bsimpsen
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2016 MacBook Pro butterfly keyboards failing twice as frequently as older models
You've got your numbers all wrong. Given that Apple sold north of 18 million Macs in 2016 (and probably a similar amount in 2014), it would be reasonable to assume that the MacBook Pro 13/15 unit volume was at least 5 million units and probably much higher. The "10% failure rate" you report means that the keyboard is responsible for 10% of the service work, not 10% of the installed base.
By your own numbers, there were 2120 service events for the 2014 generation, which would represent a 0.424% failure rate (2120/5,000,000). Of those failures, 5.6% were keyboard related, for a total keyboard failure rate of 0.024%.
Also by your own numbers, there were 1402 warranty events for 2016 MacBook Pros of which 11.8% were keyboard related. That's 0.035%.
The keyboard failure rate has neither doubled (it's gone up by perhaps 45%), nor is it significant.
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Apple responds to aftermarket iPhone replacement battery health warning
I think Apple's approach is reasonable. Thirty years ago, I designed battery powered medical instrumentation (including defibrillators) containing rudimentary "gas gauge" hardware/firmware in the battery packs that allowed cell life and capacity to be monitored far more accurately than in previous systems. A couple years after introduction, we started getting field failure reports of batteries going dead unexpectedly while the gas gauge was indicating half a tank, or of warnings from our software that recently refurbished battery packs were worn out.
Customers were replacing the cells in our packs with generic cells of about half the capacity, because they were far less expensive. On the first charge cycle, those new cells were delivering half the energy expected by our battery monitoring system and our firmware wasn't able to cope with such a large (and out of spec) change in component behavior. A large system customer asked us to disable or modify our firmware to allow use of those lower capacity aftermarket replacement cells. We refused. It was our contention that the end customer for our products was the patient who's care was affected by our product's performance. Were we not about to let unskilled health care providers dictate to us the parameters for safe and effective operation of our products.
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Apple responds to aftermarket iPhone replacement battery health warning
We tried this route for third world countries where our products were sold, and where our distribution network was too thin to easily supply fast turnaround support. We quickly dropped the effort because it was too difficult to certify and police third party battery suppliers. We had particular difficulty in India, where the service bureau recommended by our customers, and who we'd connected with our own battery cell supplier, chose to use the worst quality NiMh batteries we'd ever seen in their refurb work, while tarnishing our reputation by claiming (correctly) that we'd certified them. That's the kind of brand damage that Apple understandably wishes to avoid. They're in a better position to hold third party service providers to account, but it's still a risky move.Zamgeek said:There might be umteen hundred Apple authorised service centers around the US, sure. But the world is bigger than the US, and Apple products are used arond the globe. Some countries, like the one where I service Apple products, have no official Apple presence at all. Battery replacement is dead simple to do really, any tech savvy person can do it. If Apple wanted to make sure replaced batteries are working the way they should, the better road to take would be to institute an MFI program for 3rd party batteries. I would be happy to get mine from a MFI certified manufacturer, the market for 3rd party batteries are for the most part completely opaque and it's really difficult to know anything much about the quality of the batteries you do take in. Which is a bummer for me and my business and a bummer for my customers.
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Apple says it's been losing money on its repair programs
I began my four decade career in electrical engineering as a QA/QC engineer for a large company making building automation/safety systems. Reliability was tantamount. While analyzing field failure reports, I discovered, unsurprisingly, that connectors were the highest failure rate items. The military reliability handbook (MIL-217) warned of this, so it was not a surprise. The fascinating aspect of the field failure data I received was that, although connectors of almost any kind truly were more prone to failure than most other things, socketed parts of systems (chips in particular) were themselves "failing" at above expected rates. Deeper analysis revealed that, because socketed things are easy/cheap to replace, they would be routinely replaced, and because the replacement wasn't done under controlled factory conditions, connection reliability decreased.
There is ample historical data to support designing systems to have as few mechanical connections as possible, and that's precisely what Apple does. While repair of such systems may be more difficult, the reduction in overall failure rate more than makes up for it. The truth of this is reflected in Apple's consistently high user satisfaction scores.The manufacturing companies I worked for during my career would never have attempted to turn service/repair into a profit center. That damages the incentive to design well in the first place and is ultimately detrimental to the organization. The reason service/repair is more expensive than the original manufacturing is simply a matter of scale. Repair centers do not move thousands of components/assemblies per day, do not possess purpose built mass manufacturing equipment, and do not have factory labor rate people available to make the repairs.
I find Apple's claim credible. Public ignorance of how mass scale manufacturing works doesn't make the reality of it go away.
