danox

robin huber said:

They’re already to the point where I have to careful about holding it or picking it up to avoid invoking some touch screen command. I know, I’m “holding it wrong.” 😑 

charlesn said:

Stop by any Sunday at the giant flea market in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium (home to the football Giants and Jets) in NJ and you'll find stacks of Apple products on vendor tables, selling "new in box" for under $50. The boxes are near indistinguishable from legit Apple merchandise, but you can bet the $50 AirPods Max will not be the same. What's remarkable is that this counterfeit merchandise is ALWAYS there and no authorities attempt to stop it, even though one bust where everything is seized would halt it (at least at this site) immediately. 

sakamura said:

Agreed, Rob53. It eventually becomes a law of diminishing returns. As long as the devices are not powerful enough, there is a great reason to improve their performance. But now, we’re entering a realm where the phone cameras are competing with premium dedicated offerings for photography and videography. The screens are full HDR, high luminance, dark black beasts with enough resolution our eyes don’t see the pixels anymore, all that at 1-120Hz.  Likewise, the GPUs and CPUs are now on par with a good quality gaming computer. And finally, we are even getting NPUs that would’ve decimated the coin world would they had existed 20 years ago, and dozens of dedicated coprocessors, not only the old FPU or Neon SIMD of lore. Not even counting 5G+mm/buzzword, WiFi999+++extreme, Bluetooth/99.99, we can connect the phones to an USB-C hub providing device support such as HDMI 4k, Ethernet, Audio in/out for 8 channels at ridiculous rates, external storage. We can even connect a keyboard and mouse. All that to a phone.

For pro usage, yes, of course. Pushing the envelope, as usual. For development. Or for specialized worlds like gaming. But for every day use? iPhone 13 & up are still very potent.

Now, we have the A-series, and then, the M-series, M-Pro, M-Max, M-Ultra. Not counting Watch’s S, Vision’s R, and other « hidden » processors in the range. And cross-pollination between iPad with M-series as well as A-series.

At this point, it makes sense to repurpose the A-series closer to the S-series, and keep on improving the performance/watt instead of pure performance. That would also help devices such as the MacBook Air, that’s starting to get eerily hot on the later models. I wouldn’t mind a highly efficient A19 into a MBA, differentiating it from the performance-oriented M-based MBP.

This is sincerely the same than PCs, where IMHO the technology started getting into the asymptotic part of the diminishing returns curve 10 years ago. There are still reasons to improve computers outside of performance, or specialized parts. integrated GPUs are great examples. I am hoping for great improvement with Intel’s discrete GPUs, where it’ll eventually bring higher quality in the integrated GPU world. We’re already seeing this, where some workloads are executed faster on integrated GPUs than intermediate discrete GPUs. But if we look solely at CPUs, the gigahertz war is roughly over, the number of cores are tapered with efficiency in mind, not only performance. For a regular user, it’s typically not necessary to upgrade. Yes if you do 4K streaming with 2 inputs and interface compositing, as well as playing a game on the same computer, with audio and video processing and compression to Twitch and YT. But we’re getting in the crazy realm now, let’s agree on that! Most users won’t need that. There’s reasons why most people are still buying four core computers even today.

Nikon8 said:

I rather have a phone that can give me battery life than faster speed.  It makes no difference these days. Any recent phones are fast enough