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netrox said:
I am not sure how you get penalized for not meeting the minimum purchase? Isn't it a custom to buy ALL of them to avoid being penalized? Can't those extra screens be saved for repairs when needed? Apple could repair for a lot less and their loss would be minimized.

When talking about serious volume orders companies universally negotiate a price at a given volume.  The better the volume, often a better price can be achieved from a vendor. A guarantee to buy/sell a certain minimum allows a vendor to ensure that a contract to sell will meet their baseline opportunity cost as well as ensuring any hard cost they will have as a result of preparing large orders will be covered.

Vendors have to have a ‘penalty’ if their buyers fail to meet their minimum purchases otherwise they can be left holding the bag for unused components and other sunk costs made because of the purchase agreement.

In Apple’s case, I’m sure they had already accounted for all the screen they might need for repairs. They have a lot of data telling them how many they’ll likely need for any number of units sold.

While not disputing the recommendation in the article, I find it curious that single core performance improvement of 20% is deemed as a slight improvement where in reviews of other recent Apple releases, be they phones or laptop/desktop computers have considered such gains as “notable” and motivation to make the purchase.  I guess it should be no surprise that difference reviewers will judge differently - but it would be nice if AI was a bit more uniform in their published assessments.

Also, seems to me those geekbench bar graphs are wonky.  They seem skewed to make the performance difference not seem so great.  e.g., the single core performance of the A12 is 20% greater than the A10x but the graph is not 20% longer.  So follows the multi-core.

I realize the danger of making assumptions but I'll hazard it anyway and posit that Corning has been making Gorilla Glass more flexible in the last generation or so to aid in drop surviability in contrast to a harder screen that is more scratch resistant. Anecdotally, I've scratched my first iPhone glass on my 6s after having owned each model from the 5s and earlier. I hope people ARE seeing fewer cracked screens because I'm really bummed about this scratch.