Looks like the 8 and 8 Plus are able to retain higher clocks longer, for slightly higher scores on the same chip?
That in addition to the X driving a higher resolution display. I guess this is the awkward transition period where the 8 at least would be faster at native resolution than the X (not sure about the Plus for its weird downscaling dance it has to do).
Yes, the X's SOC has a lot more going on at the same time, a hell of a lot more, which produces heat which limits the speed of the CPU itself. Lose a bit on one side and gain a lot more on the other side.
Apple won't use the Ax in Macs until they outperform Intel's best chips. Putting Ax processors in MacBooks will only diminish Apple's buying power with Intel.
Besides, a new class of Ax processors would be required to operate MacOS applications. You don't want to force developers to recompile for a new processor design when all of their experience/expertise is firmly established in existing technology. The exception to that statement is a processor that can operate two different OSs ala MacOS 9/MacOS X.
There is no reason to put it in the smaller MacBook. They will put it iPad Pro and continue to build out iOS for iPad to have the same desktop features as MacOS. Eventually it will to replace the need for MacBook as iPad Pro gains more MacOS ported features. MacBook and MacBook Pro can continue along in parallel as this happens until it makes no sense to buy them anymore. Give me a trackpad and adjustable hinge on a smart keyboard that attaches to the 12.9 inch and a few more Apple native MacOS apps ported over and I'm good. Terminal, etc. They already are taking the steps to go in that direction. Dock, Multitasking, Files (aka Finder lite).
MacOS is already feeling like it is falling behind in features in some way. HomeKit, lack of App availability. I think if Apple had an opportunity to get people off MacOS and only one common iOS platform (TV, iPhone, iPad, iPad Pro (Desktop replacement) ), then they would take it. If they can get people to move from MacOS on MacBook to iOS on iPad Pro by providing enough Desktop features in iOS, then I think they would be in a much stronger market position on the Desktop. More Apps, more secure OS, less SW development efforts using a unified SW platform.
I dont have a magic 8 ball, however indications do seem like they are heading in this direction. I have no pressing reason to upgrade to High Sierra. It just not that much of a feature release for me and I suspect others. The MacOS team has obviously focused on something else over the past year.
Merger of iOS and macOS won't happen. This urban legend is baked again and again at every product launch and Apple execs reject that again and again at every occasion.
These two belong to different realms. One is consumer electronics, the other is highly parallel high performance computing. Apple is not detached from its high performance computing roots and thanks to that it is able to deliver so powerful consumer devices.
Wanna know what macOS team is focused to? Wait for the iMac Pro.
Aren't the A11's scores better because the iPhones are running at a lower resolution, or am I missing something?
Multiple resolution independent tests (aka off screen rendering tests) put to rest that myth a long time ago, when Note7 and iPhone7 were compared. And yet again, we hear that same tired BS... Sigh...
AFAIR, In those tests iPhone7 outperformed both in resolution dependent, as well as independent tests by quite a significant margin, so why the frack are we still talking about that, year later? And the same stuff happened to iPhone6s and whatever was running the show on Android side back then.
Apple won't use the Ax in Macs until they outperform Intel's best chips. Putting Ax processors in MacBooks will only diminish Apple's buying power with Intel.
Besides, a new class of Ax processors would be required to operate MacOS applications. You don't want to force developers to recompile for a new processor design when all of their experience/expertise is firmly established in existing technology. The exception to that statement is a processor that can operate two different OSs ala MacOS 9/MacOS X.
There is no reason to put it in the smaller MacBook. They will put it iPad Pro and continue to build out iOS for iPad to have the same desktop features as MacOS. Eventually it will to replace the need for MacBook as iPad Pro gains more MacOS ported features. MacBook and MacBook Pro can continue along in parallel as this happens until it makes no sense to buy them anymore. Give me a trackpad and adjustable hinge on a smart keyboard that attaches to the 12.9 inch and a few more Apple native MacOS apps ported over and I'm good. Terminal, etc. They already are taking the steps to go in that direction. Dock, Multitasking, Files (aka Finder lite).
