mattinoz

tenthousandthings said:

mike1 said:

AppleInsider said:

For the last few iPhone generations, Apple incorporated new chip features into its Pro product line. The standard iPhone tier instead had the same chips one year later.

This is demonstrated in the iPhone 15 family of devices. While the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max used the A17 Pro, the iPhone 15 and Plus used the A16.

If I'm not mistaken, the 15 models were the only series that followed this path. Don't think it was the case with the 14 series. That would make last year the outlier.

It started when the A15 Bionic was used in the iPhone 13, then reused for the iPhone 14, while the iPhone 14 Pro got the A16 Bionic.

But yes, it’s just these last two generations.

It’s interesting (if accurate) that the A17 Pro architecture will be reused on N3E for A18. I think we might be able to draw some conclusions from that. It could mean that the A17 Pro was rearchitected (in preparation for the transition to N3E) at a late stage, while the M3 family was not changed. That would explain the INT8 support in the A17 Pro’s Neural Engine, while M3 (apparently) doesn’t have it.

radarthekat said:

araquen said:

I am skeptical. Apple Intelligence is not a product, and everyone gets that wrong. Apple Intelligence is functionality that is intended to enhance and improve the various platforms Apple has (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, etc). How do you monetize that without monetizing the OS? An OS Apple offers for free.

I highly doubt Apple will start charging again for their OS, just to monetize Apple Intelligence. Rather, what Apple is more likely to do is use Apple Intelligence to enhance the user experience for services. Perhaps “Enhanced AppleTV+” or “Enhanced AppleMusic” where the AI infrastructure is used to enhance the users’ experiences on those services. And I am on the fence about charging for that extra functionality. If Apple boosts prices for their services, it would be for far more than just “look it has AI now."

At the end of the day, it is easy to predict how Apple is going to do something once you understand that Apple is a hardware manufacturer first and foremost. Their goal is to have you buy their devices, originally the Mac. Even the iPhone was originally intended to be a supplement to the Mac, and Apple shifted gears when the iPhone proved to be as widely popular as it had become. But regardless of device - Apple wants to sell you their hardware. And they want to justify the premium consumers pay. So EVERYTHING ELSE Apple does is intended to be a value-add to make it worthwhile to have invested in Apple’s hardware. Everything. Mail. Messages. Pages. FaceTime. Numbers. Keynote. AppleMusic. Apple Arcade. iCloud. AppleOne. All the software and services are there to give your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone something to do without being dependent on the “kindness of strangers.” Because Apple hasn’t forgotten (nor have long-time Mac users), there was a time where developers were cheerfully refusing to develop for Apple offerings.

People call it “walled garden” but that assumes an even playing field. For decades, Apple has been on the periphery of popular tech, and barely anyone was developing for the Mac. The iPhone was largely developed because prior to that, not a single cell phone manufacturer would provide interoperability between their devices and the Mac (and I loved my Motorola flip phone, but its lack of connectivity to my Mac was a royal pain in my ***). The iPhone was the first cell phone Mac users could sync with their computer. From that point, Apple’s offerings remain consistent with: how do we (Apple) provide solutions that extend the efficacy of the products our customers already own? How do we keep improving the value of our brand to our consumers?

Apple’s goal isn’t to sell us an Apple Intelligence product. That’s Google’s world. Apple’s goal is to use Apple Intelligence as the infrastructural foundation for having Apple solutioning a “personal digital assistant” for their customers. That isn’t a product. It is core functionality of the hardware and software systems Apple provides.

But pundits (especially those driven by the limited vision of Wall Street) can’t understand this, so keep getting it wrong.

Trust me. Once you start looking at Apple as a hardware manufacturer first and foremost, whose business model is based on the idea of providing a boutique experience for their customers (who have paid a premium for such treatment) you’ll have a better understanding on how Apple intends to leverage its software and services solutions.

Perhaps a good analogy would be the free Apple workout app and exercise rings versus the Apple Firness+ app.  So it’s maybe not an extra cost on top of an already paid subscription service like your Apple TV example, but rather a new paid service that goes beyond what’s available in the free Apple Intelligence capabilities.  I could see an app for medical professionals, maybe partnering with IBM Watson, or an app for sports trainers, etc. 

chasm said:

miiwtwo said:

cheaper and standalone headset or else, put an A1x pro or m1, simple,

Given that the AVP kind of straddles a line between being a spatial iPad and (now) a spatial Mac, I think you'll get your wish in AVP v2.

dewme said:

programmer said:

A few years ago I suggested that Apple Silicon & Mac Pro could be combined by creating an M-series chip-on-a-PCIe-board which could be inserted into a Mac Pro's chassis.  The problem with doing this is that it doesn't look (to software) like a traditional CPU/GPU/memory machine.  That is precisely what this article is about though -- how to distribute heavy computations to the available hardware.  The more computation Apple manages to offload from the local machine, the more it makes sense to have additional "headless" hardware available.  This would make the Mac Pro chassis a lot more compelling than it is currently, and the same ASi-on-PCIe boards could be deployed into servers in the cloud.

Thanks for the server feedback. The dedicated servers I've dealt with (Windows Server) were always quite heavily loaded, but server machines weren't nearly as powerful back then, especially with redundancy to support hot failover.

It sounds like what you're describing would also lend itself to a "stack-of-minis" approach to provide additional compute resources as needed, i.e., compute elasticity. At one point in time before the Mac Studio came out I really thought that Apple might do something like this with the Mx Mac mini. It sounds like Apple is proposing an architecture that will allow end users to setup their own ad hoc system for managing compute elasticity but also functional elasticity by using a heterogeneous mix of computers. It sounds very compelling.