Intel supplies hundreds of millions of computer cpu's a year. That's just for laptops and towers. They produce tens of millions more for netbooks and other smaller devices, and a hundred million or more for embedded use.
That is easier done with older chips or chips that have been ramped up. Dell can grab a new chip that is still in limited production as Intel is still working out production issues and advertise that they have the newest Intel CPU as a BTO option well before Apple can convert their ENTIRE notebook and AIO line to use these CPUs.
Yeah, he shouldn't have said never, but given Microsoft's mobile track record, let's just say it's unlikely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Logisticaldron
2006 Q2 Apple sold Apple shipped 1.11M Macs. In 2009 Q2 Apple sold 2.22M Macs. That is double, and that doesn’t account for the fact that many of those Macs in the 2006 quarter were still PPC-based Macs. You just can’t keep growing and expect that supply will not outreach demand, especially when you are trying to grab the latest and greatest before production has ramped up.
I can't find hard numbers, but I think it's reasonable to say that Intel makes about 60 million processors a quarter, based on having 80% of the desktop/notebook CPU market, and 300 million computers sold in a year. I don't know what their capacity is, but if demand keeps growing, I'm sure they can expand their capacity. But Apple's 2.22 million isn't huge in terms of what Intel produces. If there is a shortage, Apple can easily outbid other companies to keep their supply.
I'm not questioning your credentials. If anything, I was asking you to elucidate on some of the points you made earlier since few people posting here seemed to have any idea about what's practical in supply chain or manufacturing. What metrics might be ok for one company may be insufficient for another. For example, the article AI just posted "Apple, Microsoft trade places selling iPod touch and Zune HD" talks about the fact that the new Zune OLED screen is expensive. Microsoft & Sony might be willing to make a sacrifice in per-unit profit margin in order to gain marketshare against Apple. Apple might have looked on the decision as "do we sacrifice significant profit margin here in order to have the latest screen technology"? Apple's profit margins are the envy of the industry for a hardware company and accounts a lot for that P/E ratio approaching 30. It may have been one in many factors that made the difference in what screen technology they went with.
As far as your audio experience, I'd be curious to find out which company and what's in your rack right now.
Let's talk prices then.
MS goes to a large OLED manufacturer and integrator and asks for a screen with a multitouch layer and a glass layer, all bonded together.
Let's say, just to make it simpler, that MS's screen is 3.5" and 480 x 320, the same as Apple's, instead of being smaller with less rez,
The company asks how many they will need for the contract's completion, and what's the expected monthly flow.
MS, based upon past sales, and expected new sales says, one million, with an average monthly flow of 83,300.
The manufacturer says to them, ok, that's $60 per screen for you."
It's just a number, so please don't argue it.
Now, Apple goes to the same manufacturer and asks for the same exact assembly.
They say, 40 million with an average monthly flow of 3.33 million a month.
The manufacturer says, "Ok, that's $30 per screen for you."
Profit margins for Apple aren't a problem. It's the much smaller manufacturers who have the problem. This is one reason why it's thought that MS loses money on every Zune it sells, while Apple is making a very high margin on theirs.
My company was called Magnum Opus, though we later changed that to Peacetime Communications. We sold the company a long time ago to JBL. I was later a long time partner in a commercial film Lab here in NYC, until we sold that about five years ago.
I have done design work and manufacturing on my own for Showtime, HBO and others, and design, and manufacturer prototypes for various companies.
I already mentioned the Yonahs. That was almost three months before anyone else got them.
Apple started putting Yonah in MacBook in May 2006 - Yonah was introduced in Nov 2005. Now Apple may have been the first company to put Yonah in a Laptop (perhaps no one else bothered because they went from Dothan to Conroe (Pentium M to Core 2)).
I think Apple's original strategy (when they announced Intel in 2005) was probably to go straight to Core 2 (64-bit). Yonah just happened to be around to fulfill a promise, and although it's a great chip (I have a 2006 MacBook), having 32/64-bit Intels now is probably a pain for Apple. That's speculation on my part though.
That is easier done with older chips or chips that have been ramped up. Dell can grab a new chip that is still in limited production as Intel is still working out production issues and advertise that they have the newest Intel CPU as a BTO option well before Apple can convert their ENTIRE notebook and AIO line to use these CPUs.
It's just the way Apple works. Many PC manufacturers come out with new mobo's every quarter. Many jump on every new chip that's out there.
Apple doesn't do that. They change their machines at a more stately pace (that wasn't always so), so they want to get it just so first.
Apple started putting Yonah in MacBook in May 2006 - Yonah was introduced in Nov 2005. Now Apple may have been the first company to put Yonah in a Laptop (perhaps no one else bothered because they went from Dothan to Conroe (Pentium M to Core 2)).
I think Apple's original strategy (when they announced Intel in 2005) was probably to go straight to Core 2 (64-bit). Yonah just happened to be around to fulfill a promise, and although it's a great chip (I have a 2006 MacBook), having 32/64-bit Intels now is probably a pain for Apple. That's speculation on my part though.
It likely was their intent, but it wasn't ready in time.
And at length. The OLED section alone made the same points at least three times.
Quote:
Originally Posted by djsherly
...the OLED news is disappointing - I had an OLED screen on a Moto flip phone.. ..and it seemed bright enough. I wonder what gives today?
The link off this paragraph points at a gallery of pictures. It also assumes that all OLEDs are the same. We know that Apple for instance can put inferior LCDs on their screens
Additionally, the fact that OLEDs degrade faster than LCDs is a moot point given the half life of one particular OLED panel is about 17,0000 hours. The device would have been replaced some time before then.
