United States.

Can't people just record with their smartphones?

Happy Birthday!

The Kills - Keep On Your Mean Side

I was going through the macOS 15 Sequoia (and iOS 18) reviews today. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/macos-15-sequoia-the-ars-technica-review/ Not a lot of interesting features, in my opinion. They seem to be catchup updates, enhancing usability, security, and fixing bugs. The promised AI features are late and they will be added to macOS later. OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) updated to 2.0.1 recently. They've detected problems running the new macOS with 2018 MacBook Air and 2008 Mac Pro/Xserve, but otherwise things look fine. People have been running macOS 15 betas on OCLP for a few months so far. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-15-sequoia-on-unsupported-macs-thread.2428654/ I'd recommend anyone with older Macs (pre-2018, generally) to hold off on upgrading to Sequoia for a few months at least, whether officially supported or not. People seem to say macOS 14 Sonoma works quite well on unsupported Macs with OCLP. Your mileage may vary. macOS 14 Sonoma and 13 Ventura (and iOS 17) also got some security updates today.

New pro Spectera (Wireless Multichannel Audio Systems) from Sennheiser - wideband, bidirectional:

Happy Birthday!

Bluetooth 6 was just announced. I checked the list of new features and most of them aren't particularly exciting for consumers, except the one where it is centimeter-accurate for distance estimation (useful for some gadgets).

Yes. There's nothing wrong with the new products, they're simply incremental updates to established phones, watches, and AirPods.

Shpongle - Are You Shpongled? Back to basics

They needed to save $13 billion to pay Ireland's back taxes. ☘️ Google is also on the hook for $8.25 billion in EU antitrust fines.

An eminently skippable series of product updates.