There's no magic circuit design that PA Semi has that others don't.
Really? So Apple spent over 1 Billion on PA Semi to get functionality that anyone else can have?
Wow, that's a pretty bad investment!
/sarcasm
Quote:
But Stokes pokes on the right thing. The number one complaint about iPhones is battery life. So, I think Apple is putting a lot of effort into getting the best performance/Watt as possible.
The chips are important, but if you watch Steve talking with Walt Mossburg right after the unveiling, he comments that the chips use next to nothing and it's screen that consumes the lions share of the power - right about the same time he rightly points out that it's going to be VERY rare for someone to use a device for more than 10 hours at a time thus making recharging an essentially moot issue.
If it yields a true 30 day standby time for the iPad and 10 hours of video/WiFi browsing, maybe 12 hours for ebook reading, and doing a custom SoC is the reason, that's a big big win. If that development work means a 10 hour WiFi/talk time and 3 week standby time for the next iPhone, that's a big win.
Quote:
If the A4 can downclock and reduce voltage to the bare minimum for iBook reading, that could mean 14-16 hrs of battery life for reading. That's probably something other SoCs can't do.
So wouldn't this be "magic circuit"? Stripping out features is certainly voodoo to just about every other manufacturer except Apple. Why there are all those boxes on the feature checklists that will be empty!
Yes, but don't forget you have much more Wiis in houses than other consoles. Relative to number of each console in the wild, there are less Wii games per console owner compared to other platforms.
Apple sells less overall computers but has a market cap that rivals Microsoft.
The Wii is successful, the Wii makes money and it continues to do so despite it's "fatal" flaws.
I agree about the battery life, and was thinking about the same numbers myself. I believe that Jobs said 10 hours for movies, if I'm not mistaken. If so, that's about the most intensive usage the hardware will be getting other than some 3D gaming. 140 hours of music without the screen on! I'd like to see any other tablet match that.
But he also said 10hrs of reading, answering some questions to Mossberg I believe, and stated that the chip used hardly any power and that all went into the screen.
This $1 Billion estimate to tweak an existing design of a SoC has to be off by an order of a magnitude.
Lets assume a Full Time Engineer(FTE) costs $200,000 per year (Salary + Benefits + Overhead)
For $1 Billion you would get 5,000 FTE's for one year, 2,500 FTE's for two years or 1,666 for three years.
There is no way you need 1600 FTE's for 3 years to modify a Cortex A8 design, the communications and project management overhead would be insane for a project of this scope.
Even if we assume $200 Million for capital expenditures related to the project which to me seems high since its a fabless shop. This still leaves you with 4,000 FTE's for one year, 2,000 FTE's for two years and 1,000 FTE's for 3 years. My guess is the real cost is somewhere in the range of $100 Million - $250 Million.
About this being a stripped down Cortex A8, its just as likely to be a stripped down Cortex A9(Apple's M.O. is to run these under clocked relative to their typical operation). The fact is we won't really have any idea until enough companies get there hands on this device and do a proper teardown of it.
So the iPad isn't for you - great. I find it fascinating that people are so threatened by something different that they feel they have to not only not just buy it, but campaign against it
(snip)
Careful Doc! One of our house trolls might wander by and ingest your impeccable logic and self-combust. You wouldn't want that on your conscience would you?
I'm willing to bet there is some sort of EFI reading SSD, phoning home like DRM scheme embedded into the processor too.
The iPad is to be a content delivering device, but what's scary is the fact that Apple has removed all but one MacBook for a line of iPad media devices.
Doesn't sound too good for the future of traditional computers.
And what's with the Apple propaganda plug at the end of the article?
That isn't propaganda, but instead the author is reminding folks of Apple's statement regarding their "in-house" silicon after providing information in the article that indicates that the chip is not nearly as much a breakthrough chip as Apple claims.
Also, I don't understand your comment about only one Macbook for a line of iPads. Apple has the Macbook and the Macbook Pros in addition to their desktop machines...??