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Editorial: How Apple beat Samsung in the 2010 global ARM race
I don't think you got the history quite right here. The Hummingbird core was a joint project between Intrinsity and Samsung, with the bulk of the design credit going to Intensity and Samsung acting as the foundry. The A4 was based on that work, and debuted in Apple's first iPad in April 3 of 2010. On April 27, 2010, Apple acquired Intensity, depriving Samsung of the ability to advance the Hummingbird architecture. It was not so much that Samsung took the more comfortable course of relying on ARM. They took the only course available.AppleInsider said:
Samsung also used the Hummingbird core and PowerVR GPU in its chip, which was later branded as "Exynos 3." But rather than seeking to relentlessly advance its custom chip design technology in the pattern of Apple, Samsung initially took the more comfortable and affordable route of relying on ARM to deliver its Cortex-A CPU and Mali GPU designs. That didn't work out well.
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Why Apple uses integrated memory in Apple Silicon -- and why it's both good and bad
The trace lengths and widths of PCB memory busses and socket connections are substantially greater than those inside the chip carrier. That adds significant capacitance that must be driven by both the SOC on one end and the memory modules on the other. This takes considerable power. As trace lengths increase, timing skew increases. With clock frequencies approaching 6GHz, a "bit" is approaching one inch in length (PCB signal propagation speed is about C/2). Matching trace lengths is much harder to do as trace length increases. Keeping signals on the PCB also becomes harder as trace lengths approach 1/4 wavelength, turning traces into antennae. There are very good reasons for Apple to take the path they're on. Phones, tablets and laptops are the bulk of the Apple's business and those products don't want server farm memory architectures.mfryd said:
Actually, moving the memory further away from the CPU does add latency. Every foot of wire adds about a nanosecond of delay.melgross said:Ok, so the writer gets it wrong, as so many others have when it comes to the M series RAM packaging. One would think that’s this simple thing would be well understood by now. So let me make it very clear - the RAM is NOT on the chip. It is NOT “in the CPU itself”. As we should all know by now, it’s in two packages soldered to the substrate, which is the small board the the SoC is itself soldered to. The lines from Apple’s fabric, which everything on the chip is connected with, extend to that substrate, to the RAM chips. Therefore, the RAM chips are separate from the SoC, and certainly not in the CPU itself. As we also know, Apple offers several different levels of RAM for each M series they sell. That means that there is no limit to their ability to decide how much RAM they can offer, up to the number of memory lines that can be brought out. This is no different from any traditional computer. Every CPU and memory controller has a limit as to how much RAM can be used. So, it seems to me that Apple could, if it wanted to, have sockets for those RAM packages, which add no latency, and would allow exchangeable RAM packages. Apple would just have to extend the maximum number of memory lines out to the socket. How many would get used would depend on the amount of RAM in the package. That’s nothing new. That’s how it’s done. Yes, under that scheme you would have to remove a smaller RAM package when getting a larger one, but that's also normal. The iMac had limited RAM slots and we used to do that all the time. Apple could also add an extra two sockets, in addition to the RAM that comes with the machine. So possibly there would be two packages soldered to the substrate, and two more sockets for RAM expansion. Remember that Apple sometimes does something a specific way, not because that’s the way it has to be done, but because they decided that this was the way they were going to do it. We don’t know where Apple is going with this in the future. It’s possible that the M2, which is really just a bump from the M1, is something to fill in the time while we’re waiting for the M3, which with the 3nm process it’s being built on, is expected to be more than just another bump in performance. Perhaps an extended RAM capability is part of that.Then there is the issue of how many wires you run. When the memory is physically close to the CPU you can run more wires from the memory to the CPU, this allows you to get data to/from the CPU faster. It's not practical to run a large number of wires to a socket that might be a foot or more of cable run away. That means you transfer less data in each clock cycle.
Generally socketed memory is on an external bus. This lets various peripherals directly access memory. The bus arbitration also adds overhead.
Traditional CPUs try to overcome these memory bottlenecks by using multiple levels of cache. This can provide a memory bandwidth performance boost for chunks of recently accessed memory. However, tasks that use more memory than will fit in the cache, may not benefit from these techniques.
Apples "System on a Chip" design really does allow much higher memory bandwidth. Socketing the memory really would reduce performance.
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Imagination announces PowerVR 'Furian' mobile GPU architecture, could power Apple's iPhone...
PA Semi and Intrinsity were a different kind of semiconductor play. PA Semi was acquired for their expertise in processor design. Note that Apple discarded PA Semi's PowerPC designs, so they were not interested in that CPU architecture, they were interested in the team's skill set. Intrinsity was acquired for their optimization expertise which one would expect to benefit all Apple chip efforts, not just CPU. Apple also acquired GPU expertise in Florida (I forget the details of that acquisition).mtbnut said:What reason would Apple have NOT to buy Imagination Technologies? Seems like a no-brainer, akin to them buying PA Semi.
Other customers help pay for Imagination's) GPU efforts, but don't have the resources to field superior implementations of the technology. Imagination also contains a lot of uninteresting (and seemingly unprofitable) baggage (IOT, MIPS, etc). Those are two reasons not to acquire the company. Imagination also has a patent portfolio that probably protects Apple. That's a reason to continue the relationship.
