Can they be sued for that? Selling a product that you later find out was intentionally hobbled?
While I suppose people can sue for anything, I think the spirit of the answer is no. The original device met the specifications it was advertised with. The fact that it had an underlying inactivated graphics core should be legally irrelevant. Perhaps the had cooling or other issues with the overall design when that core was active.
It’s not that it was “inactivated” previously. Making chips is hard, many chips fail to achieve 100% of the desired features. The failure/success rate is the yield. Over time you get better at making them and your yield improves. Doing it at scale is a massive undertaking. Now making the A12 series is hitting better numbers, resulting in chips with the full number of cores.
You just cannot sue a company for deliberately disabling a feature that could provide a boost in performance. It's not how it works. If Apple advertises the CPU being faster but disables that performance improvement afterwards, then we would have a case.
I think the moral of this story is for iPad buyers to wait for reviews of CPU performance and architecture before purchasing new iPads. This simply not enough “improvement” to justify a brand new device for anything other than hardcore Apple fans.
Nonsense. It depends what you’re upgrading from. Normal people don’t upgrade every iteration. Mine is years old now, and this is certainly faster.
Trillion dollar company doesn’t make those trillions by being good at heart.
No, quite the opposite actually.
The world's great companies were founded and built on making great products that met people's needs -- Not financially driven organizations more interested in stock buybacks than the products or services they were selling. Neither did they become great by ripping off their customers.
Top 10 Biggest Companies of All Time
Dutch East India Company: $8.28 trillion.
Mississippi Company: $6.8 trillion.
South Sea Company: $4.5 trillion.
Saudi Aramco: $1.89 trillion.
Apple: $1.3 trillion.
PetroChina: $1.24 trillion.
Microsoft: $1.2 trillion.
Standard Oil: more than $1 trillion.
Never heard of the Mississippi Company; I'll have to look it up. In any case GeorgeBMac never said the "biggest" companies, he said the "great" companies. Obviously there are examples from histories of companies that succeeded (for a time) through tactics that weren't consumer friendly. But I don't think they are "great" companies in George's sense.
The OP said 'trillion dollar company" so of course he was, using greatest in the sense of greatest wealth. If not then he was going his own way with a post that didn't address the OP or even $Trillion dollar companies.
Quote:"Trillion dollar company doesn’t make those trillions by being good at heart."
That is nonsense, pure mental gymnastics. The OP said a trillion dollar company blah blah, and George replied back how great companies operate - and Apple is a great company and that was his point. You’ve injected your own meaning into something that wasn’t said. Pathetic.
Apple was the first public sustained trillion dollar player, and remains the most successful public company in history.
Can they be sued for that? Selling a product that you later find out was intentionally hobbled?
While I suppose people can sue for anything, I think the spirit of the answer is no. The original device met the specifications it was advertised with. The fact that it had an underlying inactivated graphics core should be legally irrelevant. Perhaps the had cooling or other issues with the overall design when that core was active.
It’s not that it was “inactivated” previously. Making chips is hard, many chips fail to achieve 100% of the desired features. The failure/success rate is the yield. Over time you get better at making them and your yield improves. Doing it at scale is a massive undertaking. Now making the A12 series is hitting better numbers, resulting in chips with the full number of cores.
This. All semiconductor companies do this to some extent as a new chip design will have significant yield losses at launch. In order to salvage the breakthrough design process, it's common practice to allow for some acceptable level of manufacturing flaw and lower the threshold of perfection so that things remain cost effective and less wasteful for the manufacturer and for the consumer.
Two years later, the A12X is now refined to the point where the defect rate is reduced and a higher standard is cost effective and can be provided to the consumer at equal or lesser price than originally.
A) an iPad Pro Fall 2020 release with A13X (And mini-LED, as predicted)
or
a next release of iPad Pro in Spring 2021 with A14X?
I’m curious because I have an upgrade due this fall and, well, quarantine— I’m bored.
A fall 2020 release is going to piss off the people who purchased the current one.
I hope it’s a 2021 A14X in a well thought out, much improved platform that the engineers will have been working on for almost 3 years.
Seconded. I can’t see it this year. They have skipped chip generations for the iPad Pro before and the iPad 3 to iPad 4 move was probably a lesson learned for Apple.
Trillion dollar company doesn’t make those trillions by being good at heart.
No, quite the opposite actually.
The world's great companies were founded and built on making great products that met people's needs -- Not financially driven organizations more interested in stock buybacks than the products or services they were selling. Neither did they become great by ripping off their customers.
Top 10 Biggest Companies of All Time
Dutch East India Company: $8.28 trillion.
Mississippi Company: $6.8 trillion.