The MacBooks are intended for the younger market, the MacBook Pro is intended for the more mature market.
Apple introduces a line of iPads, but it's not ready for market yet. As soon as sales pick up all Apple has to do is eliminate the one remaining white MacBook model as it already phased out the other MacBook models.
The iPad is intended to replace Apple's traditional computers in the younger market.
Why is this bad? Because the iPad is a closed device and doesn't encourage as much immediate hacking and interest as a open device does.
On a Mac, anyone who has the interest can fire up Terminal, learn a few Unix commands and be messing around. It encourages that because it's a open device.
The iPad has a high barrier to cross before one can get under the hood. This high barrier is going to discourage future youth from a interest in computers.
The low end Macbook Pro isn't much more expensive than the Macbook. Also, those youngsters can also buy a Mac Mini and an iPad for the price of a Macbook or Macbook Pro and have the best of both worlds. How is that a loss?
Do you honestly believe that the ability to hack a device and mess around with its firmware via a Unix prompt has any bearing on the commercial succes of a consumer device like the iPad?
I know a place like Appleinsider attracts a fair share of geeks, but really ... ?
The MacBooks are intended for the younger market, the MacBook Pro is intended for the more mature market.
Apple introduces a line of iPads, but it's not ready for market yet. As soon as sales pick up all Apple has to do is eliminate the one remaining white MacBook model as it already phased out the other MacBook models.
The iPad is intended to replace Apple's traditional computers in the younger market.
Why is this bad? Because the iPad is a closed device and doesn't encourage as much immediate hacking and interest as a open device does.
On a Mac, anyone who has the interest can fire up Terminal, learn a few Unix commands and be messing around. It encourages that because it's a open device.
The iPad has a high barrier to cross before one can get under the hood. This high barrier is going to discourage future youth from a interest in computers.
Do you honestly believe that the ability to hack a device and mess around with its firmware via a Unix prompt has any bearing on the commercial succes of a consumer device like the iPad?
I know a site like Appleinsider attracts a fair share of geeks, but really ... ? Oh, and one more thing; as far as the future youth and their interest in computers - has it ever occured to you that the computers of tomorrow may be very different animals than the Unix-powered big boxes you think of as computers today? The personal computers of tomorrow could in fact be something like ... the iPad.
If you wan't something you can pick apart, get gaga over the guts, or get root and terminal access go buy one of the many existing solutions that will do all that right now. This device isn't targeted at you!
Dude, notice how he said 'personally... I'll likely skip'? He's not telling YOU not to buy one or that the product is total crap if the A4 is a cortex A8 derivative. He just wants something more robust that'll have more 'legs' and be able to keep longer. Is that unreasonable?
The implied premise of this report is that Apple is a bunch of stupid bozos who don't know what they are doing.
So, according to this Jon Stokes fellow, Apple first went ahead and spent 278 mio dollars on PA Semi, and then spent another billion dollars to develop a crappy chip that is inferior to any off-the-shelf chip that Apple could have bought on the market? Is THAT what they want us to believe? Well, color me sceptical!
You can call Apple a lot of things, but stupid they are not.
The amount of people today who have HDTV's but no HDTV cable or OTA HD antenna blow your little theory right out of the water. They don't care right now for the primary purpose of their "HD" TV, why are they going to suddenly care for a game console that is a casual, secondary use?
To a geek such as yourself, watching SD on an HDTV is a distraction in and of itself and unfathomable. To non-geeks, the Wii is fun and it's approachable in a way that the Xbox and PS3 aren't. Extra resolution isn't going to change that part of the experience. They couldn't care less that it's 480i instead of 1080p - it's fun!. Wanna know why the Wii is still popular? It's about the end user experience, not the specs!