So long as Apple can field the best implementations of ARM and PowerVR, why not allow competitors to help support the development of the underlying architectures? This also allows Apple to pick and choose future employees who'll have experience with ARM and PowerVR. If they roll their own custom designs, there will be no external pool of talent to draw from, at least initially.
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Apple engineers lack optimism about the Apple TV strategy, claims report
We have five AppleTVs driving five different brands of TVs/projectors. Using the shared Home Screen, we need understand only one interface and the experience is identical everywhere. All remotes are the same, all apps are in the same place, our favorites and histories are on all units, if we pause viewing in one place, we can pick it up in another. Does anyone else offer that?
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Apple will use 3D printing to make Apple Watch Ultra mechanical parts
Don't be so quick to judge. People thought that machining unibody chassis was a bogus idea when everybody else was stamping parts out of sheet metal, but that's precisely what Apple does. Selective laser sintering can be faster than CNC machining if the parts are small and multiple lasers are employed over the powder bed.eriamjh said:There is no 3D printing process that can handle the volume for the production of Apple Watch.
This article is bogus. 3D printing is only used for prototypes.
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Apple responds to aftermarket iPhone replacement battery health warning
I've been designing battery operated instrumentation for the entire thirty years since that first experience with battery management. The story has not changed, the behavior of third party service bureaus has not changed, the variance in quality and specification for batteries (of any chemistry) has not changed. The issue of Apple software not operating properly upon installation of an Apple battery has been explained as the result of the service person not using Apple's tools to recalibrate the monitoring system to the new battery.CloudTalkin said:
Your anecdote, although interesting, is only a single data point. The viewpoint it represents is not indicative of the current state of battery tech in iPhones. You haven't presented any evidence that current 3rd party batteries for iPhone are any more likely to be substandard to OEM or Authorized batteries. You've provided info about an issue 30 years ago. Again, it's interesting, but doesn't seem really relevant here. Afaik, there haven't been wide scale complaints about 3rd party iPhone batteries. No shortened life span, nothing about lesser capacity. Those details, relative to your devices' issues, serve to highlight troubles you experienced 30 years ago. Those details, relative to this iPhone issue, paint an inaccurate picture unsupported by any evidence. If 3rd party batteries were that much of a menace, Apple wouldn't be willing to service iPhones with them inside. Yet they do.bsimpsen said:I think Apple's approach is reasonable. Thirty years ago, I designed battery powered medical instrumentation (including defibrillators) containing rudimentary "gas gauge" hardware/firmware in the battery packs that allowed cell life and capacity to be monitored far more accurately than in previous systems. A couple years after introduction, we started getting field failure reports of batteries going dead unexpectedly while the gas gauge was indicating half a tank, or of warnings from our software that recently refurbished battery packs were worn out.
Customers were replacing the cells in our packs with generic cells of about half the capacity, because they were far less expensive. On the first charge cycle, those new cells were delivering half the energy expected by our battery monitoring system and our firmware wasn't able to cope with such a large (and out of spec) change in component behavior. A large system customer asked us to disable or modify our firmware to allow use of those lower capacity aftermarket replacement cells. We refused. It was our contention that the end customer for our products was the patient who's care was affected by our product's performance. Were we not about to let unskilled health care providers dictate to us the parameters for safe and effective operation of our products.
Also, the software flakes when confronted with an OEM battery that wasn't installed by Apple or an Authorized repair shop. So it's not just a 3rd party issue. Essentially, Apple is saying you can use batteries that weren't installed by us or our partners. We know they work just like ours, but we won't monitor them with our software. Which is fine, since they weren't monitoring the batteries via that software before last year anyway... and people were none the worse for wear. Remember, this software only exists because Apple mishandled informing users of the software throttling they instituted to deal with their own substandard batteries. Users that concerned can probably get an app like Coconut Battery to monitor their non-OEM/authorized battery if it's a real concern.
My "anecdote" is not a single data point. My experience, which makes me appreciate what Apple is dealing with, spans thirty years of battery system design and tens of thousands of devices in the field.
As for Apple throttling the CPU to extend operating time, the issue was primarily poor communications. I've seen no evidence to suggest that Apple was using substandard batteries, but rather that it deployed a mechanism for extending the operating time of their phones without explaining it properly. The batteries in current iPhones are no better than before (excepting general improvement in the technology over time), but owners now have a better view into their health. Customer satisfaction with iPhones remains the best in the industry, and that's Apple's goal.
Widespread complaints about third party batteries would require widespread use of third party batteries, and some method of objectively comparing performance of those batteries to Apple's OEM parts. Were I to put a cheap third party battery in a two year old iPhone, I don't think I'd be inclined to complain much if it didn't last as long as the original.
Also, understand that Apple can't monitor things that can't be measured in the phone, like battery condition at installation, expected cycle life, initial capacity, etc.
