Linked List: December 8, 2020

Tuesday, 8 December 2020

Honey, I Shrunk the AirPods Max Touch Pads 

Also speaking of Mark Gurman, here’s his and Debby Wu’s report for Bloomberg on Apple’s AirPods from 6 weeks ago:

Apple is still planning to announce high-end, noise-canceling over-ear headphones. The device has faced several development challenges over the past two years and has been delayed multiple times. The headphones were due to go into production weeks ago, but that was pushed back due to problems with the headband, a person familiar with the matter said. That part was deemed too tight in some testing.

The company initially wanted to include large touch pads on the sides of the headphones, but reduced the size of those panels.

Reduced them down to nothing, apparently.

Gurman on Apple’s 2021 M-Series Chip Plans 

Speaking of Gurman, I feel like Bloomberg buried the lede on his report this week on Apple’s plans for the next M-series chips, for higher-end MacBooks and Mac desktops. This was the last paragraph in his report, but to me the most interesting:

For later in 2021 or potentially 2022, Apple is working on pricier graphics upgrades with 64 and 128 dedicated cores aimed at its highest-end machines, the people said. Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel-powered hardware.

The other stuff was obvious. Of course they’ll just add more high-performance cores to the M-series chips for faster higher-end Macs. They don’t need to make the high-performance cores faster — the M1 Macs already have world-class workstation performance for single core tasks. They just need more of them for multi-core performance.

But the big unanswered question is what Apple has in store for graphics. My hunch has been that they’re getting ready to tell AMD to take a hike. (I’m not sure what Bloomberg is referencing regarding “current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD” — the last desktop Mac to ship with Nvidia graphics was the late 2013 iMac, and the last MacBook with Nvidia graphics was the mid-2014 15-inch MBP. Apple and Nvidia divorced five years ago.)

With CPUs, we’ve long been looking at the performance of Apple’s A-series iOS device chips and saying, “Hey, these look better than Intel’s x86 CPUs used in PCs.” Apple has shown, for years, that they can make not just great mobile CPUs, but great CPUs period. World-class PC graphics chips, though, would require muscles Apple hasn’t come close to flexing in public yet. 64- and 128-core GPUs would probably do it.

AI Chief John Giannandrea Takes Leadership of Project Titan 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:*

Apple Inc. has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company’s continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car.

The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea’s artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Previously, Field reported to Bob Mansfield, Apple’s former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mansfield has now fully retired from Apple, leading to Giannandrea taking over.

Mansfield is the Michael Corleone of Apple executives — they kept pulling him back in. What a run Mansfield had. The man is a legend inside Apple — well-liked and well-respected, with a remarkable string of accomplishments.

It seems clear, too, that the biggest hurdles in front of Titan are AI problems. Not sensors or hardware or OS/framework problems. Just pure AI. I’m not saying any of the other hardware or software stuff is easy or solved, just that I get the impression Apple knows they can do it. The AI stuff, though, those are unsolved hard problems.

But how can the division behind Siri — a product that gets confused about what you mean by “What time is it in London?” — make a car that safely drives around a parking lot, let alone roads? “This car is as smart as Siri” sounds like a threat, not a selling point.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true. Over two years ago and they’re still pretending they didn’t completely shit the bed on this story.

Apple Announces AirPods Max 

Announced today, shipping in a week:

  • $550. Helps make full-size HomePods seem not so expensive.
  • Space gray, silver, sky blue, green, and pink color options. Makes me wonder why regular AirPods and especially AirPods Pro only come in white.
  • Apple Watch-style digital crown for volume and playback control.
  • If you want to use them wired, you’ll need a Lightning to 3.5 mm headphone jack cable. Apple’s 1.2 meter cable costs $35 (but does come in both white and black); Amazon, unsurprisingly, sells a bunch of cheaper ones.
  • Update: Those cheaper cables probably won’t work. Even the Belkin Audio Cable With Lightning Connector that Apple itself sells now has a warning: “Note: This cable is not compatible with AirPods Max or Beats Solo Pro.” You need a bi-directional Lightning to 3.5 mm cable that can be used for both audio-in and audio-out — I’m not sure if any cable other than Apple’s does that.
  • Evans Hankey, VP of industrial design, narrates the product video — her first stint as narrator, unless I missed one.

Updates: System requirements:

AirPods Max require Apple devices running iOS 14.3 or later, iPadOS 14.3 or later, macOS Big Sur 11.1 or later, watchOS 7.2 or later, or tvOS 14.3 or later.

Seems like a good guess that these OS updates will all roll out by next week.

Estimated ship dates are tight, to say the least, if you’re thinking about buying these for someone as a holiday gift. The color ones — green, blue, and pink — aren’t shipping until February or March. As I type this, you can order silver for arrival next week (“December 15–17”) but if you get them engraved, that gets pushed back to December 31. Space gray — engraved or not — are pushed back to December 29–31 already. For a while earlier today, you could order engraved space gray ones with an arrival date sooner than un-engraved.

Notes from Jason Snell:

  • Replacement cushions are $69 […]
  • No claims about water resistance so maybe don’t exercise in these
  • 5 minutes charge nets 90 mins of use

Notes from Matthew Panzarino:

  • They do work with Find My
  • They do NOT support USB audio (only 3.5mm via optional cable)
  • They do not function without a charge passively.