MacOS is already feeling like it is falling behind in features in some way. HomeKit, lack of App availability. I think if Apple had an opportunity to get people off MacOS and only one common iOS platform (TV, iPhone, iPad, iPad Pro (Desktop replacement) ), then they would take it. If they can get people to move from MacOS on MacBook to iOS on iPad Pro by providing enough Desktop features in iOS, then I think they would be in a much stronger market position on the Desktop. More Apps, more secure OS, less SW development efforts using a unified SW platform.
I dont have a magic 8 ball, however indications do seem like they are heading in this direction. I have no pressing reason to upgrade to High Sierra. It just not that much of a feature release for me and I suspect others. The MacOS team has obviously focused on something else over the past year.
Merger of iOS and macOS won't happen. This urban legend is baked again and again at every product launch and Apple execs reject that again and again at every occasion.
These two belong to different realms. One is consumer electronics, the other is highly parallel high performance computing. Apple is not detached from its high performance computing roots and thanks to that it is able to deliver so powerful consumer devices.
Wanna know what macOS team is focused to? Wait for the iMac Pro.
I don't expect them to merge. I expect iOS on iPad Pro 12.9" to transition the customer for those who typically use 12" MacBooks today. As far as what is and isn't happening... How do we explain the new Dock on iPad, the Files app (which is Finder), and multi windows multitasking on iOS 11 for iPad?. It seems I have seen that concept on Mac prior. Tim Cook make it pretty clear what the aspirations are for the iPad Pro as a replacement a laptop.
Same for multi processor use case. How many general computational cores are in the A11? It seems that multitasking on iOS is not an afterthought anymore.
I'm not saying MacOS will go away, I'm just saying it will become less and less relevant in the space that is being targeted by iPad Pro. ie. MacBook will be first. Then MacBook Pro a bit later. Will it get to targeting iMac Pro and MacPro? Not in the near furture. But.. ask me again in 10 years. ;-) Who would have thought a phone would be doing what it's doing now when the iPhone came out 10 years ago. I highest level of what we thought was possible was the Crackberry.
Who would have thought a phone would be doing what it's doing now when the iPhone came out 10 years ago. I highest level of what we thought was possible was the Crackberry.
It really dates media like Casino Royale, which came out two months before the iPhone was introduced, to show simulacra of what we all wanted from our phones. Bond uses a Sony Ericsson candy bar phone in that film that is, of course, tricked out with magical spy-style tracking software and a Retina display (because how else could it have fit that 3D revolving hotel map on a 1.5" screen!) because… that's the best kind of phone we had at the time and the fantasy elements just had to work around that. The iPhone was a fantasy made reality just two months later.
There's a good line in the Rifftrax of the film during that scene. Spoken as a tagline for a commercial, "Sony Ericsson: Our Phones Can't Actually Do This!"
While Apple's SoCs are objectively better than SoCs used in Android flagships for last 2+ years (from A9 onwards), Pixels and other near-stock Android phones (from HTC/Sony/Motorola) do NOT exhibit the same performance issues observed in Samsung's phones. They run perfectly fine with the same high resolution QHD+.
This is incorrect. Pixel is one of the worst performing Android flagship phones.
Now, it may be accurate to say it had less junkware and bloat, but Android itself is not an optimized OS in the way Apple's iOS is. From buttery animations to an architecture that lets you rapidly launch, freeze and relaunch background apps, iOS is vastly superior to Android in everyday tasks as well as in performance apps and games.
Despite lots of love from tech media enthusiasts, Pixel is almost always the lowest rated flagship because it uses a middling SoC and limited RAM (compared to what Android needs to compete with iOS) in an attempt to reach an attractive price point.
if Samsung is second rate, Google's vanity projects are solidly third rate. Samsung at least makes money on its hardware sales. Pixel can't even claim to be a functional product launch. It's still a loss leader strategy of desperation after ~8 solid years of successive Nexus flops.
Its fine to own, cherish and proudly claim to prefer to own Google's latest vanity hardware, but don't mistake it for a real product that materially matters in the industry. It's a vanity cobranded HTC phone built by a company that is commercially failing on its own. It ships in smaller quantities than Apple Watch, without making any money or attracting any new customers.