My new Samsung TL320 P&S has an "AMOLED" screen (and claims to be the first cam to have one). It's totally viewable in noonday sun, and the useable viewing angle is amazing. No color/reflective negative shift at all when seen from extreme angles, and I get plenty of "great screen" comments out in the world.
So is this a different tech from "regular" OLED (whatever that means) in any fundamental way, e.g., power consumption, brightness, lifetime, etc?
Also, thanks for lessening my anxiety, since 17,000 hours should do me for a month or two anyway. LoLz. And PS, congrats for being in the 5% who know it's "moot point" rather than a "mute" one.....
Quote:
Originally Posted by karmamule
Actually you get to keep 10 DRM-free MP3s a month as part of your $15 subscription cost. Most of the songs on my iPhone at this point are from my Zune subscription!
So, as long as you were going to be buying at least 10 songs per month anyways, then that means you're only paying an extra $5 bucks for access to those millions of songs.
Oh, and most of those other services you talk about do NOT let you exactly specify playlist order, listen to entire CDs at once, etc.. Oh, and most of them don't let you store that music for offline listening.. and ..you can't specify exactly what you want to hear and in what order.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dominiej
What the article fails to mention is the good points of the Zune HD like Xbox360 integration, wireless syncing, [plus Zune Pass, etc., etc]- making it have the ability to reflect the owner, than just be another player with a fruit on the back.
You've hit one key point I didn't see at all in the first three pages, nor in the article. The Zune HD is NOT the ballgame for Zune, which is being positioned, like Bing, as a platform, in this case for a variety of media initiatives.
XBox 360 integration is one of those next steps. Further down the road expect to see Zune software in WinMobile 7, meaning MS won't have to manufacture a full line of Zunes, but let all of its phone partners make them. Beyond that, again finally learning some lessons about branding and keeping evolution backward compatible, Zune software will probably replace or at least become the guts of Windows Media Player - reducing its number of music platforms to one that's extensible - and MS may also do something Zuny on the web as part of the Live stable. It could also be integrated into its Sync car software (that Ford is using) - or directly into car stereos from other manufacturers - and selling software to hardware makers and end users is still 95% of how MS has always made its living - not from selling hardware.
Full disclosure: I got this line of thought from Paul Thurrot's Windows Weekly podcast where he says he's been discussing all of this with MS.
He also suggested, now that Apple's approved a Rhapsody app, a Vonage App and has been nudged by the FCC on Google Voice, that they'd have a hard time not allowing, drumroll please, a Zune App for the iPhone and Touch, which would definitely score tons of irony points if nothing else.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
I can't find hard numbers, but I think it's reasonable to say that Intel makes about 60 million processors a quarter, based on having 80% of the desktop/notebook CPU market, and 300 million computers sold in a year. I don't know what their capacity is, but if demand keeps growing, I'm sure they can expand their capacity. But Apple's 2.22 million isn't huge in terms of what Intel produces. If there is a shortage, Apple can easily outbid other companies to keep their supply.
It doesn’t sounds like we’re talking about 40M CPUs from Intel’s entire production line. It sounds like getting an excessive amount of Intel CPU that have just gone into production and not at full production. Brand new, next generation hardware. They produce small quantities at first, then slowly increase production as they can. Once production is in full swing I have no doubt that Intel can get Apple whatever it needs, but at first these very small batches will not suit a large operation like Apple, but can suit Dell just fine who need next to nothing in comparison for there barely sold, high-end, BTO machines.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
Back to you.....
I don't see that as being possible. A subscription requires DRM. Apple has never had MS DRM on their machines, and I don't see that happening now. This seems like pie in the sky.
The only place where he's partly wrong is about the OLED screen.
Otherwise you will find just about the same information elsewhere.
I know that's it's also politically correct to slam his articles because they often contain some errors, but mostly, they are correct.
We're going to see overly optimistic reviews on a number of other sites, that like a few earlier Zune reviews give opinions that most people after using the device and its software for a while won't agree with, so perhaps we should slam those articles as well.
Again, what the f--k is the point of this article on AI? Dilger has never touched the Zune HD and probably never will. 99% of the people on this site will agree that the Zune HD is already destined to be an also-ran PMP. The article is just fanboy nonsense regardless of what percentage is right or wrong. If he's going to go on for 3 pages of crap (I stopped reading halfway through the first page since all I could really see him saying was, "Microsoft sucks. Apple rules."), why not mention the strengths of the Zune HD?
Both you and him try to negate the nicety of having an HD Radio tuner built in. I have one in my car and that piece of gear is definitely something that will come with me to my next vehicle. HD Radio channels DO sound better than their analog counterparts. They obviously have no static and that alone makes them sound better even if they are broadcast at the same bit rate as the analog version. And nearly every major station in my area is broadcasting in HD plus several have secondary digital channels as well.
Everyone slams the Zune pass but I subscribe to Rhapsody to use it on my 2 TiVo's and I love it. It makes we wish I wasn't stuck with a Mac so I could use the unlimited downloads feature. No, music subscriptions aren't for everyone but it works for me. It's great to get to listen to a full album before I commit to buying it. And it's really nice to listen to songs that I want to hear but don't want to buy the album. I love 80's music and it's fun to explore the rest of one-hit-wonders catalogs.
And it's also really nice that it can play back 720p video files despite the display resolution not matching. It seems really nice to not have to download both and SD and HD version of a file like the iTunes kludgy solution. No, you won't fit many full length HD movies on the Zune HD, but you won't fit all that many SD movies on an iPod Touch or iPhone either.
