Dan_Dilger

KidAKidB said:

Except for the fact that the report arbitrarily used 36,000 rupees as the starting range for cost of premium phones, knowing full well that OnePlus devices sell for 35,000 rupees. OnePlus being the top selling premium device in India. So yeah, this report is meaningless.

Yes it’s critically important to draw the line at $480 vs $500. 

woochifer said:

Generally a good series on the Apple A-series processor lineage, but this installment seems even more overly focused on Apple's critics. In the context of the A8 itself, it didn't break a lot of new ground. But, it was crucial to resetting the market bar at a time when the smartphone market shifted more towards larger screen sizes, and diversifying the supply chain away from Samsung.

The A8 was primarily a die shrink moving from 28nm to 20 nm process. So, the primary benefits of the A8 over the A7 largely centered on the significantly reduced power consumption and a relatively modest bump up in processor performance. But, the A8's lower power consumption was crucial to bringing the iPhone 6 and the even larger iPhone 6 Plus to market without any battery life penalty. This was an important market shift for Apple because it moved the mainstream screen size baseline from 4" to 4.7".

But, as an architectural transition, the heavy lifting had already been done the year before by the A7 and the A8 did not push the performance envelope in the same manner that the A7 did. That's one reason why iOS support for both the A7-powered iPhone 5s and A8-powered iPhone 6/6 Plus were both deprecated at iOS 12.4. Only devices that packaged the A8 with the extra 1 GB of RAM or the graphics-enhanced A8X are currently supported by iPadOS 13.

Also, my recollection of the iPhone 5c was that Apple went to the CNC-machined color plastic to maximize production capacity for the iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5 launch suffered from severe supply chain bottlenecks related to the then-new aluminum body. By moving the iPhone 5 internals to a plastic case, Apple could reserve the entire aluminum body inventory just for the iPhone 5s. And by introducing new colors, they could market the 5c as something different. The iPhone 5s launch ended up being a huge success. Yes, there were supply shortages, but nothing close to what Apple experienced with the iPhone 5.

It's interesting that Apple's annual advancements on Ax chips are often portrayed as making minor jumps in between the larger leaps. Compare Ax to the advancement cycle of other ARM chips or even Intel x86 and it's impressive instead that Apple did so much so quickly. And beyond that, the A8 cycle was also performing a transition to a new fab, as the article focused on. That's was in itself a major leap to take on while also delivering both an architectural advancement and handling the node shift. 

Certainly a lot of the advancement in Ax came from Samsung and then TSMC process enhancements, but the only way Apple could have driven and benefited from that was if it were able to forecast, develop and then sell iOS devices on a massive scale at a profit, allowing it to foot the bill to own prime access to their advanced fab technology. And that in turn helped it to maintain selling huge volumes of advanced, profitable products while its tablet competitors looked to TI, Nvidia, Intel Atom, and Qcom to do all the silicon work for them to deliver basic, good enough tablet devices serving as placeholders in a catalog. Again, another argument of how Apple's capital-driven, profit-based approach was better than community-cooperative, ideological-based commodity production.

Good comments on the iPhone 6 jump, which was not just screen size but also resolution, requiring significantly faster graphics to deliver similar performance with previous 5" iPhone. That was the same reason that Samsung's push to ever higher resolutions without adequate graphics work (as the article noted) was a bad tradeoff: show over function. Samsung in particular was much better at producing high quality, large, hires displays than in including the silicon (and software) to power them. 

Also note that the Galaxy S5, which arrived 6 months before iPhone 6, was last officially supported by 2015's Android 6 Marshmallow. iPhone 6 still runs iOS 12.4.5, which was last updated January 2020. It doesn't run 2019's latest iOS 13.

Yet when those phones shipped, they were portrayed by CNET reviews as being in the same bucket, with no suggestion that iPhones would continue to be supported for 5 years longer than the best selling android flagship offered by Samsung, the largest licensee. Details like that are important to understanding how truly terrible and myopic tech writing has been across the last decade. There's almost zero criticism of that, but if you point out details like this at the time, or look back and provide some inescapable observations in hindsight, you have critics coming out of the woodwork to tell you that you are not classy and they don't like your "tone." 

The absolute contempt for anything resembling truth is quite remarkable.  

polymnia said:

corrections said:

polymnia said:

None of that makes his writing more positive or pleasant to read. It reads like a deeply researched political attack essay. Maybe one from a perspective I agree with, but it still leaves me wishing it were styled with more class 

For somebody complaining about "class" and positivity, you sure seem unpleasant yourself--your entire comment is a grumbling personal attack without even articulating what exactly you took offense with. 