It's nice that the A11 outperforms the CPUs of other vendors, but the main question is: does it really matter? I am using my iPhone 6s for calling, web browsing, emailing, checking my calendar, taking notes, paying, chatting, taking photos, checking bank account, playing music, checking public transport timetable. And for none of these actions my iPhone 6s feels sluggish. How impressive the A11 may be, I am not at all convinced that I will be more productive with a faster CPU. One might say that the A11 is needed for face recognition, but I fail to see the advantage of face recognition versus TouchID. I am pretty sure ApplyPay with face recognition will be more cumbersome ans slower to use than the current ApplePay. The fact that I have to turn the phone to my face is inherently slower than putting my finger on the home button.
As a user with low requirements for performance, you can also benefit from the increased performance that the A11 brings. Faster processors get even basic tasks completed much sooner allowing the CPU to re-enter low power states sooner....thus giving extended battery performance, on top of the increased efficiencies in the new design.
Aren't the A11's scores better because the iPhones are running at a lower resolution, or am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing a lot of things. There are benchmarks which are NOT dependent on screen resolution. Even in ALL of those benchmarks, A11 is a champion. Guess which SoC is second in most of those benchmarks? No prices, if you guessed A10 from Apple.
Then why does the iPhone 8 have a better overall score than the 8s, which in turn scores better than the X? Obviously resolution is playing a factor here, so the test is not a good Apples to Apples comparison. The test should pick a baseline resolution and measure all devices based on it. For example, you could say a laptop with an Nvidia 1060 "obliterates" the laptop with Nvidi 1080 at 4K because the "performance" is so much better, but that wound be entirely inaccurate because the 1080 is much more powerful.
Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation and until further testing is performed with actual handsets, you can't draw a conclusion that resolution plays a part. I know from experience that Geekbench can return multiple different scores when ran many times in succession. We don't know who uploaded these scores and whether they were on shipping silicon with GM or beta firmwares. They literally have no controls in place to posit any theories.
Apple won't use the Ax in Macs until they outperform Intel's best chips. Putting Ax processors in MacBooks will only diminish Apple's buying power with Intel.
Besides, a new class of Ax processors would be required to operate MacOS applications. You don't want to force developers to recompile for a new processor design when all of their experience/expertise is firmly established in existing technology. The exception to that statement is a processor that can operate two different OSs ala MacOS 9/MacOS X.
There is no reason to put it in the smaller MacBook. They will put it iPad Pro and continue to build out iOS for iPad to have the same desktop features as MacOS. Eventually it will to replace the need for MacBook as iPad Pro gains more MacOS ported features. MacBook and MacBook Pro can continue along in parallel as this happens until it makes no sense to buy them anymore. Give me a trackpad and adjustable hinge on a smart keyboard that attaches to the 12.9 inch and a few more Apple native MacOS apps ported over and I'm good. Terminal, etc. They already are taking the steps to go in that direction. Dock, Multitasking, Files (aka Finder lite).
MacOS is already feeling like it is falling behind in features in some way. HomeKit, lack of App availability. I think if Apple had an opportunity to get people off MacOS and only one common iOS platform (TV, iPhone, iPad, iPad Pro (Desktop replacement) ), then they would take it. If they can get people to move from MacOS on MacBook to iOS on iPad Pro by providing enough Desktop features in iOS, then I think they would be in a much stronger market position on the Desktop. More Apps, more secure OS, less SW development efforts using a unified SW platform.
I dont have a magic 8 ball, however indications do seem like they are heading in this direction. I have no pressing reason to upgrade to High Sierra. It just not that much of a feature release for me and I suspect others. The MacOS team has obviously focused on something else over the past year.
Merger of iOS and macOS won't happen. This urban legend is baked again and again at every product launch and Apple execs reject that again and again at every occasion.
These two belong to different realms. One is consumer electronics, the other is highly parallel high performance computing. Apple is not detached from its high performance computing roots and thanks to that it is able to deliver so powerful consumer devices.
Wanna know what macOS team is focused to? Wait for the iMac Pro.
