misa

pogo007 said:

Apple's iPad line up is just getting more and more confusing. I think with their current lineup will confuse customers. They are starting to have to many different models. On top of that the new model they released is smaller and has newer features that it's bigger counter part. I remember a 1 year ago we had a debate on putting Mac OS X on the iPad. Now with these bigger models it's never been more evident that IOS is just not up to par for a device that size. It also mind boggles me that iOS still lacks a file exploerer and the ability to attach multiple documents to a email. I think customers that don't need to do to much artistic work should just stick to getting a MacBook Air.

I imagine the 9.7" iPad Pro replaces the iPad Air/iPad previous much like the MacBook Pro replaced the MacBook as it's flagship laptop.

Likewise the Macbook/MacBook Air are not compelling products when put beside the MacBook Pro looking at the specs alone. So the iPad Mini, and the iPhone SE are geared towards people who want the smaller/lighter product. 

About the only case where Apple has no idea what it's doing is with the AppleTV and Mac Pro products. The AppleTV should literately be a "headless" iPad Pro, while the MacMini should be a "headless" iMac. The current Mac Pro looks "cute" but it's not what professionals want. The AppleTV, MacMini and MacPro need to be user-upgradeable with storage, and arguably the RAM should be upgradeable as well. I know Steve Job's industrial design basically mandates that "no user serviceable parts inside" but this creates way too much waste. 

If we were talking about companies being "green" Apple might be green in terms of the production pipeline, but it's products are a major e-waste contributor due to these "sealed box" industrial designs. Intel isn't helping on this front either. Sure I can buy the idea that a computer doesn't really have 7 years of useful life, but we hit the Moore's Law wall in 2008 and everything after that has been about reducing power consumption. But if the devices aren't really improving year over year, why should we replace them every 3 years instead of just replacing the "wear part", eg the NAND memory.

But the alternatives are worse. Computers are the only thing that where upgrades are even considered. Imagine if you replaced your "dumb" TV every 3 years instead of holding onto it like 30 years (like people did with color CRT's.)  The batteries and NAND memory won't last 5 years in current devices, and you're lucky if you can buy a LCD TV that lasts more than 10 (The LCD screen I have right now was purchased around 9 years ago and the top of the screen is starting to get some image persistence problems.) This is the same kind of problem that the iPad, iPhone, MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac would have.

linkman said:

The article doesn't mention the $100 price differential between the 16GB and 64GB models. There is a large difference in the profit margin on the two.

While there will be some cannibalism from 6s model sales, most of the purchases of the SE will be from customers that would not buy the larger models. All of the profit from the SE would have been unrealized profit for Apple.

There won't be any cannibalism. People who want the smaller screen, want the smaller screen. That is the only deciding factor here. People aren't going to pick a smaller phone to save money just like they don't pick a smaller capacity to save money. They pick what they need.

Given how fast this came about, I'm going to say the security company is going to keep it close to their chest because otherwise all the LEO (Law Enforcement Officers) around the world are going to want to know it.

There's that "curved glass" and "AMOLED" rumor that has been springing up every so often ever since Samsung did it.

No... I don't think it's in apple's best interests

mdriftmeyer said:

Or Apple just waits for Zen to arrive with Polaris and offers BTO options for either Intel or AMD. Since AMD's AM4 boards now come with USB 3.1-C and Thunderbolt 2.0 nothing will keep Apple tethered to Intel exclusively.

It will be a cold day in hell when AMD releases a CPU part that isn't 3 generations behind Intel's flagship product. I'm making a broad generalization, but this is the same reason why I've never bought a AMD CPU.

And people still seem to think Apple is going to switch to their own parts they use for iOS. Nevermind the fact that one fab isn't enough to generate enough parts for the iOS devices, the ARM parts are not performance equivalent. It's like comparing a car going 100KPH that has a top speed of 300KPH (Intel) to a Scooter that 100KPH is the redline (ARM.) Just because you can get X performance out of it, doesn't mean X performance is where it's most efficient. 

The A9 in the iPhone 6S ( Apple A9 1849 MHz ) has a Geekbench score of 2490, which is just shy of the score a Intel Core i5-2520M @ 2.50 GHz is at 2500. But put this on a much larger perspective, The i5-2520M has a Passmark score of 3,556, and isn't on the "high end CPU" list at all. Rather it has the same relative score as a Intel Atom C2750 @ 2.41GHz. If you look at the single-thread Passmark list, the scores look even worse, A 1,497 score. That puts the i5, and by extension the A9 at just slightly over half the performance of the top-end part ( Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz : 2,530 ) 

For reference, AMD's highest performing part on passmark is the AMD Athlon X4 845 (3.5Ghz) : 1,807

When the Apple ARM part can hit a solid equivalent of 2,250 on Passmark (that's the performance of the highest performing i3 dual-core desktop part), Apple can justify putting those parts in the Desktop and Laptop, but I'm fairly certain Intel and Apple aren't making such leaps in performance given that Intel keeps selling trash CPU's with passmark scores of 600 into the same space that ARM parts have scores over 1500.

And yes, I'm dismissing multi-core performance, because to date, the only software that takes advantage of multicore are processes best done on the GPU, and Intel's GPU parts are such a joke that any computer that doesn't include a dedicated GPU is a joke and a paperweight. I'm sure all the businesses that buy laptops assume their employees aren't playing games, but the entire 3D compositing and windowing engine introduced in Windows Vista/7/8/8.1/10 and "WebGL" technology being pushed by web browsers is making even "new" devices appear obsolete. WebGL itself is a huge joke (OpenGL ES 2.0, with some missing features and controlled from javascript) being several layers of hardware and software abstraction away from the hardware, it is impossible to get reasonable performance even out of the highest end CPU+GPU parts.