cloudguy

9secondkox2 said:

Apple chargesover a thousand bucks for a PHONE! 

ifthe M series chips outperform intel i9 series, Apple May well charge MORE for Macs. 

And it would be unfortunate for us as consumers,yet totally justified. 

Faster computing than anywhere else plus better battery life and perhaps special features? 

That’s best in class premium computing. 

AApple is going to likely either keep prices the same or slightly raise them
the cash they save compared to paying intel will pas the famous Apple profit margin and stocks will soar yet again. 

With the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra starting at $1400, the cost of Apple phones should no longer be an issue.

People who are convinced that Apple is paying Intel all this money are going to be disappointed. The Intel Core i3 costs Apple less than $50 and the Intel Core i5 less than $100. While the i7, i9 and Xeon cost a bit more - and even better they will no longer need to buy AMD GPUs for those models -  Apple sells far less of those (Mac Pros, iMacs, top end MacBook Pros) than they do the entry level and midrange MacBook Air and MacBook Pro devices that contain the i3 and i5. The same 10th gen Intel Core i3 that is in a $1000 MacBook Air is in a $450 Inspiron or IdeaPad (with the same specs). Whoever Apple is paying all this money too, it isn't Intel so save the dreams of increased margins and stock prices.

gmgravytrain said:

Just wait until Apple Silicon Macs hit their stride.  I believe Mac laptop sales will go through the roof if they have the processing power of a six-core i7 and can get 15 to 20 hours of use on a charge.  It seems as though the pandemic is going to last well into next year so Apple Silicon laptops will likely be a strong revenue factor.  Hopefully, Apple sells Apple Silicon MacBooks for a decent price below $1000.  Apple could theoretically cut into the market of cheap Chromebooks and those low-cost Wintel laptops, but maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.

It is wishful thinking on your part.

1. An 11 inch iPad Pro with 256 GB of storage costs $899. If you have a case for a MacBook Air being less, make it. An entry level MacBook Air doesn't need a "Pro" chip? Fine ... a 256 GB MacBook Air costs $750. And remember: iPads don't have keyboards.

2. You presume that macOS is as popular - and Windows as unpopular - with the general populace as it is with Apple fans. Or that this same general populace is so enamored with Apple's engineering and product design that they will run out and get a new computer just because it has the same general CPU in it that an iPhone or iPad has. There is ... no basis for this presumption. Even if there were some basis for the presumption other factors - an entry level Mac will still cost twice as much as an entry level Lenovo, Dell or HP while not being able to run nearly as much software and will require learning an entirely new OS - would inhibit it.

ARM-based Macs is a huge deal ... for people who already exclusively buy Macs and other Apple products already. The rest ... well ask them if their computer's CPU and GPU were made by Intel, AMD or Nvidia, and whether their hard drive is SSD. What percentage of them would be able to tell you? (Note: this applies to most Mac owners too.)

Apple bought Beats because of branding. Back in the early 2010s Samsung got a lot of mileage from depicting Apple as "establishment country club squares" and themselves as the "hip urban rebels against the status quo." Apple was opera, Samsung hip-hop, and so forth. So in addition to heavily marketing LeBron James and their infamous ads skewering not only Apple products but their consumers, Samsung had tie-ins with Beats including preinstalling Beats Radio - and its hip hop heavy programming - on every Samsung phone or tablet and cross promotions where Samsung phones and tablets and Beats headphones were featured together in marketing materials. Apple's buying Beats was a play to alter their image just a bit and chase the same crowd.

But now, times have changed. Beats is no longer the hottest headphone brand. Apple's "image" is now the biggest and most profitable company in history, and it is Google and Facebook with the image problems. (Everyone hates Google and loves Microsoft now when just a few years ago it was the opposite.) More important, the headphones market is no longer considered a "music" one at all but instead a tech one. It is but a part of the "wearables" market that Apple dominates profits, mindshare and much of the market share with AirPods and the Apple Watch. And as someone whose formative years were spent with oversized headphones attached to battery-powered Sony Walkmans, we aren't going back. Apple succeeded at this where Google failed - smartwatches, smart jackets, smart jeans, smart shoes, smart glasses - after years of trying. (As for Samsung, while they did - and still do - offer smart watches, they focused more on smart home building on their existing strength in appliances than on wearables. And the idea of coming up with a smart home app for their watches seems to have eluded them. They shouldn't feel too bad, as even though you should be able to use Google Assistant on your watch to control your smart speaker, Android TV, smartphone, smart bulb or whatever in practice it doesn't really work.)

