[kccqzy]

The following is actually the most surprising part to me.

> This is quite limiting, as it forces PipeWire to waste CPU cycles (and therefore battery life) on resampling audio streams that are not either 48 or 96 kHz.

So the Asahi team thinks that only supporting 48 or 96 kHz wastes battery life by forcing the software to resample audio streams. But why does Apple still do this? Presumably Apple has a very high commitment to save power and increase battery life.

[ryandrake]

Always possible that it's the standard commercial software company reason: They do know about it and have a P2 bug tracking it, but the team that maintains that code has 5000 other things to do, and it never gets fixed.

[jasomill]

More likely it’s that 48 kHz is a more sensible default, since the majority of non-music digital audio is sampled at 48 kHz, almost anyone who cares about potential audio artifacts introduced by resampling is going to be using an external DAC, and (from an Apple-centric viewpoint) almost anyone concerned about the energy consumption of music playback on their MacBook is going to listen to music on their iPhone instead.

[ryandrake]

Maybe this is a little pedantic, but we're not talking about a default among the many other available options supported by the chip. We're talking about 48 or 96 kHz being intentionally (or unintentionally) made the only allowed options.

So either someone said "we must disallow the other options" or they didn't and it's a bug.

[trueno]

do we ever get apple engineers rolling thru here or on mastodon? wish stuff like this wasn't such a black box behind the scenes.

i think the only time ive ever run into an apple engineer was on mastodon related to gptk it was interesting to see they actually are quite tuned into what is possible on these devices and what that could mean for gaming. despite being a developer toolkit to help studios get a read on the work needed to optimize a game for a metal port, they were expressing that they were well aware such tools showed a lot of promise for getting games going on mac. not much of a gamer myself, but thought it was interesting to see a slice into engineering there & that they weren't as hostile as HN would believe them to be and broadly aligned with many of us. id be mega curious what apple engineers think about asahi.

[Klonoar]

We’ve had a few over the years but it’s usually after they’ve left.

E.g, an AppKit engineer or two, or the primary dev behind Rosetta 2. Not so sure of any hardware-engineers tho.

[nicoburns]

> do we ever get apple engineers rolling thru here or on mastodon? wish stuff like this wasn't such a black box behind the scenes.

Very rarely. I believe because Apple has a culture of secrecy and contractually forbids employees from sharing details about their work in most circumstances (and actually enforces this).

[einsteinx2]

I used to work there and can confirm this. They beat it into you during training when you’re first hired that anything you say can become viral news or be attributed as an official statement from Apple and they are strict about enforcement.

There’s also extreme secrecy both between teams on different projects and even between teams within the same project just working on different parts of it. At least that was my experience.

I did enjoy my time there, but it was a very unique/strange development culture.

[trueno]

damn. that sucks.

[rasz]

Imagine LCD screen capable of emitting from IR to UV and people up in arms because laptop vendor software limits output to visible spectrum.

[yndoendo]

I would not agree with your analogy. [0] Turns out the movie industry actually uses infrasound in horror movies. [1] It might also explain why people think old buildings are haunted. [2]

If Apple only focuses on audible sounds, their devices lack the ability to maximize the thrill of horror movies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

[1] https://nightscapestories.com/the-art-of-sound-design-horror...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/27/spooky-feeli...

[rasz]

Tell me more about laptops and phones sporting 12 inch speakers, not that low frequencies are the problem here.

[ryandrake]

Come on, don't do that here. You can see in the thread I replied to there are practical benefits for supporting additional sampling rates.

[rasz]

Practical reasons vanished ~20 years ago, about the time Microsoft dropped hardware audio acceleration and switched to software audio mixing. Resampling is ear transparent and eats less than 1% of one slowest possible CPU core.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Likely because the only speakers Apple cares about are Airpods/Airpod max so they are free to only pick the 2 most common sample rates.

[LoganDark]

Presumably Apple can resample audio streams extremely cheaply.

[mort96]

I mean the algorithms for that are known, and PipeWire/PulseAudio implements them competently. But it still has to be done.

[bzzzt]

Just like the mouse that has to be polled 100 times per second or display that is composited from all window buffers at least 60 times per second. It might really be negligible in the grand scheme of things and not worth optimizing for.

[big-and-small]

You cant imagine how much strain fast-moving mouse cursor put on display server of almost any OS if there a lot of windows open simultaneously. Also non-standard cursor sizes / formats are still such a mess everywhere since even in 2026 there are semi-hardware and software cursors...