It is notable that Nintendo, like Apple, is doing just fine dissing people such as yourself who look at a few missing checkboxes and proclaims "it sucks". From the beating self-proclaimed Internet experts took with the iPod, personified in the now infamous Slashdot iPod comments, you think this kind of inane commentary would be a little more reserved. But here we are, all over again...
Watch YFM.
My observation is based on what happens to great and popular products that sit on shelves too long while competitors cycle and update their products. Popularity means nothing if the idea is old, with no fresh take. The Wii has done well, will continue to do OK, but within 2 years will be completely dead, in terms of new sales.
Get some real opinions from people that own one. Average usage for the Wii is 1 month. Many people use it for 2 weeks, then forget they even have it. People are lazy, and despite having a brief compulsion to play an interactive video game, the thrill is quickly gone, aided by the extreme lack of interesting content on the platform.
Really? So Apple spent over 1 Billion on PA Semi to get functionality that anyone else can have?
Wow, that's a pretty bad investment!
/sarcasm
Apple didn't spend $1G on PA Semi. They spent ~$270M to acquire their engineering talent (the company). The last thing we heard about PA Semi was that the team was split into two, one working iPad and the other on iPhones. It was about 150 engineers. It costs about $30M/year for those 150 people. At that spend rate, it'll take another 20 years to hit a billion USD.
Quote:
The chips are important, but if you watch Steve talking with Walt Mossburg right after the unveiling, he comments that the chips use next to nothing and it's screen that consumes the lions share of the power - right about the same time he rightly points out that it's going to be VERY rare for someone to use a device for more than 10 hours at a time thus making recharging an essentially moot issue.
This is Jobsian marketing speak. Everything is true in the way he's saying it.
Quote:
So wouldn't this be "magic circuit"?
I was talking in terms of computational performance. It's doubtful they'll create a more powerful chip than competing designs. Jon Stokes did intimate the right thing I think. They are doing in-house designs to gain an advantage on performance/Watt.
Yes, there are a lot of Mac users staffed at Ars. It doesn't mean they have any good sources for Apple dealings. Stokes is as just in the dark as anyone else. What he has on his side is good x86 knowledge, industry sources, and a good understanding of microprocessor design. I'm pretty confident he has zero sources into Apple proper. I think the best he's got is a contractor working on compiler and driver design. Maybe it is a developer with iPad access and they have inferred by performance results.
You're making an assumption that you can't really make. What do you know of his sources? Nothing. It's also possible that he has them at Apple and Samsung.
Quote:
Notice how he is just speculating about what is missing. He's already admitted to being wrong about display output. I think all his sources told him was that the A4 is an Cortex-A8 based SoC. And it's only based on indirect knowledge. That's it. I don't think anyone knows but the upper management, the SoC CPU/SMC subteam, and the compiler/driver subteam.
He's speculating, because he hasn't been given detailed info, just the basic stuff. Just like Apple, where they give employees slightly different versions, so they can find how who spilled the bean, it's possible his sources have the same problem.
I don't know why you're so against the idea that he may know what he's talking about.
Quote:
It's right on the iPad specs page: 10 hrs for video or web browsing at default display settings. The iPad has to really hit that mark.
Apple is known to be conservative with their handheld mobile battery ratings. They almost always exceed them.
You're right. It wasn't Jobs and anything attributed to Apple. Nobody knows how much Apple has spent on the A4.
The $1G quote was the NYT quoting an industry analyst on the cost of designing a proprietary, from the ground-up CPU. That's all he was talking about in an article about how Nvidia, Qualcomm and Apple are off building their own custom SoCs. It's quite doubtful it cost any of them that much as they all took various existing designs and did custom integration work.
One can make a guess. It is fairly simple. Take 50 people including managers and engineers, multiply by 200k and by 2 years, you get 20m. Double it for other procurements, testing and pad it a little more for other stuff. It probably cost Apple on the order of 50 million if they devouted 50 engineers and various related testing, prototyping, licensing and "institutional" costs. For $1G, you're talking 500 people over 2 years and some capital expenditures. Apple probably didn't even spend that much on iPad development as whole. They probably didn't even spend half that.
