Does the 1080p resolution show up if you go to Advanced > Show Resolutions as List and then tick "Show all resolutions" under the list? The resolution you are looking for is probably 1920 x 1080 (low resolution). If you choose a non "low" resolution the OS will output at 4K but scale the UI to the virtual resolution.
I still won't forgive Apple from dropping 1080i resolution from macOS. I've got a home theater Mac mini hooked up to my TV which only supports 720p or 1080i. I've always displayed 1080i fine, and then one upgrade later, it's suddenly "Fuck you, user. Use 720p LOL."
On mine, Apple TV+ (the official app as well as Safari) will refuse to play 4K through a similar adapter (VMM7100) on an OLED C2 42 from Cable Matters with the latest 120Hz supporting firmware. I assume it is because HDCP is broken. It works fine with the Mac Mini's built in HDMI. Frustratingly there is no great way to debug this, but if you open up Safari and look in the network tab, you can see the resolution of the video being streamed.
Does your adapter work at 120Hz without updating the firmware? If it does, does it support HDCP?
The Google Nest Audio speakers are kind of a special case. They only sound good because they use a sealed, extremely rigid cast aluminum sealed enclosure with a high excursion driver. The performance of these speakers with a regular crossover and amp will be poor, due to the low efficiency of the enclosure/small driver.
To get around this, Google put in the TI TAS5825M smart audio amp. By measuring the speaker parameters through V/I measurement and a model, it drives the speaker in a closed loop way with far more power than it would actually be able to handle nornally to compensate for the resistance from the enclosure air pressure, and throttles to maintain the coil at a safe temperature. The chip also does DSP to compress the audio signal, cutting the peaks off the bass as needed when the volume is turned up so volume is maintained at the cost of bass.
One way to explore could be to just feed I2S audio from an I2S ADC i.e. PCM1808 to the digital input of the amplifier. The processing is internal to the amp so theoretically you won't lose the tuning. However this may turn out to be a relatively annoying reverse engineering project with fine magnet wire involved.
Note: I2S is different from I2C - the amp will likely have both. You will likely need to keep the original system around to program the amp over I2C (or capture the transaction and replay it) - otherwise you will likely get no audio.
The "raw" audio performance of this device (just an amplifier connected directly to the internal speaker and dsp on the computer) is impressive, kicking out bass down to 40Hz. It will, however, not last long like that. Reports online are that these blow speakers easily even when used with the default amplifier.
I would recommend that if 3.5mm input is desired, to replace them altogether with the IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitors. These have sound quality just as good as the Google at similar size, with the same DSP tricks, but have regular inputs and no smart features.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer, I'll look into the I2S audio solution.
You're right that iLoud Micros sound similar, they're 3x the price (The Nest Audios were sold at $50/each on sale). Definitely worth it, I just like tinkering with things.
The YouTube link that starts with RJUvNV, titled "(a). sip" IMO, the first track is a banger (I really like it), and it doesn't sound obviously AI.
The second track is more obviously AI, mostly due to the high frequency "dullness". Likewise, the second link iBT051 seems to have the same issue, it's low fidelity (but in a different way than the lo-fi style is).
Perhaps the most interesting (though sort of irrelevant) part from a linked page on the site is that "cloud" storage is being sold as a one-time cost. A great deal (depending on price) if you ask me!
Pricing and charging for storage inside an organization is always ultimately a non-technical decision that has to balance who pays for it versus the consequences of it not being paid for. This is especially the case within organizations like universities, which have unusual funding and funding patterns (for instance, one time capex is usually much easier than guaranteed ongoing opex). We (the people providing the disk storage) know that there are ongoing costs to doing so, but the non-technical decision has been made to cover those costs in other ways than charging professors on a recurring basis.
Oh yes, I recall the fun of that, from many years ago.
One of my favorites remains when we were prototyping our next gen of servers for some compute next to quite a lot of disk. We had a prototype design, but we weren't done testing it, and someone needed a grant spent _now_, so they bought that design.
Unfortunately, that was the Dell R715/R815 family, which you may recall, had some...unique performance characteristics, so we didn't go with those for the final model, but had to deal with the support of them thereafter.
I have often wondered if you can come up with a one-time price for storage and guarantee that you’ll be able to store the data forever. Disks prices keep dropping so it should be in theory cheaper and cheaper to store data.
I remember this from a few years ago, when I requested the code for this from Charlie Miller on Twitter/X (he replied with a link to the code on archive.org). I was trying to use it to fix a MacBook battery, before I realized the cells were actually bad and stopped trying.
Interestingly enough, this particular question has been tested by Rtings [1] They found that during their tests, inverters which continuously varied the power did not necessarily lead to more even heating, but they do note that small quantities of food (like the butter you mentioned) that need to be heated for very short periods show some differences between inverter and non-inverter models.
Overall, they found that the improvement was much smaller than I'd originally anticipated.
FWIW, if this was somewhat recent, Gamers Nexus recently did a segment [1] on ASUS' warranty support and practices, and they say that they are making some improvements to the way warranty support is being handled. They claim that they retroactively reviewed, or will review, warranty cases for issues such as what you outlined like shipping being charged, high RMA fees, and so forth.
The precursor to these features was the "Audio/AirPods Accessibility" settings as "Custom Transparency Mode"). When I last tried them, some settings seemed to process the audio in the "control plane" (as opposed to the regular transparency being "data plane"), leading to loss in quality or delay (compared to plain transparency mode). I remember hoping the 2nd gen AirPods Pro would solve this but I think it remained.
For example I remember amplifying the sound appeared to introduce some kind of extra delay and quality reduction that wasn't there before. I no longer have an iPhone to try this out with but I do wonder if someone knows whether these new features are still subject to this limitation.
Unless they changed something, in Canada I was able to try the AirPods Pro and the Pro 2 in store. They sanitize them between customers (IMO, not very well) with alcohol wipes. You just go in and ask someone to try them out.