Just like this article's author I've never touched a Zune HD, but it sounds like a competent media player. Too bad very few people on this site will look past their fanboy-ism to get it a fair chance. Does it match a Touch for features? No, but who cares? If Microsoft worked on the Xbox 360 integration, it could be a really compelling companion to that game machine. It would be even better if Microsoft removed the PC from the equation and let the console be the device's sync hub.
MS goes to a large OLED manufacturer and integrator and asks for a screen with a multitouch layer and a glass layer, all bonded together.
Let's say, just to make it simpler, that MS's screen is 3.5" and 480 x 320, the same as Apple's, instead of being smaller with less rez,
The company asks how many they will need for the contract's completion, and what's the expected monthly flow.
MS, based upon past sales, and expected new sales says, one million, with an average monthly flow of 83,300.
The manufacturer says to them, ok, that's $60 per screen for you."
It's just a number, so please don't argue it.
Now, Apple goes to the same manufacturer and asks for the same exact assembly.
They say, 40 million with an average monthly flow of 3.33 million a month.
The manufacturer says, "Ok, that's $30 per screen for you."
Profit margins for Apple aren't a problem. It's the much smaller manufacturers who have the problem. This is one reason why it's thought that MS loses money on every Zune it sells, while Apple is making a very high margin on theirs.
My company was called Magnum Opus, though we later changed that to Peacetime Communications. We sold the company a long time ago to JBL. I was later a long time partner in a commercial film Lab here in NYC, until we sold that about five years ago.
I have done design work and manufacturing on my own for Showtime, HBO and others, and design, and manufacturer prototypes for various companies.
Good points. But I could easily see Apple saying to a vendor, "well we're getting our current screens for $18" (like your example, just a number). "If we do a $30 screen, we might have to charge an additional $50 to the retail price just to keep our proper margins. Also, you tell me that the failure rate of your product in 30 days is 2% while our current product is .06%" So if we keep our profit margin where the street expects, we may shave off 500,000 unit sales this year as some customers choose the cheaper older Touch or (worse) choose a Zune. And given the projected failure rate, our warranty costs for this part are projected to more than triple, which eats into margins as well."
All I'm saying is that we have no idea all the metrics that went into Apple's decision not to go OLED with this cycle of product but I can speculate on some reasonable theories. Again, Sony and Microsoft may be looking strictly to poach market share by going with a product feature that is really sexy but makes the product that much unprofitable. Given how entrenched Apple's marketshare and mindshare is, they might figure it's the only way in the game until they have enough critical mass to force suppliers to give them better prices. Apple's investments in the Flash RAM markets is a classic example of a company who gets far better prices than anyone else due to the sheer number of pieces than can order and their ability to pre-pay for large shipments of product months in advance. The Palm Pre launch is a classic example where Apple's 16g iPhone 3G was the same price as the 8g Pre at launch. Apple's component costs including things like lithium batteries, Flash RAM and LCD screens were lower than Palm's.
Nice to read about your background. Pleased to meet you.
I actually have a little background in this, so let me take a whack at it...
Traditional LCD screens produce a color image by selectively filtering down a white light source, the backlight. As the name implies, the backlight lies at the back of the screen, and fires forward toward the viewer. Most backlights use CCFL tubes, while those on high-end televisions sometimes use LEDs instead.
Of the total amount of light produced, only a tiny fraction makes it through the entire screen. The filtering starts by removing over 1/2 of the light that's not polarized in the right direction. It then flows through a series of colored filters, LCD shutters and another polarizer on the front. In a typical display, only about 10% of the light at the back of the screen reaches the viewer.
LED's produce light directly on their front surface in the color you want, so almost 100% of the light they produce reaches your eye. Modern devices are more efficient than a CCFL as well, so the amount of energy needed to produce any given image is much lower for LEDs than LCDs. Unfortunately, traditional LEDs are fairly large, and not really suitable for television-like displays.
Into this void steps the OLED, which uses a printable technology that can scale down to useful sizes. Although the OLED is not efficient as the traditional LED, the overall end-to-end performance is still much better than an LCD of the same brightness. OLED screens require about 1/2 as much power as an LCD to display an all-white image (the most efficient image one an LCD can display) and are generally much more efficient as most images contain colors or graduations in brightness.
There, that is an accurate description of the technologies involved.
No, SOME of today's OLED panels are. Others are much brigher. Seeing as you didn't actually see the Zune and based your entire article on supposition from a photo series on Engaget, let's turn to someone that actually has seen the new device, Ars:
Everything I've heard states in normal use it is much brighter than the iPhone. It is entirely possible that it has problems outdoors, likely even, but the iPhone is hardly perfect here either.
They last more than long enough for a device that is essentially disposable over a period of 2 to 3 years.
This statement is absolutely false. OLED screens use, less power than an LCD of the same size and brightness. Period. Can I put numbers to this? Sure:
This post suggests they will use about 30% of the power of the equivalent CCFL backlit LCD, like the one in the iPhone.
"Considering it's got an energy-saving OLED screen, we were disappointed with the battery life of the Jet. Perhaps the powerful processor puts some extra drain on the juice, but the promised 180 minutes of talk time and 250 hours' standby translated into a barely a day of moderate use."
And they guessed it was the processor, which strikes me as just as informed as your guess. Of course, it could be neither of these things.
Perhaps it's because Apple sells millions of devices a year, and current production lines can't handle that load. Whereas MS, which sells perhaps 1/20th the number, doesn't present any particular strain.