Would you prefer to watch a sporting event where the commentators didn't mention the score, and were careful to not actually point out why the winning team was ahead and the errors made the losing team? Would you be offended to hear who won, or details on the history of previous games between those players?

Consumer electronics isn't a game. It's a war for attention. I have detailed for 15+ years what has been happening and why so many models of what might happen in tech were wrong, and why. So to have you show up in 2020 telling me you're upset that I'm detailing, accurately, what is happening, what just happened, and what has occurred over the past several years--in stark contrast to the general consensus of most pundits, analysts and journalists--is just absurd. It's hard to take your comment seriously. 

unpleasant? I’ve given DED his due. He writes comprehensive, well researched articles. I learn things when I read them. I even agree with his conclusions. Perhaps I don’t read enough tech journalism to need DED’s zingers? Either way, I could do without them. I guess some people enjoy them. 

Though I find his writing style generally irritating, here is where it crossed the line in this article for me: “Outside of phones, there was even greater ignorance building up in a steaming pile that obscured the reality of Apple's vast lead in tablet computing.” This goes quite a bit further than telling me who won. It’s calling a bunch of people deluded  idiots who are full of shit. Maybe that’s just how journalism is done in 2020, bit I wish it were not. I guess DEF’s pieces are editorials held to different standards?

Guess I took the bait by commenting on the preemptive defenses of DED’s writing. Never engage anyone on the internet defending themselves from complaints that haven’t been made yet. Probably someone in search of an argument. My mistake. 

You literally dismissed the article --with clear contempt and disgust-- for reasons you didn't actually articulate. You can't then cry as if persecuted for being asked what exactly you took issue with. 

And specifically, it's inarguably true that there was widespread ignorance of the reality and scale of Apple's lead in tablets, certainly 2013 to just recently. You can take issue with me using visual wording, but its just false to say I was "calling a bunch of people deluded idiots who are full of shit." That's your wording. It may even be true, but it's not what I wrote. 

The article stated what you actually quoted, and that remark does not "call people idiots" or say people were "full of shit." 

If you want to offer criticism, don't write up a straw man of an argument so you can tear it down easy.

And when somebody points out the weakness of your argument--which you delivered without much class yourself--don't double down on how sorry you are to be victimized by getting a response. Arguments can be made and opinions can be stated without all that. 

polymnia said:

None of that makes his writing more positive or pleasant to read. It reads like a deeply researched political attack essay. Maybe one from a perspective I agree with, but it still leaves me wishing it were styled with more class 

For somebody complaining about "class" and positivity, you sure seem unpleasant yourself--your entire comment is a grumbling personal attack without even articulating what exactly you took offense with. 

Would you prefer to watch a sporting event where the commentators didn't mention the score, and were careful to not actually point out why the winning team was ahead and the errors made the losing team? Would you be offended to hear who won, or details on the history of previous games between those players?

Consumer electronics isn't a game. It's a war for attention. I have detailed for 15+ years what has been happening and why so many models of what might happen in tech were wrong, and why. So to have you show up in 2020 telling me you're upset that I'm detailing, accurately, what is happening, what just happened, and what has occurred over the past several years--in stark contrast to the general consensus of most pundits, analysts and journalists--is just absurd. It's hard to take your comment seriously. 

verne arase said:

Ugh ... there's no telling when this COVID-19 outbreak will end - heck there's no telling if it's going to visit us soon (our numbers have been frozen in amber and we're not testing symptomatic patients, even on request).

This thing probably has a R naught waaayyy higher than most popular estimates - and stock prices are just staying up buoyed by good thoughts.

Apple's got way too much reliance on China - they've got 10,000 CNC milling machines in their China facilities, and you don't just throw ten into a first class envelope and mail 'em to India.

Between the demand, manufacturing, and parts-sourcing ends, they're pretty much stuck in China for the foreseeable future.

If they activate a factory and they get a single COVID-19 case, they go into lockdown with all workers quarantined (despite what the schizophrenic central government wants to do). And I sincerely hope they're UVing all product through each macro stage of the assembly line. (Their JIT production/delivery model is way too fast for my comfort level).

China is similar in land area to the USA. Fires in California, or floods in the South don't shut down the entire country. Three mile island didn't turn the whole country into a wasteland. About 40,000 Americans die in car crashed every year. That doesn't stop all economic activity across the country. 

Also, a factory is probably one of the easiest facilities to keep clean. The rapid spread of this virus is largely related to lots of people living in close quarters with janky plumbing. It's more surprising that this sort of thing isn't occurring more often in China and in emerging nations with extremely dense populations. 

China's shutdown of massive transportation and big events to contain a rapid spreading of a cold virus is excessive caution. If this were a really deadly plague, we wouldn't be reading of 1500 deaths after two months of 11 million people being confined in a megacity.