I don't expect them to merge. I expect iOS on iPad Pro 12.9" to transition the customer for those who typically use 12" MacBooks today. As far as what is and isn't happening... How do we explain the new Dock on iPad, the Files app (which is Finder), and multi windows multitasking on iOS 11 for iPad?. It seems I have seen that concept on Mac prior. Tim Cook make it pretty clear what the aspirations are for the iPad Pro as a replacement a laptop.
12" Macbook already targets iPad users since the beginning, those who need true macOS power in the footprint of an iPad. It is finished, it is complete and won't evolve further as a form factor. iOS 11 Files and multiple windows cannot be compared to macOS, they are only rough approximations. macOS and iOS differ primarily on precision data selection. macOS is built from the ground-up for precision data selection, like any other desktop operating system. You cannot select multiple data objects in a snap like you do in macOS, you need a mouse pointer for this. Even if multiple selection is allowed in iOS, you must select objects one by one by tapping. Not a big timesaver for productivity work. You can select multiple objects, move them, and even drop them onto another window or application but that's all. The idea of an iPad Pro as a replacement laptop is absolutely true, but provided that the identity of the iPad is preserved.
The touch interface is not conceived for precision data selection. We all know what a nightmare selecting text in iOS is.
Same for multi processor use case. How many general computational cores are in the A11? It seems that multitasking on iOS is not an afterthought anymore.
iOS is significantly different in that it is designed for short interactions and short work sessions. "Launch and forget" type computing jobs and the true preemptive multitasking they require have no place in iOS. iOS kills such "launch and forget" type applications already, before you even forget them.
So, I already answered the rest of your comment by this.
With the power of the A11 Apple has opened up a world of opportunity and options that few people currently imagine.
Particularly when you combine the A11 with an external GPU, you get a device you can carry in your pocket capable of driving large screen applications... And, with that, you get say, a single device serving as a smart phone, laptop and desktop by simply plugging into the appropriate screen and peripherals.
But then you come to newer technologies of self driving cars trucks, augmented reality, home automation, robotics, and business & industrial applications...
This is where Steve excelled: applying technology to meeting needs people didn't even know that they had. Since his death, technological progress has been mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But the A11 (as well as its successors) could enable the revolution. Tim obviously will not be up to the challenge. But, will TIm's Apple? The history of the Apple Watch says "Yes!"
Still pushing the toaster fridge idea, which frankly, makes you sound like you are completely full of shit. For the record, the industry is striving to get away from plugs and cables, and you are advocating for more of the same cable connections. People, by and large, aren't asking for what you are pushing, so it is both a bad idea, and would, again, be a failure in the market. There were enough of these out there in the last decade to prove it a bad idea.
Don't like what Tim is doing?
Buy something other that Apple and move on, or better, start you own company, like Essential, and break barriers, or something, something.
LOL... If it was up to you, we would still be back in the Mac era... Time to move on for some of us. You seem to be stuck in the mud.
With the power of the A11 Apple has opened up a world of opportunity and options that few people currently imagine.
Particularly when you combine the A11 with an external GPU, you get a device you can carry in your pocket capable of driving large screen applications... And, with that, you get say, a single device serving as a smart phone, laptop and desktop by simply plugging into the appropriate screen and peripherals.
But then you come to newer technologies of self driving cars trucks, augmented reality, home automation, robotics, and business & industrial applications...
This is where Steve excelled: applying technology to meeting needs people didn't even know that they had. Since his death, technological progress has been mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But the A11 (as well as its successors) could enable the revolution. Tim obviously will not be up to the challenge. But, will TIm's Apple? The history of the Apple Watch says "Yes!"
Still pushing the toaster fridge idea, which frankly, makes you sound like you are completely full of shit. For the record, the industry is striving to get away from plugs and cables, and you are advocating for more of the same cable connections. People, by and large, aren't asking for what you are pushing, so it is both a bad idea, and would, again, be a failure in the market. There were enough of these out there in the last decade to prove it a bad idea.
Don't like what Tim is doing?
Buy something other that Apple and move on, or better, start you own company, like Essential, and break barriers, or something, something.
LOL... If it was up to you, we would still be back in the Mac era... Time to move on for some of us. You seem to be stuck in the mud.