Your knowledge of the OLED market appears as limited as your knowledge of its technology.
Maury
From your very poor understanding LED-backlit technology i assume rest of your post is total BS as well. Shame you claim you "have a little background in this" until this is micro-little. I guess you just read Wikipedia article with no understanding what you are reading about.
I'm sorry you didn't get the camera, but the ZuneHD doesn't have on either. This article provided some additional insight for me, but I am also taking it with a grain of salt. Whether or not the HD Radio will be more useful than a regular FM radio is largely irrelevant when the iPod Touch doesn't have a radio at all. On the other hand I don't think OLED or the HD radio will be a big selling point, and I would consider the graphics and processing capabilities to be similar (iPod Touch has the stronger processor, ZuneHD the stronger graphics processor). If 720p output is important, Apple can activate it with a firmware update. Whether or not this thing flops will come down probably come down to software. We will have to wait and see.
You've hit one key point I didn't see at all in the first three pages, nor in the article. The Zune HD is NOT the ballgame for Zune, which is being positioned, like Bing, as a platform, in this case for a variety of media initiatives.
XBox 360 integration is one of those next steps. Further down the road expect to see Zune software in WinMobile 7, meaning MS won't have to manufacture a full line of Zunes, but let all of its phone partners make them. Beyond that, again finally learning some lessons about branding and keeping evolution backward compatible, Zune software will probably replace or at least become the guts of Windows Media Player - reducing its number of music platforms to one that's extensible - and MS may also do something Zuny on the web as part of the Live stable. It could also be integrated into its Sync car software (that Ford is using) - or directly into car stereos from other manufacturers - and selling software to hardware makers and end users is still 95% of how MS has always made its living - not from selling hardware.
Full disclosure: I got this line of thought from Paul Thurrot's Windows Weekly podcast where he says he's been discussing all of this with MS.
He also suggested, now that Apple's approved a Rhapsody app, a Vonage App and has been nudged by the FCC on Google Voice, that they'd have a hard time not allowing, drumroll please, a Zune App for the iPhone and Touch, which would definitely score tons of irony points if nothing else.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
Q: Will it open up for third-party app developers?
A: It's hard to say right now. If you look around the company at other places where things like this are important, Windows Mobile rises to the top. They have devices which are always connected, which make applications like maps really cool and important.
On a sometimes-connected device, what people are using them for are games. So what we didn't want to do was build two parallel app store experiences that didn't work together.
Right now our product roadmaps didn't line up perfectly for us to snap to what they're doing or vice versa. That being said, we know people want things like this on their devices so we're going to build them ourselves, they're going to be super high-quality, and they're going to be free.
Down the road if there's a way we can work with Windows Mobile or another group inside the company that's building an app store and take advantage of that, that's something we'll look into.
Or as Jon Gruber over at Daring Fireball dryly translates it,
Quote:
No, because our mobile strategy is a convoluted mess.
"However, Tegra isn't a scaled down version of NVIDIA's PC graphics GPUs. Instead, it's based on technology NVIDIA acquired in its purchase of fabless chip designer PortalPlayer in 2007."
Got any source info on this?
I can see NVidia using PortalPlayer tech for fixed function codec acceleration, but NVidia using PortalPlayer tech as a base for OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn't sound right.
Wow Im used to extremely slanted stories on here, but the bitterness to which this article was written feels like the Zune inventor slept with the authors wife or something.
"The radically different manufacturing process of OLEDs lends itself to many advantages over flat-panel displays made with LCD technology. Since OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable substrate using an inkjet printer or even screen printing technologies,[43] they can theoretically have a significantly lower cost than LCDs or plasma displays.[citation needed] Printing OLEDs onto flexible substrates opens the door to new applications such as roll-up displays and displays embedded in fabrics or clothing.
OLEDs enable a greater range of colors, gamut, brightness, contrast (both DR and static) and viewing angle than LCDs because OLED pixels directly emit light. OLED pixel colors appear correct and unshifted, even as the viewing angle approaches 90 degrees from normal. LCDs use a backlight and cannot show true black, while an off OLED element produces no light and consumes no power. Energy is also wasted in LCDs because they require polarizers that filter out about half of the light emitted by the backlight. Additionally, color filters in most color LCDs filter out two-thirds of the light; technology to separate backlight colors by diffraction has not been widely adopted.[citation needed]
OLEDs also have a faster response time than standard LCD screens. Whereas the fastest LCD displays currently have a 2ms response time (manufacturer's quote), an OLED can have less than 0.01ms response time.[44]"
- From wikipedia, and you can travel there yourself to look at the citations.
and as far as the display's life being "too short," how many people still use their mp3 players from five years ago, which is the average time it takes to show any degradation in screen quality (even blues).
point one from fanboys = FAIL.
should i go on, or will you guys just go to the store and see how much pretty and responsive it is. don't worry. your head wont explode since these are all just TOYS, but grab your ipod touch and a zune hd, turn them both to the side, watch which one works faster and smoother.
nobody cares what you pick, zune or ipod, but i want competition so apple will get off their asses and start innovating again. It took microsoft 3 years to catch up on something 8 years in the making. apple needs to get a move on.
Comments
Intel supplies hundreds of millions of computer cpu's a year. That's just for laptops and towers. They produce tens of millions more for netbooks and other smaller devices, and a hundred million or more for embedded use.
That is easier done with older chips or chips that have been ramped up. Dell can grab a new chip that is still in limited production as Intel is still working out production issues and advertise that they have the newest Intel CPU as a BTO option well before Apple can convert their ENTIRE notebook and AIO line to use these CPUs.
