Apple juggernaut cranks out big, big numbers In addition to updating its laptop line; providing more details about its July release of the next OS X, Mountain Lion ($19.99); and unveiling the Google-goading iOS 6, set for a fall debut, Apple also tossed around some interesting – and some very, very big – numbers on Monday morning during the keynote to its Worldwide …
I still find the assertion that it's impossible to program with a two-year old GPU laughable (though possibly my memory is at fault; did they have programming before 2010?) but it seems Apple have sided with the critics for once. The 'new' text has been removed from the Mac Pro on the official storefront.
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> fragile lump of glass and electronics
No, no, no, no. It's a 'beautifully engineered' lump of glass and electronics that is almost certainly wrapped in some ugly case to protect it and an 'amazing' retina display covered with a horrible half-peeled-off screen protector.
Isn't the cost more like 500 quid as well?
because the activation itself generates so much money, much more than apps or messages or any of the other stats, right?
activations just show a phone has been enabled, that's half the story. if there's 900,000 activations, but 1,000,000 old phone go silent every day, that's a totally different statistic.
But knowing the number of people that are using a platform to purchase apps and use features, that's a statistic that a developer wants to know. it's useless to a dev if 900,000 phones are activated but none of them download an app, or just re-download it because they purchased it for their old phone.
how many of those activations are actually a reinstall of the OS and not a new user?
we'll never know.
anyway, techies still dont get it. turnover = vanity, profit = sanity. Market share doesnt actaully really matter if you are making most of the money
A few reasons one being gamut or in layman's terms the range of colours that can be represented by a 'pixel' on paper is far greater than a dot can represent on paper. The CMYK range has much smaller available colour space so even a 75 dpi image will look better when printing at 150 or even 300 dpi because the dots on the paper can be mixed to approximate the original colour better.
Another reason - which might be even more important - are the 5 MPixels the camera real or just blur pixels (my term!!) if you zoom at 100% and you just see loads a noise - the 5 MP are just theoretical.. as megapixels have been hijacked by marketing departments and are now a useless metric on the quality of an image that a device can produce.
nice term - yes we should adopt this for all cams in the consumer space ...100 MegaBlurxels = about 5 MP in the pro space!!! (as for sounding like cat vomit being sucked up in vacuum - that sums up what I feel about such photos hence quite apt!!)
Can we have it added as an official elreg unit of measure?
It depends a lot on the camera that took the picture, and on the quality of the printer. Assuming a good printer, let's focus on the camera. Cameras use 4 photosite per final pixel (1 red, 1 blue, 2 green). The colour image is then reconstructed using more or less complex algorythms. In order to cram more pixels on a sensor you need to reduce their size. The amount of noise a photosite generates is pretty muc constant, but the amount of light (useful signal) it gets drastically decreases with the size. That is made worst by the 4-to-1 ration of photosites per pixel because in most arrangements the proportion of lost space between photosites increases when the size of the photosite decreases. So, with megapickles a major sale argument, manufacturers began cramming more and more pixels on fixed-size sensors, which leads to a huge increase in the noise, and generally crappy images. The old 5D Mk 1, a pro camera of its time, had a 1Mp sensor. You can print that on an A4 page and it will look beautiful (assuming you have a very good printer).
Then there is the issue of the lens: with megapickles _the_ major sale argument for consumer cameras, manufacturers started to not pay attention to other "detail" such as the glass you put in front of the sensor. That is actually more important for image quality than the sensor itself.
Another point: images will no doubt look good on these "retina" display, but as soon as pickles density becomes a sale argument the market will be flooded with cheap multi-Mp monitors that will look like absolute shit because the (much more important) gamut, contrast, brightness etc will be complitely ignored. Then your average 5Mp display will look worst than the printout from the 5Mp camera you are talking about.
To add briefly to those that have commented above on why a camera's 5 megapixels usually don't look very good; the Bayer filter used by 99.99% of cameras has an extremely low entropy and hence introduces significant aliasing. Almost every camera with a Bayer filter therefore performs lowpass filtering as part of the demosaicing process (the main exception being Leica, Leica owners generally being aware of the issues and able to do what they think is intelligent in software after the fact).
So cameras explicitly go out of their way to ensure the 5mp contains less information than it could, even if sensor size, quality of lens, etc, weren't problems.
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