That's right. I keep telling people that the $1 billion figure referred to a from scratch job, but saying Apple spent $1 billion is more sensationalist, so people keep misquoting it.
The amount of people today who have HDTV's but no HDTV cable or OTA HD antenna blow your little theory right out of the water. They don't care right now for the primary purpose of their "HD" TV, why are they going to suddenly care for a game console that is a casual, secondary use?
To a geek such as yourself, watching SD on an HDTV is a distraction in and of itself and unfathomable. To non-geeks, the Wii is fun and it's approachable in a way that the Xbox and PS3 aren't. Extra resolution isn't going to change that part of the experience. They couldn't care less that it's 480i instead of 1080p - it's fun!. Wanna know why the Wii is still popular? It's about the end user experience, not the specs!
It is notable that Nintendo, like Apple, is doing just fine dissing people such as yourself who look at a few missing checkboxes and proclaims "it sucks". From the beating self-proclaimed Internet experts took with the iPod, personified in the now infamous Slashdot iPod comments, you think this kind of inane commentary would be a little more reserved. But here we are, all over again...
Actually, when we first plugged my daughters Wii into the then new Samsung 61" DLP LED set I had just bought, I was prepared to think that it would look crappy. I was wrong! The Wii has a higher rez than 720x 480. I forget the actual number right now, but it looks much better than expected. Not as good as our PS3, but close enough most of the time. Some games look so good, it's almost impossible to tell from a normal distance.
But he also said 10hrs of reading, answering some questions to Mossberg I believe, and stated that the chip used hardly any power and that all went into the screen.
If it gives 10 hours of video, it will give more for reading. Unless he was meaning reading magazines with interactive features. That's possible too. But video uses more resources than does reading. I find it hard to believe that reading books would use the same amount of battery power as video.
But Apple is conservative about the battery usage of its handheld devices, likely they are with this too.
The implied premise of this report is that Apple is a bunch of stupid bozos who don't know what they are doing.
So, according to this Jon Stokes fellow, Apple first went ahead and spent 278 mio dollars on PA Semi, and then spent another billion dollars to develop a crappy chip that is inferior to any off-the-shelf chip that Apple could have bought on the market? Is THAT what they want us to believe? Well, color me sceptical!
You can call Apple a lot of things, but stupid they are not.
Stop with the $1 billion garbage already! Stokes knows very well, as does everyone with at least half a brain, that Apple didn't spend anywhere near $1 billion to develop this variation of a chip they licensed.
And who is to say this chip is inferior? The easy thing for Apple to have done was to just continue buying chips from Samsung, unchanged. The fact that they didn't, means that they wanted to do things to it that would have a benefit to them. That could either mean stripping features that have no meaning in the context they will be using it, as well as adding those that will.
As Stokes mentioned, chips that are sold, are sold with features than most companies buying them won't use, but they need to be there to service a group of buyers that will need a sub grouping of those features. So these companies over pay for what they don't need. But they are also buying in much smaller volumes than Apple does. That means that Apple can afford to mod the chip for themselves, where other companies can't.
That's an advantage to Apple. If they buy 60 million of these chips next year, that would be a big advantage. Even if they only buy ten million it would still be more than most others would be buying.
To strip out unneeded features makes for a superior chip, because it will have better yields, lower pricing, lower power usage, better performance, cooler running, etc. Advantage Apple.
My observation is based on what happens to great and popular products that sit on shelves too long while competitors cycle and update their products. Popularity means nothing if the idea is old, with no fresh take. The Wii has done well, will continue to do OK, but within 2 years will be completely dead, in terms of new sales.
Get some real opinions from people that own one. Average usage for the Wii is 1 month. Many people use it for 2 weeks, then forget they even have it. People are lazy, and despite having a brief compulsion to play an interactive video game, the thrill is quickly gone, aided by the extreme lack of interesting content on the platform.