Wow, you have power to foresee the future.
Yeah, he shouldn't have said never, but given Microsoft's mobile track record, let's just say it's unlikely.
2006 Q2 Apple sold Apple shipped 1.11M Macs. In 2009 Q2 Apple sold 2.22M Macs. That is double, and that doesn’t account for the fact that many of those Macs in the 2006 quarter were still PPC-based Macs. You just can’t keep growing and expect that supply will not outreach demand, especially when you are trying to grab the latest and greatest before production has ramped up.
I can't find hard numbers, but I think it's reasonable to say that Intel makes about 60 million processors a quarter, based on having 80% of the desktop/notebook CPU market, and 300 million computers sold in a year. I don't know what their capacity is, but if demand keeps growing, I'm sure they can expand their capacity. But Apple's 2.22 million isn't huge in terms of what Intel produces. If there is a shortage, Apple can easily outbid other companies to keep their supply.
I'm not questioning your credentials. If anything, I was asking you to elucidate on some of the points you made earlier since few people posting here seemed to have any idea about what's practical in supply chain or manufacturing. What metrics might be ok for one company may be insufficient for another. For example, the article AI just posted "Apple, Microsoft trade places selling iPod touch and Zune HD" talks about the fact that the new Zune OLED screen is expensive. Microsoft & Sony might be willing to make a sacrifice in per-unit profit margin in order to gain marketshare against Apple. Apple might have looked on the decision as "do we sacrifice significant profit margin here in order to have the latest screen technology"? Apple's profit margins are the envy of the industry for a hardware company and accounts a lot for that P/E ratio approaching 30. It may have been one in many factors that made the difference in what screen technology they went with.
As far as your audio experience, I'd be curious to find out which company and what's in your rack right now.
Let's talk prices then.
MS goes to a large OLED manufacturer and integrator and asks for a screen with a multitouch layer and a glass layer, all bonded together.
Let's say, just to make it simpler, that MS's screen is 3.5" and 480 x 320, the same as Apple's, instead of being smaller with less rez,
The company asks how many they will need for the contract's completion, and what's the expected monthly flow.
MS, based upon past sales, and expected new sales says, one million, with an average monthly flow of 83,300.
The manufacturer says to them, ok, that's $60 per screen for you."
It's just a number, so please don't argue it.
Now, Apple goes to the same manufacturer and asks for the same exact assembly.
They say, 40 million with an average monthly flow of 3.33 million a month.
The manufacturer says, "Ok, that's $30 per screen for you."
Profit margins for Apple aren't a problem. It's the much smaller manufacturers who have the problem. This is one reason why it's thought that MS loses money on every Zune it sells, while Apple is making a very high margin on theirs.
My company was called Magnum Opus, though we later changed that to Peacetime Communications. We sold the company a long time ago to JBL. I was later a long time partner in a commercial film Lab here in NYC, until we sold that about five years ago.
I have done design work and manufacturing on my own for Showtime, HBO and others, and design, and manufacturer prototypes for various companies.
That is exactly right, but they all have upper limits. This is not a new phenomenon. Nothing can be scaled indefinitely.
Of course, If Apple had needed 10 million Yonah chips in a couple of months at that early time, even Intel would have had a problem supplying them.
I already mentioned the Yonahs. That was almost three months before anyone else got them.
Apple started putting Yonah in MacBook in May 2006 - Yonah was introduced in Nov 2005. Now Apple may have been the first company to put Yonah in a Laptop (perhaps no one else bothered because they went from Dothan to Conroe (Pentium M to Core 2)).
I think Apple's original strategy (when they announced Intel in 2005) was probably to go straight to Core 2 (64-bit). Yonah just happened to be around to fulfill a promise, and although it's a great chip (I have a 2006 MacBook), having 32/64-bit Intels now is probably a pain for Apple. That's speculation on my part though.
That is easier done with older chips or chips that have been ramped up. Dell can grab a new chip that is still in limited production as Intel is still working out production issues and advertise that they have the newest Intel CPU as a BTO option well before Apple can convert their ENTIRE notebook and AIO line to use these CPUs.
It's just the way Apple works. Many PC manufacturers come out with new mobo's every quarter. Many jump on every new chip that's out there.
Apple doesn't do that. They change their machines at a more stately pace (that wasn't always so), so they want to get it just so first.
Yeah, he shouldn't have said never, but given Microsoft's mobile track record, let's just say it's unlikely.
Let's stick "highly" in there.
Apple started putting Yonah in MacBook in May 2006 - Yonah was introduced in Nov 2005. Now Apple may have been the first company to put Yonah in a Laptop (perhaps no one else bothered because they went from Dothan to Conroe (Pentium M to Core 2)).
I think Apple's original strategy (when they announced Intel in 2005) was probably to go straight to Core 2 (64-bit). Yonah just happened to be around to fulfill a promise, and although it's a great chip (I have a 2006 MacBook), having 32/64-bit Intels now is probably a pain for Apple. That's speculation on my part though.
It likely was their intent, but it wasn't ready in time.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
And at length. The OLED section alone made the same points at least three times.
...the OLED news is disappointing - I had an OLED screen on a Moto flip phone.. ..and it seemed bright enough. I wonder what gives today?
The link off this paragraph points at a gallery of pictures. It also assumes that all OLEDs are the same. We know that Apple for instance can put inferior LCDs on their screens
Additionally, the fact that OLEDs degrade faster than LCDs is a moot point given the half life of one particular OLED panel is about 17,0000 hours. The device would have been replaced some time before then.