In the short term, buying Beats ended their very successful partnership with Samsung. Apple fans - who were never going to buy Galaxy phones in the first place - will always hate those advertising campaigns but they did their job in establishing Samsung as a tech brand where before they were only associated with appliances in the west. Apple buying them was a smart move. (Samsung considered buying Beats before Apple did but decided against it because Samsung had their own audio products line ... two of them in fact. In retrospect Samsung should have just bought them anyway.) In the intermediate term, the guts of Beats Radio became Apple Music, a core part of Apple's growing services empire. And in the long term, Apple's next wave of products - Apple Watch and then AirPods - made Beats obsolete and irrelevant. Walking around with massive headphones over your hears is no longer a coolness signifier. Instead, even in the same urban areas that Samsung targeted with their LeBron and Beats spots years ago, now AirPods are. 

As for AirPods Studio ... fine. They are a far more successful and mainstream product than Beats ever were. Despite Beats' hip factor, no one copied Beats and a significant portion of the population - including not a few ardent Apple consumers - would never buy them because they wanted no association with "Doctor Dre" and what he and his "music" represent. Meanwhile everyone (but Samsung) has copied AirPods. So ditching yesterday's news in favor of Apple's most successful and influential product since the iPhone is just good business. The HomePod replaces the Pill. AirPods Studio replaces the headphones. And the Beats brand is no more. It is just business, and part of that is progress. After all, it is not like there is any sentimental attachment towards a product line that Apple didn't develop and has only been part of their portfolio for about 5 years - and has been a declining brand in favor of AirPods for much of that time - anyway.

"The expansion of the Neural Engine to 16 cores instead of 8 cores brought up the question of why Apple elected to devote transistors there and not budgeted for more GPU or CPU performance, which Millet suggests is down to how Apple views the feature."

Two things.

1. There are a lot of AI features on mobile and this will increase in the future. You offload those AI features to their own chips for the same reason that floating point math was offloaded at one time and graphics and security functions are offloaded now. Separating the specialized functions allows for botth the specialized and generalized functions to run better.

2. The other companies involved in AI - Microsoft, Amazon, Google - are using the cloud for AI. Apple lacks their cloud prowess and infrastructure so they are trying to compete using hardware. Apple is going to either aim to provide more AI functionality locally than the competition can provide using the cloud - which should be possible in theory so long as Apple can come up with applications for it - or provide similar AI functionality but with more "speed, security and privacy" than shipping AI queries and results back and forth over a 5G connection.

While it isn't this way on PCs - yet - go ahead and accept that going forward there are going to be 3 main processing units in mobile: CPU, GPU and AI. 

This is dumb. Similar to the search engine on Android auction for the EU - which was won by Microsoft and Yandex - any and all actions to break up Google and Apple will only benefit Microsoft. Let me repeat: any and all actions to break up Google and Apple will only benefit Microsoft (and Amazon and Facebook). It won't "open up" squat. It will just shift things around a bit at the top. 

It may actually hurt things. Google's existence is the very thing that keeps us from having to rely on Microsoft for everything. (This is true even if you use Apple hardware whether you wish to admit it or not.) Also, the war between Google and Amazon forced Google to court retailers - especially WalMart and Best Buy - as alternative channels. 

Also, do these folks know that without the Chrome browser, Chrome OS would be absolutely worthless? So give Chrome OS to who then? To Microsoft? Don't make me laugh. To Amazon? Yeah, they did such a good job with smartphones - when they didn't even invest the OS - that we should totally believe that they have the capability to compete with Microsoft and Apple in PCs. Who else is there? Oracle maybe? Again, they did such a good job with the tech that they got from Sun, didn't they? I still remember when their CEO stated that the cloud was going to fail. 

Also, getting rid of Chrome wouldn't do squat to solve the real problem - Google's search and ads dominance - in the first place. Apple folks should understand this: why do AirPods and the Apple Watch dominate? Because they are the best, right? Same here. First off, Google was #1 in search before the Chrome browser in the first place. Prior to Chrome, the #1 browser was Firefox, where Google was default. Also, everyone who used IE would make Google the default search engine. Ads? More of the same. Google bought DoubleClick - back when Microsoft, Yahoo or anyone else could have but no one wanted it - combined it with their own tech, came up with some innovative offerings like AdWords and so forth.

Look, if you want to split search off from Google then fine. Liberating Android, ChromeOS, Nest etc. from Google's singular focus on search would make that company better. "Wear OS is crap, our ChromeOS UI is buggy, there are no productivity apps for Android tablets, we go years without updating Android TV or our smart speakers and no one buys our Pixel phones, and were Samsung to ditch us we would be up a creek with no paddle? Ah, big deal, we get hundreds of billions a year off ads so who cares." But splitting Chrome - a free product that is primarily open source - from Google would just inconvenience billions of users while accomplishing nothing at all.