You're making that up for sure. Where can you show us that it's true?
Comments
There's no magic circuit design that PA Semi has that others don't.
Really? So Apple spent over 1 Billion on PA Semi to get functionality that anyone else can have?
Wow, that's a pretty bad investment!
/sarcasm
But Stokes pokes on the right thing. The number one complaint about iPhones is battery life. So, I think Apple is putting a lot of effort into getting the best performance/Watt as possible.
The chips are important, but if you watch Steve talking with Walt Mossburg right after the unveiling, he comments that the chips use next to nothing and it's screen that consumes the lions share of the power - right about the same time he rightly points out that it's going to be VERY rare for someone to use a device for more than 10 hours at a time thus making recharging an essentially moot issue.
If it yields a true 30 day standby time for the iPad and 10 hours of video/WiFi browsing, maybe 12 hours for ebook reading, and doing a custom SoC is the reason, that's a big big win. If that development work means a 10 hour WiFi/talk time and 3 week standby time for the next iPhone, that's a big win.
If the A4 can downclock and reduce voltage to the bare minimum for iBook reading, that could mean 14-16 hrs of battery life for reading. That's probably something other SoCs can't do.
So wouldn't this be "magic circuit"? Stripping out features is certainly voodoo to just about every other manufacturer except Apple. Why there are all those boxes on the feature checklists that will be empty!
Yes, but don't forget you have much more Wiis in houses than other consoles. Relative to number of each console in the wild, there are less Wii games per console owner compared to other platforms.
Apple sells less overall computers but has a market cap that rivals Microsoft.
The Wii is successful, the Wii makes money and it continues to do so despite it's "fatal" flaws.
"fatal" flaws - sound familiar?
I agree about the battery life, and was thinking about the same numbers myself. I believe that Jobs said 10 hours for movies, if I'm not mistaken. If so, that's about the most intensive usage the hardware will be getting other than some 3D gaming. 140 hours of music without the screen on! I'd like to see any other tablet match that.
But he also said 10hrs of reading, answering some questions to Mossberg I believe, and stated that the chip used hardly any power and that all went into the screen.
Lets assume a Full Time Engineer(FTE) costs $200,000 per year (Salary + Benefits + Overhead)
For $1 Billion you would get 5,000 FTE's for one year, 2,500 FTE's for two years or 1,666 for three years.
There is no way you need 1600 FTE's for 3 years to modify a Cortex A8 design, the communications and project management overhead would be insane for a project of this scope.
Even if we assume $200 Million for capital expenditures related to the project which to me seems high since its a fabless shop. This still leaves you with 4,000 FTE's for one year, 2,000 FTE's for two years and 1,000 FTE's for 3 years. My guess is the real cost is somewhere in the range of $100 Million - $250 Million.
About this being a stripped down Cortex A8, its just as likely to be a stripped down Cortex A9(Apple's M.O. is to run these under clocked relative to their typical operation). The fact is we won't really have any idea until enough companies get there hands on this device and do a proper teardown of it.
(snip)
So the iPad isn't for you - great. I find it fascinating that people are so threatened by something different that they feel they have to not only not just buy it, but campaign against it
(snip)
Careful Doc! One of our house trolls might wander by and ingest your impeccable logic and self-combust. You wouldn't want that on your conscience would you?
I'm willing to bet there is some sort of EFI reading SSD, phoning home like DRM scheme embedded into the processor too.
The iPad is to be a content delivering device, but what's scary is the fact that Apple has removed all but one MacBook for a line of iPad media devices.
Doesn't sound too good for the future of traditional computers.
And what's with the Apple propaganda plug at the end of the article?
That isn't propaganda, but instead the author is reminding folks of Apple's statement regarding their "in-house" silicon after providing information in the article that indicates that the chip is not nearly as much a breakthrough chip as Apple claims.