My new Samsung TL320 P&S has an "AMOLED" screen (and claims to be the first cam to have one). It's totally viewable in noonday sun, and the useable viewing angle is amazing. No color/reflective negative shift at all when seen from extreme angles, and I get plenty of "great screen" comments out in the world.
So is this a different tech from "regular" OLED (whatever that means) in any fundamental way, e.g., power consumption, brightness, lifetime, etc?
Also, thanks for lessening my anxiety, since 17,000 hours should do me for a month or two anyway. LoLz. And PS, congrats for being in the 5% who know it's "moot point" rather than a "mute" one.....
Actually you get to keep 10 DRM-free MP3s a month as part of your $15 subscription cost. Most of the songs on my iPhone at this point are from my Zune subscription!
So, as long as you were going to be buying at least 10 songs per month anyways, then that means you're only paying an extra $5 bucks for access to those millions of songs.
Oh, and most of those other services you talk about do NOT let you exactly specify playlist order, listen to entire CDs at once, etc.. Oh, and most of them don't let you store that music for offline listening.. and ..you can't specify exactly what you want to hear and in what order.
What the article fails to mention is the good points of the Zune HD like Xbox360 integration, wireless syncing, [plus Zune Pass, etc., etc]- making it have the ability to reflect the owner, than just be another player with a fruit on the back.
You've hit one key point I didn't see at all in the first three pages, nor in the article. The Zune HD is NOT the ballgame for Zune, which is being positioned, like Bing, as a platform, in this case for a variety of media initiatives.
XBox 360 integration is one of those next steps. Further down the road expect to see Zune software in WinMobile 7, meaning MS won't have to manufacture a full line of Zunes, but let all of its phone partners make them. Beyond that, again finally learning some lessons about branding and keeping evolution backward compatible, Zune software will probably replace or at least become the guts of Windows Media Player - reducing its number of music platforms to one that's extensible - and MS may also do something Zuny on the web as part of the Live stable. It could also be integrated into its Sync car software (that Ford is using) - or directly into car stereos from other manufacturers - and selling software to hardware makers and end users is still 95% of how MS has always made its living - not from selling hardware.
Full disclosure: I got this line of thought from Paul Thurrot's Windows Weekly podcast where he says he's been discussing all of this with MS.
He also suggested, now that Apple's approved a Rhapsody app, a Vonage App and has been nudged by the FCC on Google Voice, that they'd have a hard time not allowing, drumroll please, a Zune App for the iPhone and Touch, which would definitely score tons of irony points if nothing else.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
Back to you.....
I can't find hard numbers, but I think it's reasonable to say that Intel makes about 60 million processors a quarter, based on having 80% of the desktop/notebook CPU market, and 300 million computers sold in a year. I don't know what their capacity is, but if demand keeps growing, I'm sure they can expand their capacity. But Apple's 2.22 million isn't huge in terms of what Intel produces. If there is a shortage, Apple can easily outbid other companies to keep their supply.
It doesn’t sounds like we’re talking about 40M CPUs from Intel’s entire production line. It sounds like getting an excessive amount of Intel CPU that have just gone into production and not at full production. Brand new, next generation hardware. They produce small quantities at first, then slowly increase production as they can. Once production is in full swing I have no doubt that Intel can get Apple whatever it needs, but at first these very small batches will not suit a large operation like Apple, but can suit Dell just fine who need next to nothing in comparison for there barely sold, high-end, BTO machines.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
Back to you.....
I don't see that as being possible. A subscription requires DRM. Apple has never had MS DRM on their machines, and I don't see that happening now. This seems like pie in the sky.
The only place where he's partly wrong is about the OLED screen.
Otherwise you will find just about the same information elsewhere.
I know that's it's also politically correct to slam his articles because they often contain some errors, but mostly, they are correct.
We're going to see overly optimistic reviews on a number of other sites, that like a few earlier Zune reviews give opinions that most people after using the device and its software for a while won't agree with, so perhaps we should slam those articles as well.
Again, what the f--k is the point of this article on AI? Dilger has never touched the Zune HD and probably never will. 99% of the people on this site will agree that the Zune HD is already destined to be an also-ran PMP. The article is just fanboy nonsense regardless of what percentage is right or wrong. If he's going to go on for 3 pages of crap (I stopped reading halfway through the first page since all I could really see him saying was, "Microsoft sucks. Apple rules."), why not mention the strengths of the Zune HD?
Both you and him try to negate the nicety of having an HD Radio tuner built in. I have one in my car and that piece of gear is definitely something that will come with me to my next vehicle. HD Radio channels DO sound better than their analog counterparts. They obviously have no static and that alone makes them sound better even if they are broadcast at the same bit rate as the analog version. And nearly every major station in my area is broadcasting in HD plus several have secondary digital channels as well.
Everyone slams the Zune pass but I subscribe to Rhapsody to use it on my 2 TiVo's and I love it. It makes we wish I wasn't stuck with a Mac so I could use the unlimited downloads feature. No, music subscriptions aren't for everyone but it works for me. It's great to get to listen to a full album before I commit to buying it. And it's really nice to listen to songs that I want to hear but don't want to buy the album. I love 80's music and it's fun to explore the rest of one-hit-wonders catalogs.
And it's also really nice that it can play back 720p video files despite the display resolution not matching. It seems really nice to not have to download both and SD and HD version of a file like the iTunes kludgy solution. No, you won't fit many full length HD movies on the Zune HD, but you won't fit all that many SD movies on an iPod Touch or iPhone either.