I reached down in that mud, looking for your magical "appropriate screen and peripherals" and, of course, they don't exist. Why would anyone want to build them? This is no more useful than the modular phone, and certainly less viable.
Who would have thought a phone would be doing what it's doing now when the iPhone came out 10 years ago. I highest level of what we thought was possible was the Crackberry.
It really dates media like Casino Royale, which came out two months before the iPhone was introduced, to show simulacra of what we all wanted from our phones. Bond uses a Sony Ericsson candy bar phone in that film that is, of course, tricked out with magical spy-style tracking software and a Retina display (because how else could it have fit that 3D revolving hotel map on a 1.5" screen!) because… that's the best kind of phone we had at the time and the fantasy elements just had to work around that. The iPhone was a fantasy made reality just two months later.
There's a good line in the Rifftrax of the film during that scene. Spoken as a tagline for a commercial, "Sony Ericsson: Our Phones Can't Actually Do This!"
I find it tiresome to watch movies that were released B.i. The world was so much more primitive then.
It's nice that the A11 outperforms the CPUs of other vendors, but the main question is: does it really matter? I am using my iPhone 6s for calling, web browsing, emailing, checking my calendar, taking notes, paying, chatting, taking photos, checking bank account, playing music, checking public transport timetable. And for none of these actions my iPhone 6s feels sluggish. How impressive the A11 may be, I am not at all convinced that I will be more productive with a faster CPU. One might say that the A11 is needed for face recognition, but I fail to see the advantage of face recognition versus TouchID. I am pretty sure ApplyPay with face recognition will be more cumbersome ans slower to use than the current ApplePay. The fact that I have to turn the phone to my face is inherently slower than putting my finger on the home button.
As a user with low requirements for performance, you can also benefit from the increased performance that the A11 brings. Faster processors get even basic tasks completed much sooner allowing the CPU to re-enter low power states sooner....thus giving extended battery performance, on top of the increased efficiencies in the new design.
On top of being better for the environment because I.phones are more power efficient per unit of compute capability delivered. This is evident in the fact they use smaller batteries and yet still achieve time between charge periods similar the the competition with their much larger batteries.
Maybe Apple has been working on a MacBookAir with A12 ...
I really doubt an ARM based Mac will happen in any near future. The problem isn't the power - the problem is software. The Mac is used to *create* software for many platforms - not just iOS and Mac. I use it to create Java-based applications that run on all sorts of platforms. Others use Macs to write Python- C, C++ based applications. None of these languages/tools will be available (at least initially) on an ARM-based Mac. And then there are of course the commercial third-party applications - x86 based Macs already occupy a pretty small market compared to Windows-based machines. An ARM-based Mac would occupy an even smaller niche - how many 3rd-party vendors would bother writing/selling applications for it?
I guess if an ARM-based Mac could run iOS apps and help the open source community port development tools (e.g. JVM, Apache stuff, etc.), there's a chance - but it'll take a lot of time.
I agree. I used to think one was coming but no more. It's iOS / ARM for mainstream computing and macOS / Intel for more heavy-lifting computing.
They are already position the iPad Pro line as a replacement for the desktop for some people. This year, the macOS update was minor tweak of Sierra relative to past releases. While they made it clear that iPad Pro will be heading more into the Desktop space by bring up more multitasking features, File management and the Dock. If you don't want to think about MacBook with an A12, then I think you can safely agree that they will put a A12X into the next iPad Pro. What if iOS12, add even more features from macOS. The 12.9" iPad Pro is already large enough to have a full size keyboard attached via smart connector. They have enough space in that footprint to add a trackpad. We have Office for iOS plus all of the Apple office apps. Port the rest of the MacOS apps that come with MacOS to iOS, like Terminal, update the RAM, and I'm sold for a travel computer for typical light tasks.
It makes sense to me to migrate away from Intel as all of Apple other platforms are based on iOS and their own ARM cores. From a software development point of view, this would be a huge advance of they could get rid of Intel eventually and just focus on on their ARM cores and iOS.
Who would have thought a phone would be doing what it's doing now when the iPhone came out 10 years ago. I highest level of what we thought was possible was the Crackberry.