Also, I don't understand your comment about only one Macbook for a line of iPads. Apple has the Macbook and the Macbook Pros in addition to their desktop machines...??
The MacBooks are intended for the younger market, the MacBook Pro is intended for the more mature market.
Apple introduces a line of iPads, but it's not ready for market yet. As soon as sales pick up all Apple has to do is eliminate the one remaining white MacBook model as it already phased out the other MacBook models.
The iPad is intended to replace Apple's traditional computers in the younger market.
Why is this bad? Because the iPad is a closed device and doesn't encourage as much immediate hacking and interest as a open device does.
On a Mac, anyone who has the interest can fire up Terminal, learn a few Unix commands and be messing around. It encourages that because it's a open device.
The iPad has a high barrier to cross before one can get under the hood. This high barrier is going to discourage future youth from a interest in computers.
The low end Macbook Pro isn't much more expensive than the Macbook. Also, those youngsters can also buy a Mac Mini and an iPad for the price of a Macbook or Macbook Pro and have the best of both worlds. How is that a loss?
I know a place like Appleinsider attracts a fair share of geeks, but really ... ?
The MacBooks are intended for the younger market, the MacBook Pro is intended for the more mature market.
Apple introduces a line of iPads, but it's not ready for market yet. As soon as sales pick up all Apple has to do is eliminate the one remaining white MacBook model as it already phased out the other MacBook models.
The iPad is intended to replace Apple's traditional computers in the younger market.
Why is this bad? Because the iPad is a closed device and doesn't encourage as much immediate hacking and interest as a open device does.
On a Mac, anyone who has the interest can fire up Terminal, learn a few Unix commands and be messing around. It encourages that because it's a open device.
The iPad has a high barrier to cross before one can get under the hood. This high barrier is going to discourage future youth from a interest in computers.
Do you honestly believe that the ability to hack a device and mess around with its firmware via a Unix prompt has any bearing on the commercial succes of a consumer device like the iPad?
I know a site like Appleinsider attracts a fair share of geeks, but really ... ? Oh, and one more thing; as far as the future youth and their interest in computers - has it ever occured to you that the computers of tomorrow may be very different animals than the Unix-powered big boxes you think of as computers today? The personal computers of tomorrow could in fact be something like ... the iPad.
If you wan't something you can pick apart, get gaga over the guts, or get root and terminal access go buy one of the many existing solutions that will do all that right now. This device isn't targeted at you!
Dude, notice how he said 'personally... I'll likely skip'? He's not telling YOU not to buy one or that the product is total crap if the A4 is a cortex A8 derivative. He just wants something more robust that'll have more 'legs' and be able to keep longer. Is that unreasonable?
So, according to this Jon Stokes fellow, Apple first went ahead and spent 278 mio dollars on PA Semi, and then spent another billion dollars to develop a crappy chip that is inferior to any off-the-shelf chip that Apple could have bought on the market? Is THAT what they want us to believe? Well, color me sceptical!
You can call Apple a lot of things, but stupid they are not.
The amount of people today who have HDTV's but no HDTV cable or OTA HD antenna blow your little theory right out of the water. They don't care right now for the primary purpose of their "HD" TV, why are they going to suddenly care for a game console that is a casual, secondary use?
To a geek such as yourself, watching SD on an HDTV is a distraction in and of itself and unfathomable. To non-geeks, the Wii is fun and it's approachable in a way that the Xbox and PS3 aren't. Extra resolution isn't going to change that part of the experience. They couldn't care less that it's 480i instead of 1080p - it's fun!. Wanna know why the Wii is still popular? It's about the end user experience, not the specs!
It is notable that Nintendo, like Apple, is doing just fine dissing people such as yourself who look at a few missing checkboxes and proclaims "it sucks". From the beating self-proclaimed Internet experts took with the iPod, personified in the now infamous Slashdot iPod comments, you think this kind of inane commentary would be a little more reserved. But here we are, all over again...
Watch YFM.
