davidmalcolm

I laughed when I saw the free for a year to people who buy Apple Products, this is BLOODY BRILLIANT! This basically makes Apple TV+ a commercial with a several billion dollar price tag! How do you compete with piracy while still making money? Yeah, this model. Somebody buys a new AppleTV 4K? I did a quick google for "how many iPhones did Apple sell last year" I think for 2017 it said 46 million, imagine that Apple is going to give every one of those users an opportunity to have a free year long subscription to a streaming service with several unique interesting shows? It's free for the year, who cares, sign up. "Hey everybody, we added 46 million subscribers in our first year!"

I wonder how much money Apple is actually saving by using old SOCs. On the one hand it's nice because if they're selling them new they need to support the A10 for like another four years, which probably means that they don't plan to drop support for the iPhone 7 series phones for another four years. (Which is nice because I bought my Mom a 7 Plus last summer and Canadian carriers seem to be dropping subsidies so I'd like her to make that phone last as long as possible.)

I feel like with Apple Arcade they're targeting the A10 as a semi long term base model. They have it in the Apple TV 4K, they've got it in the iPod touch and they've got it in the base iPad. All of these are devices that they don't like to upgrade yearly. I suspect part of the rational behind this is that for current web browsing and general app usage the A10 is still pretty beefy, it has the high efficiency cores which means that even as the battery decays the device can still probably get phenomenal battery life. I think there was also something with the GPU that it was a pretty big leap at the time with some impressive features.

I have to wonder what's wrong with the A11 though? I'm wondering if they're not happy with it for some reason? They love the A10 and are putting it in almost everything, but the only thing the A11 has powered is three phones, and only two of those are still for sale (the ones that don't use FaceID. They keep talking about AR games and what not, but if that's the case wouldn't it make sense to have moved the iPad over to at least their first chip with a neural engine? Maybe the failure rate on it was pretty high? I can appreciate them not wanting to have the cheapest iPad competing with the iPad Air and the iPad mini, but it's kinda weird to keep the processor two generations behind.

Overall Apple's iPad line continues to be a weird hard to explain to a normal person product line.

I think things will start to be a little clearer after a probable October iPad Pro event. I was kind of expecting them to blow the whole load today, but I ought to have known better. They don't want to forgo more than two weeks of iPad Pro sales from people who don't pay attention to these things, but I find it almost impossible to believe that they intend to leave the iPad Air/mini on the same Processor (sans X) for a full year. I suspect what might happen is that Apple is going to move the iPad Pro over to an A13X in October, possibly announce a beefier Apple TV 4K (but they'll need another name since they'll keep the 4K around.) It'll be marketed as not just handling 4K video but allowing better gaming performance with Apple Arcade. Heck, I wonder if the A12X could handle an 8K stream?

I'm kind of hoping at that point that they'll move the Apple TV 4K down to the $150  price point. The Apple TV is a great little box but it's a hard sell as the price has moved up. If they're smart they'll move the A8 powered Apple TV HD down to 99. But I think Apple has kinda decided to just give that market to Roku.

I planned on watching on YouTube (because sometimes Apple's streams kick you out if you pause or whatever) but in the end I watched in the Apple App on Apple TV. So that's 2 million people watching who weren't watching on Apple TV or through Apple.com... that's pretty intense.

A10? Didn’t the iPad already have A10!? Yeah it did. They bumped the screen but didn’t improve the Soc.

I seriously have to wonder how on earth Morning Show could cost as much per episode as Game of Thrones. Like, sure it looks like it'll be a good show, but come on. Celebrities shouldn't be worth that much. Game of Thrones had a HUGE cast, need for locations and CGI and... Morning show has three big names. That said I am glad that they're not choosing to go with really cheap crappy content as people assumed based on Planet of the Apps.