It really dates media like Casino Royale, which came out two months before the iPhone was introduced, to show simulacra of what we all wanted from our phones. Bond uses a Sony Ericsson candy bar phone in that film that is, of course, tricked out with magical spy-style tracking software and a Retina display (because how else could it have fit that 3D revolving hotel map on a 1.5" screen!) because… that's the best kind of phone we had at the time and the fantasy elements just had to work around that. The iPhone was a fantasy made reality just two months later.
There's a good line in the Rifftrax of the film during that scene. Spoken as a tagline for a commercial, "Sony Ericsson: Our Phones Can't Actually Do This!"
I find it tiresome to watch movies that were released B.i. The world was so much more primitive then.
I find it funny to watch hi-tech action or spy movies or series from the 2000's that showcase phones/PDAs. Seeing Jack Bauer in "24" holding his palmOS phone (or whatever it was...it changed quite frequently pre-iPhone era) makes me chuckle.
We can’t edit posts more than 4 hours old, so here’s a photo I was now able to grab to highlight my point. Sony Ericsson: Our Phones Can’t Actually Do This!
I sort of want to work out the math of just how small those words are at the bottom of the screen (and how many pixels would be needed to display them!)…
Comments
These two belong to different realms. One is consumer electronics, the other is highly parallel high performance computing. Apple is not detached from its high performance computing roots and thanks to that it is able to deliver so powerful consumer devices.
Wanna know what macOS team is focused to? Wait for the iMac Pro.
And yet again, we hear that same tired BS... Sigh...
AFAIR, In those tests iPhone7 outperformed both in resolution dependent, as well as independent tests by quite a significant margin, so why the frack are we still talking about that, year later? And the same stuff happened to iPhone6s and whatever was running the show on Android side back then.
Same for multi processor use case. How many general computational cores are in the A11? It seems that multitasking on iOS is not an afterthought anymore.
I'm not saying MacOS will go away, I'm just saying it will become less and less relevant in the space that is being targeted by iPad Pro. ie. MacBook will be first. Then MacBook Pro a bit later. Will it get to targeting iMac Pro and MacPro? Not in the near furture. But.. ask me again in 10 years. ;-) Who would have thought a phone would be doing what it's doing now when the iPhone came out 10 years ago. I highest level of what we thought was possible was the Crackberry.
There's a good line in the Rifftrax of the film during that scene. Spoken as a tagline for a commercial, "Sony Ericsson: Our Phones Can't Actually Do This!"
Is this a Pentile screen and what is different about it that it is not like those bad Pentile screens that Android phones have.
How does this compare to the screen on the S8.
How many years till we have a OLED screen on the iPad Pro.
Unfortunately I think 3-4 years.
As a user with low requirements for performance, you can also benefit from the increased performance that the A11 brings. Faster processors get even basic tasks completed much sooner allowing the CPU to re-enter low power states sooner....thus giving extended battery performance, on top of the increased efficiencies in the new design.
Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation and until further testing is performed with actual handsets, you can't draw a conclusion that resolution plays a part. I know from experience that Geekbench can return multiple different scores when ran many times in succession. We don't know who uploaded these scores and whether they were on shipping silicon with GM or beta firmwares. They literally have no controls in place to posit any theories.
The touch interface is not conceived for precision data selection. We all know what a nightmare selecting text in iOS is.
iOS is significantly different in that it is designed for short interactions and short work sessions. "Launch and forget" type computing jobs and the true preemptive multitasking they require have no place in iOS. iOS kills such "launch and forget" type applications already, before you even forget them.
So, I already answered the rest of your comment by this.
We have Office for iOS plus all of the Apple office apps. Port the rest of the MacOS apps that come with MacOS to iOS, like Terminal, update the RAM, and I'm sold for a travel computer for typical light tasks.
It makes sense to me to migrate away from Intel as all of Apple other platforms are based on iOS and their own ARM cores. From a software development point of view, this would be a huge advance of they could get rid of Intel eventually and just focus on on their ARM cores and iOS.
I sort of want to work out the math of just how small those words are at the bottom of the screen (and how many pixels would be needed to display them!)…