melgross
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WWDC will be on June 9 with iOS 19, Apple Intelligence updates, and more
The videos are much better than the live presentations. Those tended to ramble and took much longer. Well, I remember that Apple was criticized for trying to get everything in the first release. Be more like Google and Microsoft people would say, and release features when they’re ready and don’t rush them out for an announcement. Give me a break!Rogue01 said:Will it be a live keynote, or another awful cringe-worthy video? Maybe they will be apologizing for Apple Intelligence instead of trying to push out more half-baked features. They already blundered with Siri, unless they try and do damage control and more promises of features that won't be ready with iOS 19.
I miss the days when Apple released new software and the features they previewed at WWDC were actually in the release version. Instead all we get are 'coming soon' and then 'maybe next year'. I stopped watching the videos because they were nothing more than reading press releases and spec sheets.
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Apple's C1 modem is a quiet game-changer that's mostly flying under the radar
Intel got itself in trouble years ago at the end of the 10nm period. Before then other fabs had used nm loosely.10nm wasn’t really 10nm in that much of what was on the chips were 12 and 14nm. Intel had the idealistic idea that 10nm should actually be 10nm. They couldn’t do it. So a good two years after “10nm” came out elsewhere, they finally decided to follow the industry so they could catch up. By that time “7nm” had come out and they were forever behind. They proposed a new nomenclature which was number of transistors per square mm, or something similar, because they still had the better numbers, but unsurprisingly, no other company wanted to go along.SuntanIronMan said:
I know of a company that has shiny new leading-edge fab in Arizona, is struggling financially, has been selling/spinning-off various parts of its company and now has a new CEO.melgross said:
A modern fab costs up to $25 billion, and rising. It also takes years of experience to get the fab up to optimal performance. I doubt Apple will be willing to spend that money and take years to get it running properly. Then there are the risks of having a problem as fab companies gave. So now, 2nm is a year late from tank and others. But these companies have a number of favs. The build a new one and one by one, upgrade their older ones. How could Apple do that? They would have to have a fully functioning 3nm fab and build a 2nm fab.blastdoor said:Apple's silicon design team appears to be among the strongest teams in the company, and among the best silicon design teams in the world (if not the best).
I wonder if Apple will buy or build their own fab so that they are both designing and manufacturing their chips. I know what the knee jerk reaction to that suggestion will be, but TSMC margins are steadily going up, which means that's profit Apple is missing out on. Time and time again, we have seen Apple identify suppliers with fat profit margins and then take over that business themselves.
Maybe a way to start could be a joint venture with TSMC or Intel to build an Apple fab in the US. Apple could finance and own the fab and pay their partner some patent licensing and management/operation fees. Eventually Apple could then take over the management and operation.
no. Apple decided to not do that, and they’re right.
I’m not saying Apple would buy Intel fabrication business. Not only am I not saying that, but I’m darn-near positive that Apple would never, lol.
BUT (just to speculate wildly): If Apple did want to get into fabrication (which it doesn’t), there is a quick way to skip all the time consuming parts that you mentioned. It would just require a large sum of money (which Apple has), Intel’s willingness to sell (which it might) and some government approval (since Intel took CHIPS Act money that requires Intel to not sell their fabrication business for some time).
Again, I’m not at all saying this is something that would happen. And it wouldn’t never be as simple as that. Just having fun speculating about something that definitely won’t happen, lol.
at any rate, refusing to cooperate with Apple in making the A series of SoCs because they didn’t believe Apple’s numbers, which they later said were correct, was a reason TSMC has risen, and they have fallen.Nah, it’s not that simple. Remember Intel had a pretty decent modem that Apple bought. But they stopped making them as Apple stopped buying them because of bad publicity. Apple had its own team and then they bought Intel’s. You would think that they could have popped out a new modem in a couple of years with all of that, but it took six. I was a manufacturer a while ago and I can tell you that, no pun intended, there are an awful lot of moving parts to manufacturing. You can’t just take over a chip plant. Then it needs to be upgraded to 3nm. And you have to keep your eye on 2nm. And how do you go to 2nm? What is the path? Intel, TSMC and Samsung all have multiple plants. They do a shuffle. They run most of their older plants on current process, but upgrade one or two to the new process. Then they build a new one or maybe two. Then they close some old ones.If Apple buys one plant, how does that work? Intel has no current 3nm fabs they would sell. They would have to immediately upgrade it to what, 3nm which will not be used for bleeding edge chips in 18 months, or so? Or work on 2nm which would, since they would be going from scratch, take three years, if everything works out as expected? Remember that TSMC is a year behind on 2nm now. And Apple management has no hands on experience with this. You buy the plant and hire the people and within a few months, top management leaves as do engineering personnel. No, terrible idea. Apple is well aware of this too.
i don’t understand why people make these proposals. Years ago it would have been easier. It’s far more difficult now. If they were going to do this they should have started before the first A series was ready, back in 2007. They could have bought a number of state of the art fabs from IBM, AMD and others at the time really cheaply, with a much easier learning curve. It’s too late now.