My observation is based on what happens to great and popular products that sit on shelves too long while competitors cycle and update their products. Popularity means nothing if the idea is old, with no fresh take. The Wii has done well, will continue to do OK, but within 2 years will be completely dead, in terms of new sales.
Get some real opinions from people that own one. Average usage for the Wii is 1 month. Many people use it for 2 weeks, then forget they even have it. People are lazy, and despite having a brief compulsion to play an interactive video game, the thrill is quickly gone, aided by the extreme lack of interesting content on the platform.
Really? So Apple spent over 1 Billion on PA Semi to get functionality that anyone else can have?
Wow, that's a pretty bad investment!
/sarcasm
Apple didn't spend $1G on PA Semi. They spent ~$270M to acquire their engineering talent (the company). The last thing we heard about PA Semi was that the team was split into two, one working iPad and the other on iPhones. It was about 150 engineers. It costs about $30M/year for those 150 people. At that spend rate, it'll take another 20 years to hit a billion USD.
The chips are important, but if you watch Steve talking with Walt Mossburg right after the unveiling, he comments that the chips use next to nothing and it's screen that consumes the lions share of the power - right about the same time he rightly points out that it's going to be VERY rare for someone to use a device for more than 10 hours at a time thus making recharging an essentially moot issue.
This is Jobsian marketing speak. Everything is true in the way he's saying it.
So wouldn't this be "magic circuit"?
I was talking in terms of computational performance. It's doubtful they'll create a more powerful chip than competing designs. Jon Stokes did intimate the right thing I think. They are doing in-house designs to gain an advantage on performance/Watt.
The message of January 27th was the form factor. The form factor will overlay different demographics as a content delivery device,
the real genius of the device is that it is the best means to buy stuff from the iSore.
Yes, there are a lot of Mac users staffed at Ars. It doesn't mean they have any good sources for Apple dealings. Stokes is as just in the dark as anyone else. What he has on his side is good x86 knowledge, industry sources, and a good understanding of microprocessor design. I'm pretty confident he has zero sources into Apple proper. I think the best he's got is a contractor working on compiler and driver design. Maybe it is a developer with iPad access and they have inferred by performance results.
You're making an assumption that you can't really make. What do you know of his sources? Nothing. It's also possible that he has them at Apple and Samsung.
Notice how he is just speculating about what is missing. He's already admitted to being wrong about display output. I think all his sources told him was that the A4 is an Cortex-A8 based SoC. And it's only based on indirect knowledge. That's it. I don't think anyone knows but the upper management, the SoC CPU/SMC subteam, and the compiler/driver subteam.
He's speculating, because he hasn't been given detailed info, just the basic stuff. Just like Apple, where they give employees slightly different versions, so they can find how who spilled the bean, it's possible his sources have the same problem.
I don't know why you're so against the idea that he may know what he's talking about.
It's right on the iPad specs page: 10 hrs for video or web browsing at default display settings. The iPad has to really hit that mark.
Apple is known to be conservative with their handheld mobile battery ratings. They almost always exceed them.
You're right. It wasn't Jobs and anything attributed to Apple. Nobody knows how much Apple has spent on the A4.
The $1G quote was the NYT quoting an industry analyst on the cost of designing a proprietary, from the ground-up CPU. That's all he was talking about in an article about how Nvidia, Qualcomm and Apple are off building their own custom SoCs. It's quite doubtful it cost any of them that much as they all took various existing designs and did custom integration work.
One can make a guess. It is fairly simple. Take 50 people including managers and engineers, multiply by 200k and by 2 years, you get 20m. Double it for other procurements, testing and pad it a little more for other stuff. It probably cost Apple on the order of 50 million if they devouted 50 engineers and various related testing, prototyping, licensing and "institutional" costs. For $1G, you're talking 500 people over 2 years and some capital expenditures. Apple probably didn't even spend that much on iPad development as whole. They probably didn't even spend half that.