Just like this article's author I've never touched a Zune HD, but it sounds like a competent media player. Too bad very few people on this site will look past their fanboy-ism to get it a fair chance. Does it match a Touch for features? No, but who cares? If Microsoft worked on the Xbox 360 integration, it could be a really compelling companion to that game machine. It would be even better if Microsoft removed the PC from the equation and let the console be the device's sync hub.
Let's talk prices then.
MS goes to a large OLED manufacturer and integrator and asks for a screen with a multitouch layer and a glass layer, all bonded together.
Let's say, just to make it simpler, that MS's screen is 3.5" and 480 x 320, the same as Apple's, instead of being smaller with less rez,
The company asks how many they will need for the contract's completion, and what's the expected monthly flow.
MS, based upon past sales, and expected new sales says, one million, with an average monthly flow of 83,300.
The manufacturer says to them, ok, that's $60 per screen for you."
It's just a number, so please don't argue it.
Now, Apple goes to the same manufacturer and asks for the same exact assembly.
They say, 40 million with an average monthly flow of 3.33 million a month.
The manufacturer says, "Ok, that's $30 per screen for you."
Profit margins for Apple aren't a problem. It's the much smaller manufacturers who have the problem. This is one reason why it's thought that MS loses money on every Zune it sells, while Apple is making a very high margin on theirs.
My company was called Magnum Opus, though we later changed that to Peacetime Communications. We sold the company a long time ago to JBL. I was later a long time partner in a commercial film Lab here in NYC, until we sold that about five years ago.
I have done design work and manufacturing on my own for Showtime, HBO and others, and design, and manufacturer prototypes for various companies.
Good points. But I could easily see Apple saying to a vendor, "well we're getting our current screens for $18" (like your example, just a number). "If we do a $30 screen, we might have to charge an additional $50 to the retail price just to keep our proper margins. Also, you tell me that the failure rate of your product in 30 days is 2% while our current product is .06%" So if we keep our profit margin where the street expects, we may shave off 500,000 unit sales this year as some customers choose the cheaper older Touch or (worse) choose a Zune. And given the projected failure rate, our warranty costs for this part are projected to more than triple, which eats into margins as well."
All I'm saying is that we have no idea all the metrics that went into Apple's decision not to go OLED with this cycle of product but I can speculate on some reasonable theories. Again, Sony and Microsoft may be looking strictly to poach market share by going with a product feature that is really sexy but makes the product that much unprofitable. Given how entrenched Apple's marketshare and mindshare is, they might figure it's the only way in the game until they have enough critical mass to force suppliers to give them better prices. Apple's investments in the Flash RAM markets is a classic example of a company who gets far better prices than anyone else due to the sheer number of pieces than can order and their ability to pre-pay for large shipments of product months in advance. The Palm Pre launch is a classic example where Apple's 16g iPhone 3G was the same price as the 8g Pre at launch. Apple's component costs including things like lithium batteries, Flash RAM and LCD screens were lower than Palm's.
Nice to read about your background. Pleased to meet you.
I actually have a little background in this, so let me take a whack at it...
Traditional LCD screens produce a color image by selectively filtering down a white light source, the backlight. As the name implies, the backlight lies at the back of the screen, and fires forward toward the viewer. Most backlights use CCFL tubes, while those on high-end televisions sometimes use LEDs instead.
Of the total amount of light produced, only a tiny fraction makes it through the entire screen. The filtering starts by removing over 1/2 of the light that's not polarized in the right direction. It then flows through a series of colored filters, LCD shutters and another polarizer on the front. In a typical display, only about 10% of the light at the back of the screen reaches the viewer.
LED's produce light directly on their front surface in the color you want, so almost 100% of the light they produce reaches your eye. Modern devices are more efficient than a CCFL as well, so the amount of energy needed to produce any given image is much lower for LEDs than LCDs. Unfortunately, traditional LEDs are fairly large, and not really suitable for television-like displays.
Into this void steps the OLED, which uses a printable technology that can scale down to useful sizes. Although the OLED is not efficient as the traditional LED, the overall end-to-end performance is still much better than an LCD of the same brightness. OLED screens require about 1/2 as much power as an LCD to display an all-white image (the most efficient image one an LCD can display) and are generally much more efficient as most images contain colors or graduations in brightness.
There, that is an accurate description of the technologies involved.
No, SOME of today's OLED panels are. Others are much brigher. Seeing as you didn't actually see the Zune and based your entire article on supposition from a photo series on Engaget, let's turn to someone that actually has seen the new device, Ars:
Everything I've heard states in normal use it is much brighter than the iPhone. It is entirely possible that it has problems outdoors, likely even, but the iPhone is hardly perfect here either.
They last more than long enough for a device that is essentially disposable over a period of 2 to 3 years.
This statement is absolutely false. OLED screens use, less power than an LCD of the same size and brightness. Period. Can I put numbers to this? Sure:
http://displaydaily.com/2009/07/09/w...-tvs-be-green/
This post suggests they will use about 30% of the power of the equivalent CCFL backlit LCD, like the one in the iPhone.
"Considering it's got an energy-saving OLED screen, we were disappointed with the battery life of the Jet. Perhaps the powerful processor puts some extra drain on the juice, but the promised 180 minutes of talk time and 250 hours' standby translated into a barely a day of moderate use."
And they guessed it was the processor, which strikes me as just as informed as your guess. Of course, it could be neither of these things.
