This seems like it might be Apple‘s standard thing of just promoting whatever their newest products are in all communications.

...which leads to users upgrading their devices

I mean, it's not a bad marketing strategy when most people who can afford an apple device already have 1+

Edit: per the bottom of the page...

> Apple Music Sing will be available on all compatible iPhone and iPad models as well as the new Apple TV 4K.

:/ maybe they do ML to process stuff on-device, per other comments' speculation, that justifies requiring the newer model?

In addition, the Apple TV is plugged in, it doesn't have to limit its power for battery reasons.

Using GPU's for ML is not very efficient on low-power devices. Having dedicated ML circuitry is the way to go.

So I wouldn't be surprised if it relies on a particular hardware chip that the older Apple TV simply doesn't have. That has definitely been the case for everything Apple has launched with regards to Spatial Audio.

Just curious: what in the article makes you think that?

Look at the list of what Apple Sing includes:

Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog.

Real-time lyrics: Users can sing along to their favorite songs with animated lyrics that dance to the rhythm of the vocals.

Background vocals: Vocal lines sung simultaneously can animate independently from the main vocals to make it easier for users to follow.

Duet view: Multiple vocalists show on opposite sides of the screen to make duets or multi-singer tracks easy to sing along to.

------

The part of the article where they state these things explicitly...

As a matter of fact, calling out "millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog" actually makes it seem like the adjustable vocals will only be available on certain songs that they've added support for.

My guess is that it's entirely dynamic. It's hard to imagine the complexity of doing batch processing to render each song in the library, and maintain that as new songs are uploaded, and update the renders for software improvements. Better to just do it realtime.

And since classical, instrumentals, esoteric ambient stuff, death metal, etc, will probably not be supported by the algorithms, I think the "millions" refers to those that can be processed in realtime.

> [...] an on-device machine learning algorithm that can process music in real time

Their latest apple TV includes the A15 which includes a 'neural engine' for ML, and this is also included in their latest iPhone / iPad, so that might be part of it.

I think this only requires pre-making two audio files per track, and simultaneously streaming these.

Real-time lyrics, Background vocals and Duet view are all nice features too, but the hardest part processing-wise is analysing how loud you sing into the microphone. It's just karaoke with a good UI.

That’s the understatement of the century. “this only requires […] simultaneously streaming these”

They are likely using a sophisticated ML version of what old karaoke machines did, and removing the vocals in real-time.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/06/apple-music-is-getting-a-n...

Wonder why they take this approach though, as it is clearly over-engineering (if I correctly understand that the goal is just to make vocals volume adjustable).

Depends what the other non-functional requirements were. i.e. if the NFRs were as follows:

* Cannot increase bandwidth / mobile data usage.

* Cannot impact music quality / bitrate.

* Has to work offline.

* Cannot increase on-device storage.

* Has to be responsive.

Then two audio streams might not work.

Another advantage of doing it on-device is that it doesn't actually change any of the backend architecture too. It might be a lot of change to a lot of systems for a feature which only adds a small amount of functionality - i.e. architecting your entire backend and streaming around seperating audio tracks might not be the right focus.

Since Apple is all about on-device processing with so many of its features, going back-and-forth to the data center doesn't seem to be its style these days.

That's more of a Google thing.

And no one can accuse Apple of telling its advertisers that you start your day with Funky Cold Medina.

Is that the actual reason though? My personal impression has been that it's a combination of reasons that benefit Apple. The increased user privacy being a nice bonus for users, but not the primary reason:

1. Producing phones powerful enough for on-device ML both justifies the high price point to the general public and is a good marketing point (along with increased user privacy)

2. Avoid backend infrastructure costs. Why spend extra money on servers, maintenance, and compliance when we can just offload the work to the devices themselves since they're capable?

3. Bonus: The unplanned obsolescence for new features like the one announced is also a side effect that benefits Apple.

I do not get the impression that Apple's primary focus is to benefit users and their privacy.

It makes it so you have to buy new devices sooner.