That's right. I keep telling people that the $1 billion figure referred to a from scratch job, but saying Apple spent $1 billion is more sensationalist, so people keep misquoting it.
The amount of people today who have HDTV's but no HDTV cable or OTA HD antenna blow your little theory right out of the water. They don't care right now for the primary purpose of their "HD" TV, why are they going to suddenly care for a game console that is a casual, secondary use?
To a geek such as yourself, watching SD on an HDTV is a distraction in and of itself and unfathomable. To non-geeks, the Wii is fun and it's approachable in a way that the Xbox and PS3 aren't. Extra resolution isn't going to change that part of the experience. They couldn't care less that it's 480i instead of 1080p - it's fun!. Wanna know why the Wii is still popular? It's about the end user experience, not the specs!
It is notable that Nintendo, like Apple, is doing just fine dissing people such as yourself who look at a few missing checkboxes and proclaims "it sucks". From the beating self-proclaimed Internet experts took with the iPod, personified in the now infamous Slashdot iPod comments, you think this kind of inane commentary would be a little more reserved. But here we are, all over again...
Actually, when we first plugged my daughters Wii into the then new Samsung 61" DLP LED set I had just bought, I was prepared to think that it would look crappy. I was wrong! The Wii has a higher rez than 720x 480. I forget the actual number right now, but it looks much better than expected. Not as good as our PS3, but close enough most of the time. Some games look so good, it's almost impossible to tell from a normal distance.
But he also said 10hrs of reading, answering some questions to Mossberg I believe, and stated that the chip used hardly any power and that all went into the screen.
If it gives 10 hours of video, it will give more for reading. Unless he was meaning reading magazines with interactive features. That's possible too. But video uses more resources than does reading. I find it hard to believe that reading books would use the same amount of battery power as video.
But Apple is conservative about the battery usage of its handheld devices, likely they are with this too.
The implied premise of this report is that Apple is a bunch of stupid bozos who don't know what they are doing.
So, according to this Jon Stokes fellow, Apple first went ahead and spent 278 mio dollars on PA Semi, and then spent another billion dollars to develop a crappy chip that is inferior to any off-the-shelf chip that Apple could have bought on the market? Is THAT what they want us to believe? Well, color me sceptical!
You can call Apple a lot of things, but stupid they are not.
Stop with the $1 billion garbage already! Stokes knows very well, as does everyone with at least half a brain, that Apple didn't spend anywhere near $1 billion to develop this variation of a chip they licensed.
And who is to say this chip is inferior? The easy thing for Apple to have done was to just continue buying chips from Samsung, unchanged. The fact that they didn't, means that they wanted to do things to it that would have a benefit to them. That could either mean stripping features that have no meaning in the context they will be using it, as well as adding those that will.
As Stokes mentioned, chips that are sold, are sold with features than most companies buying them won't use, but they need to be there to service a group of buyers that will need a sub grouping of those features. So these companies over pay for what they don't need. But they are also buying in much smaller volumes than Apple does. That means that Apple can afford to mod the chip for themselves, where other companies can't.
That's an advantage to Apple. If they buy 60 million of these chips next year, that would be a big advantage. Even if they only buy ten million it would still be more than most others would be buying.
To strip out unneeded features makes for a superior chip, because it will have better yields, lower pricing, lower power usage, better performance, cooler running, etc. Advantage Apple.
Watch YFM.
My observation is based on what happens to great and popular products that sit on shelves too long while competitors cycle and update their products. Popularity means nothing if the idea is old, with no fresh take. The Wii has done well, will continue to do OK, but within 2 years will be completely dead, in terms of new sales.
Get some real opinions from people that own one. Average usage for the Wii is 1 month. Many people use it for 2 weeks, then forget they even have it. People are lazy, and despite having a brief compulsion to play an interactive video game, the thrill is quickly gone, aided by the extreme lack of interesting content on the platform.
You're making that up for sure. Where can you show us that it's true?