South Sea Company: $4.5 trillion.
Saudi Aramco: $1.89 trillion.
Apple: $1.3 trillion.
PetroChina: $1.24 trillion.
Microsoft: $1.2 trillion.
Standard Oil: more than $1 trillion.
Never heard of the Mississippi Company; I'll have to look it up. In any case GeorgeBMac never said the "biggest" companies, he said the "great" companies. Obviously there are examples from histories of companies that succeeded (for a time) through tactics that weren't consumer friendly. But I don't think they are "great" companies in George's sense.
of course he was, using greatest in the sense of greatest wealth.
Wrong! Again!
Then your rebuttal to the OP made no sense.
"Trillion dollar company doesn’t make those trillions by being good at heart."
This sounds to me like way too much conclusion inferred from a mere chip micrograph. If that TechInsights company had a complete GDSII or full chip layout with all the CAD layers of both A12X and A12Z at their disposal, that would be a very different conversation. Significant performance/yield improvements can often be achieved by a revised metal mask set with no change to the front end, typically improved routing of the power grid and/or clock-tree. The fact, that 8 GPU cores are present in both A12X and A12Z doesn’t mean, that all of them could be theoretically activated at A12X, or that it is indeed the same chip as A12Z. Also, it’s not evident from the article, whether the yield issues were related to the GPU cores. If they were, the only way to improve yield would be taping out all the GPU cores as theoretically usable, and then disabling one during the wafer sort (either a faulty one, or an arbitrarily chosen good one). Because if the same GPU core was disabled on every A12X, I don’t see how that would improve the yield in any significant way.
an old chip and a eur 499 keyboard...thank you Apple....if the Covid 19 crisis is showing something it is that 100% profit margins to feed stock buy backs at the expense of innovation will kill Apple‘s business model for sure
My concern is that I'm 60 and at this point in time I can purchase any iPad Pro model. My concern is 'future-proofing.' With the economy being what it is, a future 2028 iPad Pro with a hypothetical A19X CPU and 16GB RAM may be able to launch Minuteman missiles from Minot AFB, but my 2020 Pro with the rebinned A12X/Z could be severely gimped or even bricked by Apple's exponential increase in the future demands of iOS & associated apps on hardware.
(My other two machines are Windows 10, but Scrivener 3 for Windows has been a vaporware promise going on 4 years. It's a lot like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football...)
Any advice would be appreciated. Go with a 2018 Gen 3 1TB or 2020 Gen 4 256? (Same RAM in both)
Comments
It’s not that it was “inactivated” previously. Making chips is hard, many chips fail to achieve 100% of the desired features. The failure/success rate is the yield. Over time you get better at making them and your yield improves. Doing it at scale is a massive undertaking. Now making the A12 series is hitting better numbers, resulting in chips with the full number of cores.
Nonsense. It depends what you’re upgrading from. Normal people don’t upgrade every iteration. Mine is years old now, and this is certainly faster.
As always, the moral is upgrade when you need it.
Apple was the first public sustained trillion dollar player, and remains the most successful public company in history.
The keyboard with trackpad is interesting, but I want to see it first. Especially at the outrageous price.
Two years later, the A12X is now refined to the point where the defect rate is reduced and a higher standard is cost effective and can be provided to the consumer at equal or lesser price than originally.
"Trillion dollar company doesn’t make those trillions by being good at heart."
"Unrelated companies do unrelated things"
"So what?"
The fact, that 8 GPU cores are present in both A12X and A12Z doesn’t mean, that all of them could be theoretically activated at A12X, or that it is indeed the same chip as A12Z.
Also, it’s not evident from the article, whether the yield issues were related to the GPU cores. If they were, the only way to improve yield would be taping out all the GPU cores as theoretically usable, and then disabling one during the wafer sort (either a faulty one, or an arbitrarily chosen good one). Because if the same GPU core was disabled on every A12X, I don’t see how that would improve the yield in any significant way.
My concern is that I'm 60 and at this point in time I can purchase any iPad Pro model. My concern is 'future-proofing.' With the economy being what it is, a future 2028 iPad Pro with a hypothetical A19X CPU and 16GB RAM may be able to launch Minuteman missiles from Minot AFB, but my 2020 Pro with the rebinned A12X/Z could be severely gimped or even bricked by Apple's exponential increase in the future demands of iOS & associated apps on hardware.
(My other two machines are Windows 10, but Scrivener 3 for Windows has been a vaporware promise going on 4 years. It's a lot like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football...)
Any advice would be appreciated. Go with a 2018 Gen 3 1TB or 2020 Gen 4 256? (Same RAM in both)