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Soli said:

It would be great to see that a jump of 256GB to 512GB is only $100, but we have a current iPad Pro that has this option for $200 more, this is the highest-tier purchase where companies typically makes the most profit per unit, and we have AI saying, "given that flash storage commodity prices are at a high and have been so for about nine months."

I'm fine with any guess so long as it's stated as such and that unusual predictions have some sort of explanation to back up their prediction.

Exactly. The only way i see this as possible, would be apple making the roughly same profits ( not margin )  on all three storage model. Lower Flash storage has always meant slower speed, so may be Apple is using some better components to achieve the same speed as 256 and 512 GB version. Hence the cost per GB for 64GB model would be more. 

>TVs can have a lot of cable clutter at the back so it would be best to have a way to get external ports away from the back of the TV so they don't have to put it on a hinge. This can be done with the power cable.

The new OLED TV from LG already does that, as well as many other 4K TV in China. You basically have a special cable attached to the panel, and the rest of the electronics components, and power supply are in a separate box, in LG's case ( as well as Xioami ) it is also a speaker.

Sometimes I wonder if they can have the whole side frame of TV to act as a Wireless Router as well. That is massive surface area for Antenna.

There is also the problem with TV Tuner, US, Japan, China, EU all uses different TV Technology. May be apple have find a solution to that as well?  

Well it is either LTE-M which doesn't support VoLTE and wasn't designed for continuous data connection for VoIP, or it simply doesn't have call function ever.

The industry was also expecting to test Half Duplex FDD LTE with LTE-M, making the design much cheaper.

My guess is that this is why Apple went to court with Qualcomm, no more CDMA patents required for LTE Data only services, and if they won, we could expect LTE across Mac and iPad as standard.

 

rob53 said:

Apple's license fees and royalties represented revenue of $75.8 million for the 2015-2016 financial year, and rose to approximately $81 million for the fiscal year that ended on April 2017. 

I would have thought licensing fees would have been much higher but considering the number of iPhones and iPads sold during 2016 (~250M, guessing based on several sites), that's only 30-cents/iOS device. Qualcomm must have been charging a whole lot more. I have no problem with 30-cents for an important component like the GPU, which isn't a standards-based device.

And if you compare you have to paid a maximum of $100M / year to just use HEVC, and many many times more for 4G LTE this ~$80M IP surely seems very little for something as important as GPU.

But when you put this next to ARM, Apple paid no where near this amount for CPU. ( It is an Architecture License )
Apple are already customizing alot for the GPU already. They are also not using any services from IMG for drivers development, from Nvidia and AMD we know GPU is nothing without drivers, and drivers are the major cost with GPU development.    

So they Story goes Apple is not really getting a great deal. They wanted a lower price license, IMG with the new CEO played Hard ball and even wanted to hike the price. Apple did what they could and offer to acquire them. They refuse and here we are.

P.S - Those words from the IMG CEO about Ethics are pathetic. Apple could switch to Nvidia or ARM Mali should they choose to. And he should count himself lucky he is not in the era when Steve Jobs is still alive.  

Purely? Xeon? Radeon Pro?

I really wish Apple just give me a ProSumer iMac, Core i9, Normal Top range Radeon VEGA Graphics.

The improved GPU in iMac is still not good enough. 

And how about a new Design? I mean we could use a Thinner Bezel now.