tht

designr said:

Apple is certainly fighting upward price pressure on the input side (parts, labor, etc.) and trying to maintain margins and trying to maintain a lineup of products at various price points to not destroy the demand side. No small feat.

Some might argue they can and should take a hit on margins. Maybe. But they have a business model built on their margin level. They are also a publicly traded company. I'm certain they would take a big hit if they started showing weakness on margins.

Others might argue that taking lower margins (through lower prices) will spur greater demand and they'll make up for it. Demand curves do slope downward of course. But I'm sure Apple has modeled this. They almost certainly have a pretty good sense of what the price-elasticity-of-demand (how much more they could sell at lower prices) is for their products and their brand.

Apple does need to clean up an increasingly cluttered and confusing product catalog. This clutter may be a symptom of trying to manage all of the above and may be reduced when some aspect of these pressures eases up or stabilizes. Maybe. Then again, this might be a bunch of marketing, sales, and supply chain people trying to optimize market segmentation.

Loved your thoughtful post, but I disagree with the last paragraph. iPads are something like a $40b business for Apple. I don't think it is possible to sell more units with a simpler lineup because the use cases are so varied. Software and services is a huge part of it, but hardware is a big chunk of it. The lineup serves the most casual users with the iPad 9 and iPad 10 at lower price tiers. These will be discounted to $270 and $380 or something like that for holiday sales and such. The iPad Air and Pro 11 are the upsell choices for more demanding users. Note taking, music notation, games, business stuff, PDF documents, more premium, etc. The Pro models are for people who are essentially using them as their primary machine or as a specialist device.

They've basically filled out every price tier from $330 to $1100. It's a sliding scale of what you get per dollar, designed to upsell. Even the iPad mini, which is a special edition type of device, basically a small iPad Air which doesn't fit in an easily discerned display/$ type curve, doesn't overlap in price tier. The iPhone lineup, currently at 8 models, overlaps in price, and the benefits between the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 14 aren't that big, but it doesn't present issues for Apple's iPhone sales of people choosing what phone to get. People do understand. 

If there is an iPad Pro 14", it's going to be $1500. It's another product in the lineup but won't cause confusion with its price point. I half think an 7" iPod Touch, basically an iPad with a different aspect ratio, at $250 could be a viable product. Just something to play music and watch videos with. Something is easily pocketable. That's just the mundane established stuff. They could go really different if they wanted.

Totally disagree with the takes in this article.

I hear people saying the lack of Ethernet is bad on the $130 Apple TV. When I hear that, I immediately think those people are crazy. Crazy for not understanding what the mass market is, crazy for not being introspective of their desires versus the mass market. The mass market does not have Ethernet. They aren't going to wire their house with it. If their house or home has it, they won't use it. It's WiFi all the time. This Apple TV is a Christmas gift fare for the mass market. Perhaps Apple needs to cut it to $100, but at $130, it's a great price for what you get relative to other TV dongles.

If you are buyer that wants Ethernet, you can get an Apple TV with it for $150. This used to be the price of the lower end Apple TV 4K. The new one is basically 50% to 100% more in everything: CPU, GPU, RAM and storage. And it is fanless to boot. That's a pretty good deal.

I would recommend the $450 iPad 10th gen over the $330 iPad 9th gen. There is 1 GB more RAM, a 10% larger display, faster CPU, GPU, and RAM. It's simply a better machine, and it's worth $120 more. There is perhaps 2 reasons for getting the 9th gen model: a buyer doesn't want to spend $450 and buyer wants the home button. The former will be solved with time, the latter is one of those things that can't be solved and people will have to live with it.

If people want better iPads, they spend more. Same as it always is. That ~11" iPad form factor now scales from $450 to $2100. The more the buyer is willing to pay, the more and better they get. From 10th gen to Air to Pro, the quality improves. The case gets thinner. The displays get better, the performance gets better, the stylus performance gets better. If you are just a news browser, iPad 10th gen is the way to go. You like to play games, step up to the Air. If the iPad is the primary computing device you plan on using for years, get the Pro or perhaps the 12.9".