The privacy thing is a nice side-benefit and PR thing, but let's be realistic here.

EDIT: Just to remind everyone, we are literally in a thread about a new device feature that is trivial to do in the cloud, which Apple chooses to do on-device, which makes it only a feature for its newest generation of products...

If Apple wanted to support this for user-provided mp3s then on-device would make sense. It doesn't sound like they support that though.

It requires new screens and display controllers that can refresh at much lower rates, and stronger guarantees of burn in prevention.

Like sure, you could do it on an older screen but you’d burn through battery much quicker and potentially damage the device in the process.

This is true for Android devices as well.

I am getting fed up by the user hostile attitude of producers and providers, maybe I will just keep my money or spend elsewhere.

Weird kind of devotees.

Pushing users to upgrade devices is unethical and harmful. Apple does it all the time and they should be held accountable for that.

Discarding old devices and creating new ones destroys the environment and increases pollution. The best device is the device you already own!

Their successful business strategy results in environmental destruction and other issues. Wh

But ignoring that for a moment, are you proposing that companies shouldn't improve hardware because it leads to software features that don't work on old devices, which leads to old devices being thrown away? That doesn't feel right to me.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181016142434.h...

During the lockdown, I had several Apple products that I wanted to bring to the store for disposal, but Apple wasn't taking any devices at all.

Then, once the restrictions were lifted, I found out that only one of the six Apple Stores in my area takes devices, and it was an hour away.

It seems to me that every Apple retail location should take back devices.

Huh. Long-time Apple user and my experience is they're really good about supporting older hardware, including when that hardware can't support the newest features. Usually (not always, but usually) if an older device doesn't get a feature, it's because it can't, but they keep getting updates anyway, just without the features they cannot support. That's the trade-off for more features being local-only or local-mostly rather than "cloud".

Honestly, it might not be. My Apple TV 4k seems slow as molasses with performance more like an AMLogic 905.

Not sure if it’s because it doesn’t have enough RAM, the flash is slow or the CPU is just way under powered. Yes, they advertise it as an A12Z or whatever, but it’s a binned part that wasn’t acceptable for a phone.

I currently own all three generations of the Apple TV 4K. All of them are snappy devices.

Now that said, I use them for streaming video only, both a variety of services as well as use Infuse for streaming from my NAS.

As someone that works on set top box / streaming chips, I don’t think you realize how low that bar is :P

The prev gen ATV 4k is clearly superior, I’m not disputing that. But ‘snappy’ is a relative term. I expect a lot more out of a device sporting the chip it has. I regularly get input lag, stalled apps (that the system cannot recover from for some time), bursted input (like it doesn’t debounce queued remote inputs after stalling)

There are systems level issues that remain unaddressed, and I speculate they are due to hardware bottlenecks somewhere .

The note at the bottom reads: "Apple Music Sing will be available on all compatible iPhone and iPad models as well as the new Apple TV 4K".

Maybe it requires the Neural Engine that was added with the A11 and opened to third-party apps with the A12. (Sep 2018).

But that should still allow the Apple TV 4K (second generation) which uses the A12.

iPhones/iPads with the A12 or newer are the iPhone XS/XR, iPad Mini (5th generation), iPad Air (3rd generation), and iPad (8th generation). The iPhone SE (2nd generation) uses the A13 so that should be compatible too.

If you use the Help menu's search feature it will direct you to the “Show Lyrics” option, too.

At first, I thought it meant that this only was on the current Apple TV 4K, but then I thought it might just be marketing speak to get people to buy Apple TVs.

But maybe the jump from the A12 to the A15 does provide something that makes this possible. The only thing I can think of is the neural engine (although that first debuted in the A11).

What is cool about HN though is that maybe an Apple engineer will show up anonymously and give us the low down about why. In my short experience at Apple there were plenty of problems but NOT shipping things to customers to make money was not even remotely one of them. Bending over backwards on ancient radars to support the iPhone 6 sucks up an enormous amount of time!