Perhaps it's because Apple sells millions of devices a year, and current production lines can't handle that load. Whereas MS, which sells perhaps 1/20th the number, doesn't present any particular strain.
Your knowledge of the OLED market appears as limited as your knowledge of its technology.
Maury
From your very poor understanding LED-backlit technology i assume rest of your post is total BS as well. Shame you claim you "have a little background in this" until this is micro-little. I guess you just read Wikipedia article with no understanding what you are reading about.
I'm sorry you didn't get the camera, but the ZuneHD doesn't have on either. This article provided some additional insight for me, but I am also taking it with a grain of salt. Whether or not the HD Radio will be more useful than a regular FM radio is largely irrelevant when the iPod Touch doesn't have a radio at all. On the other hand I don't think OLED or the HD radio will be a big selling point, and I would consider the graphics and processing capabilities to be similar (iPod Touch has the stronger processor, ZuneHD the stronger graphics processor). If 720p output is important, Apple can activate it with a firmware update. Whether or not this thing flops will come down probably come down to software. We will have to wait and see.
Like hell the Nvidia Tegra is a stronger GPU.
You've hit one key point I didn't see at all in the first three pages, nor in the article. The Zune HD is NOT the ballgame for Zune, which is being positioned, like Bing, as a platform, in this case for a variety of media initiatives.
XBox 360 integration is one of those next steps. Further down the road expect to see Zune software in WinMobile 7, meaning MS won't have to manufacture a full line of Zunes, but let all of its phone partners make them. Beyond that, again finally learning some lessons about branding and keeping evolution backward compatible, Zune software will probably replace or at least become the guts of Windows Media Player - reducing its number of music platforms to one that's extensible - and MS may also do something Zuny on the web as part of the Live stable. It could also be integrated into its Sync car software (that Ford is using) - or directly into car stereos from other manufacturers - and selling software to hardware makers and end users is still 95% of how MS has always made its living - not from selling hardware.
Full disclosure: I got this line of thought from Paul Thurrot's Windows Weekly podcast where he says he's been discussing all of this with MS.
He also suggested, now that Apple's approved a Rhapsody app, a Vonage App and has been nudged by the FCC on Google Voice, that they'd have a hard time not allowing, drumroll please, a Zune App for the iPhone and Touch, which would definitely score tons of irony points if nothing else.
And this is how he suggested it would work: it wouldn't "take over" the system and give it a full Zune interface, but instead be a regular app whose purpose is to allow you to play music from a Zune Pass sub on the Apple device, i.e., giving you all the iPod functionality, plus the Zune subscription service on your iPhone or Touch. And as another poster said, that could be "an interesting option" for some.
Back to you.....
Hmmmm......
Or, you could listen to Zune's marketing manager:
Q: Will it open up for third-party app developers?
A: It's hard to say right now. If you look around the company at other places where things like this are important, Windows Mobile rises to the top. They have devices which are always connected, which make applications like maps really cool and important.
On a sometimes-connected device, what people are using them for are games. So what we didn't want to do was build two parallel app store experiences that didn't work together.
Right now our product roadmaps didn't line up perfectly for us to snap to what they're doing or vice versa. That being said, we know people want things like this on their devices so we're going to build them ourselves, they're going to be super high-quality, and they're going to be free.
Down the road if there's a way we can work with Windows Mobile or another group inside the company that's building an app store and take advantage of that, that's something we'll look into.
Or as Jon Gruber over at Daring Fireball dryly translates it,
No, because our mobile strategy is a convoluted mess.
You fanbois are all clueless if you don't see the unlimited potential for Zune software sales. Here's just a few examples off the top of my head:
The best post ever! I am envious i didn't figured myself!
"However, Tegra isn't a scaled down version of NVIDIA's PC graphics GPUs. Instead, it's based on technology NVIDIA acquired in its purchase of fabless chip designer PortalPlayer in 2007."
Got any source info on this?
I can see NVidia using PortalPlayer tech for fixed function codec acceleration, but NVidia using PortalPlayer tech as a base for OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn't sound right.
Information about the current Tegra:
http://ragingbull.quote.com/mboard/b...RMH&read=20279
Direct Video Feed: http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=19922
Get a life.
OLEDs enable a greater range of colors, gamut, brightness, contrast (both DR and static) and viewing angle than LCDs because OLED pixels directly emit light. OLED pixel colors appear correct and unshifted, even as the viewing angle approaches 90 degrees from normal. LCDs use a backlight and cannot show true black, while an off OLED element produces no light and consumes no power. Energy is also wasted in LCDs because they require polarizers that filter out about half of the light emitted by the backlight. Additionally, color filters in most color LCDs filter out two-thirds of the light; technology to separate backlight colors by diffraction has not been widely adopted.[citation needed]
OLEDs also have a faster response time than standard LCD screens. Whereas the fastest LCD displays currently have a 2ms response time (manufacturer's quote), an OLED can have less than 0.01ms response time.[44]"
- From wikipedia, and you can travel there yourself to look at the citations.
and as far as the display's life being "too short," how many people still use their mp3 players from five years ago, which is the average time it takes to show any degradation in screen quality (even blues).
point one from fanboys = FAIL.
should i go on, or will you guys just go to the store and see how much pretty and responsive it is. don't worry. your head wont explode since these are all just TOYS, but grab your ipod touch and a zune hd, turn them both to the side, watch which one works faster and smoother.
nobody cares what you pick, zune or ipod, but i want competition so apple will get off their asses and start innovating again. It took microsoft 3 years to catch up on something 8 years in the making. apple needs to get a move on.