I can believe the total BOM cost of about $500. Maybe. It's your basic MSRP divided by 2 to 3, depending on how much you believe the soft costs are.

The headliner of an A16 SoC costing $110? I call BS on it. Nobody knows. Heck, I bet TSMC and Apple don't even really "know". It's a rather circular contracting arrangement of pre-paying, fixed-priced unit costs, technology funding, so on and so forth. How they determine $/SoC is going to vary with accounting assumptions. At $110, the SoC is 25% of the cost of an iPPM. Sounds crazy. If it was $80, easier to believe.

mpantone said:

tht said:

It's amazing how keyboards can have so many keys, yet have these weird imperfections. There isn't one perfect keyboard, or mouse for that matter.

Some of the keys on the Mx Mechanical mini for Mac keyboard don't look to be standard width and are less wide. If it is for Mac, why are the functions in the function key row different from a Mac laptop keyboard? There's always something.

This is a 65% keyboard. The normal keys are all regular sized keycaps. The lens on the camera might be making things look different but all the central keys are the same dimension.

The other keys (tab, caps lock, shift, control, command, option) have to be adjusted for the constraints of the 65% layout which is one key wider than the main layout.

It's a standard 75% keyboard layout. It's probably an optical illusion that the right side cmd, fn and opt keys, the esc and tilde keys appear less wide than they should be. Then, Logitech did not put the sound volume controls in F10-F12. What the F1-F3 keys are, I don't know. They all have the same icon.

It's a mechanical keyboard with replaceable keycaps. So, if the keys don't look the right size, they did something wrong as buyers typical want the option to have replaceable key caps on this sort of keyboard. But it looks like an optical illusion, so that's good that it really is "standard".

Here are a couple if other low-profile 75% keyboards that are "made for Mac":



Basically the same layout, with different treatments for the top row of keys.

Experienced PC builders will be familiar with the benefits of water cooling, including the potential to offer better thermal conditions than air-based methods, the possibility of improved chip performance, and a reduction in noise.

Reminder that the "water cooling" here is basically like how "wireless charging" is used to describe induction charging. Using the words "water cooling" is conveying more than what it is actually doing. Ultimately, these cooler designs are transferring heat from the chip to the ambient atmosphere. Virtually all them do it by blowing air across radiator fins (heat sink in my parlance). This is an "air-based" method.

Basically every single "water cooler" is a closed loop that pumps water from the chip block to a radiator and a fan is used to blow air across it to transfer heat to the ambient air. So if there is a Venn diagram, PC water coolers would be a circle inside an "air-based" cooler.

Moreover, all of the high performance "air-based" coolers, as you are thinking of them, like what is inside the Mac Studio or the MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, are "liquid coolers". They employ a heat pipe which employs a fluid medium that transfers heat from the chip block to the radiator fins. They might employ a 2 phase loop, or just be single phase, but it's a pipe with a fluid inside. The fluid transfers heat from the chip block to the radiator fins, just like what a water cooler does.

The one big advantage a water cooler has is that it uses flexible hosing. Note that I didn't say heat transfer performance. Flexible hosing enables a PC builder to do neat stuff in their case in an affordable way. The heat pipes in "air-based" coolers are basically inflexible and are custom designed for the application. You get what you get from the vendor. "Heat pipes" are as efficient if not more efficient in transferring heat than pumped water, I think. So the heat transfer properties of pumped water is not a heat transfer advantage. Flexible hosing is nice though, as PC cases have a lot of variation. PCs often have limited volume or not-optimal volumes for heatsinks or radiators. The flexible hosing enables the radiator to be 6", 12", 18" long with more advantageous fan setups and radiator locations. This is good for the PC market where there is a lot of case and motherboard variation.

If you start from a blank page, you can do everything with what you think of as air-based coolers. Just look at the Mac Pro.