Musician Neil Young has described the MacBook Pro audio quality as akin to that of a Fisher-Price toy. He has also claimed that Steve Jobs once told him that Apple wasn’t aiming for quality.
Young made the remarks in response to Apple’s celebration of emerging artists using the MacBook Pro to record their music…
His comments were made in an interview with the Verge.
That’s what Steve Jobs told me. He told me that exact thing: ‘We’re making products for consumers, not quality.’ So they don’t want audio quality. They don’t want to spend a lot of time on that. Audio quality — for your reference and for anybody else that’s listening — is deeper than visual quality.
You can look at things and think you’re seeing everything with a hi-res whatever you’re looking at in a picture. But true audio dimension is so deep, and there’s so much data there if you want to capture it all — in the echo and the softness and the loudness and the difference as things are decaying and getting smaller and smaller as they go away. That’s part of the beauty of sound, and the beauty of music based on that is that you can hear all of the detail.
Now, when you talk about doing that on a MacBook Pro, it makes me barf.
Pono was a rather niche product launching into a market with significantly cheaper alternatives. It reportedly sold only in the tens of thousands and was subsequently discontinued. Young mostly blamed the labels for wanting to charge more for higher-res music, but also claimed Apple was partly responsible.
