Egregoros

Man I'm really excited for the Macbook Neo and for once it feels like waiting a week for the release is actually going to be rough. Haven't been this excited about an Apple announcement since they first announced they were going ARM.

Just like how apple going ARM hopefully meant others were going to copy them and make more ARM computers (although so far laptop manufacturers and windows have utterly failed on that front), I hope the Macbook Neo is going to force budget laptops to actually be decent.

I want a world where finding a cheaper laptop where productivity basics like the screen and keyboard aren't horrible isn't difficult anymore.

For example, over in x86 land, most laptops around $600 will still ship with cruddy 16:9, 1080p 15.6" screens which have at best mediocre colors and brightness, if you want anything better have fun deal hunting for ages or looking at much older models. Most won't stick a decent 16:10 display in a laptop until the $1000-ish mark, because then they have to compete with Apple.

It would be a dream come true if the Neo forces competition so your typical stutent-priced Lenovo laptop is also expected to have a nice and bright 1440p screen, aluminium build and a keyboard that doesn't suck ass.

God damn. 8GB on the Macbook Neo is going to be ROUGH if it's anything like my 2019 16" Macbook Pro.

On Sequoia my 2019 MBP used about 6GB when idle on the desktop. However after updating to Tahoe it uses ~8GB just chilling on the desktop, ~10GB once I open safari.

And my MPB has a dedicated AMD GPU, so it doesn't even need to use any of the RAM as VRAM, the Neo does use shared memory.

Unless the copy of Tahoe that ships on the Neo is tweaked in some way, that thing is going to have like 25% of its memory pool in swap while doing literally nothing.

Do Android devices actually transmit differing audio over Bluetooth?

I'm confused because I have a OnePlus Pad 3 and a Fairphone 5, both running e/OS/. But for whatever reason when I connect them to my speakers over bluetooth, both using regular old SBC and volume set to 100% on device (without adjusting speaker volume) somehow the sound from my Pad 3 sounds darker and contains more bass, while my Fairphone sounds brighter and less bassy.

Like wtf, I always assumed that unless your Android ROM tries to do some crappy Dolby or Virtual "Surround" shenanigans it'd just take the same bits of PCM, compress them to SBC and ship them out over bluetooth. Why does it sound different???

At first I thought I was going mad and this had to be some weird placebo-ish thing. But no. But when I leave the speakers are untouched and test both client devices with the same audio player (Finamp), same Android ROM, same Bluetooth codec and same audio file, for whatever reason they sound different. The only variable is the hardware, which shouldn't really matter when you never do a digital to analogue conversion.

Are there some real cursed hardware shenanigans going on here? Is there a difference in how the two SoCs compress bluetooth? Or is the audio -> SBC conversion done by some proprietary firmware blob and one of them contains some fucked hard-coded EQ?

I feel like I'm going mad, taking a lossless audio file, then playing it with the same app, and compressing it to the same codec using the same UI and shipping it off over the same wireless protocol should in theory yield the same result, no? Everything is (supposedly) happening digitally in software.

@ignaloidas Oh well, I guess I didn't notice the "like" well enough.

Also while googling around for details about Android and Bluetooth Profiles I found out there are three more codecs I personally didn't know about either:

- SSC (Samsung Scalable Codec, apparently only used between Samsung phones and their earbuds???)
- LHDC (Basically LDAC but someone decided to reinvent it, it seems)
- LC3 (Lower complexity codec intended for BLE devices. Probably intended for stuff like transmitting microphone input from a TV remote to TVs with a voice assistant or similar)

The filter thing seems like a reasonable guess.