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Apple's C1 modem is a quiet game-changer that's mostly flying under the radar
People don’t remember that Intel’s modem was about as good as Qualcomm’s modem except in edge cases where Qualcomm’s would get weaker to where it dropped. Intel’s would be about the same but would just drop. That was about the only difference. But it was hyped by “reviewer’s” as being very important, when it was a minor deficiency. Apple dropped it because of the bad publicity. I never found it to be a problem in my iPhone at the time.tht said:
It’s doubtful that any user end tests are reliable, or, that the those anecdotes can be applied everywhere. Apple will have actual measured performance data where they have control of both a “cellular tower” model and the phone, but obviously that’s going to be proprietary data.TigerWilliams said:Are there any real world tests of how well Apples C1 modem does in establishing and maintaining a connection in areas with spotty coverage, vs a Qualcomm modem ?I repeat, any end user test is unreliable if they don’t have control of the tower.
Some reviewers and vloggers have measured bandwidth and power consumption. For those, I think all you can say is that it is about the same iPhone 16, 16 Pro models. Who knows if those tests were actually using the same bands across phones.
i imagine that Apple is very recognizant of that and wouldn’t have released this one if they weren’t confident that performance was pretty much equal to Qualcomm’s. And from Qualcomm’s statements over the last two years of this, they seem to be expressing that Apple’s modems will be competitive. That’s a pretty neutral stance.
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Apple's C1 modem is a quiet game-changer that's mostly flying under the radar
While space is a consideration for Macs as their mobos these days are very small, power considerations, latency and other performance issues are just as important, or more so. Modern modems are expensive standalone computers. They are getting close to the size of an SoC. If Apple couldn’t figure out how to integrate into the SoC as Qualcomm’s SoCs are integrated, that would also save money in the packaging. So there would be good reasons to integrate.twolf2919 said:"Apple is even working on integrating the C-series chips directly into its A and M-series processors. Which means, theoretically, we could finally get cellular Macs." It doesn't mean that at all! Whether the C1 is a chip by itself or on the processor itself is irrelevant to Apple's decision to produce a cellular Mac. Surely space is not a consideration on a Mac when a standalone C1 chip can fit into an iPhone? Also, while the author may root for paying for multiple cellular plans - I guess he must also enjoy paying for a separate plan on his Apple Watch? - I'd rather *occasionally* use the wireless hotspot and suffer whatever real (or imaginary) performance disadvantage that brings over a separate cell than *always* pay for a separate data plan.When Apple Watch first added cellular capability, I wondered if one could simply *switch* ones cellular plan from one device to the other - rather than have a separate one altogether. But that was never a supported capability. I still maintain that in today's eSIM world, it should be trivial for Apple to let this cellular "license" float among any of its devices; when the user goes from his iPhone to his mac, he ought to be able to push a button "move cellular here". Now, that would be a useful and money-saving feature. -
Apple's C1 modem is a quiet game-changer that's mostly flying under the radar
A modern fab costs up to $25 billion, and rising. It also takes years of experience to get the fab up to optimal performance. I doubt Apple will be willing to spend that money and take years to get it running properly. Then there are the risks of having a problem as fab companies gave. So now, 2nm is a year late from tank and others. But these companies have a number of favs. The build a new one and one by one, upgrade their older ones. How could Apple do that? They would have to have a fully functioning 3nm fab and build a 2nm fab.blastdoor said:Apple's silicon design team appears to be among the strongest teams in the company, and among the best silicon design teams in the world (if not the best).
I wonder if Apple will buy or build their own fab so that they are both designing and manufacturing their chips. I know what the knee jerk reaction to that suggestion will be, but TSMC margins are steadily going up, which means that's profit Apple is missing out on. Time and time again, we have seen Apple identify suppliers with fat profit margins and then take over that business themselves.
Maybe a way to start could be a joint venture with TSMC or Intel to build an Apple fab in the US. Apple could finance and own the fab and pay their partner some patent licensing and management/operation fees. Eventually Apple could then take over the management and operation.
no. Apple decided to not do that, and they’re right.
