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entropys said:

What were Massimo thinking basically building a design around the Apple Watch? Way to kill your own campaign.  If it had been another design entirely they might have had more success. Worse, that watch decision is impacting on Massimo’s broader reputation.

Masimo needed to have a smart watch on the market in order to bring their case to the USITC. The C in USITC does not mean court. It means commission, whose charter is to protect US companies from unfair foreign competition (dumping) or malpractice (copying). There wouldn't be a USITC import ban if Masimo didn't have a smart watch business. (This is why Apple lost the recent lawsuit against Masimo. Apple didn't want money. They wanted Masimo's current watches banned and if so the USITC import ban gets undermined.)

Masimo brought their patent and IP theft/poaching case against Apple in 2020. Their W1 watch was released in 2022. You can be the judge on why they shipped a smart watch. You can also think about what the ITC is doing too, because what are they doing accepting this case? The stupidity of this type decision is worse for the American economy which is what they are protecting.

Furthermore, Masimo got a patent for an oxygen sensor with 4 LEDs on a convex protrusion with a chamfer on 2021, which was filed after the Apple Watch with pulse oximetry was announced. That convex protrusion with a chamfer has been on the Apple Watch since 2014. So, the USPTO gave Masimo a freebie there, and those patents were put to immediate use on their suit with Apple. Yeah, you can decide what Masimo's intentions were there too, when their "patents" were filed years after the Apple Watch shipped.

Their ex-CEO is shady. Really shady. Just read up on Politan Capital's reasons for getting 2 of their chosen candidates on the board, which resulted in Kiana resigning. He didn't want to work for a board that was independent. The dude had a shady side company that he had Masimo funnel money too, with free licensing and probably employee movement between the teo. He was thinking of leaving Masimo and was going to get Masimo to provide free licensing, his choice of employees, and like 500m in capital for his post-Masimo company. 

As far as I'm concerned, Apple should continue suing Masimo in perpetuity, until they stop suing. They have developed some good measurement tech, but it doesn't mean they should be rewarded for their shady business dealings. Heck, buy some medical measurement IP and sue some more if they have too.

apple4thewin said:

So in theory I can hook up a 4tb ssd with read speeds around 7400 mbps and it should be able to fully take advantage of the storage device? (I will be using this for gaming on mac)

You mean 7.4 GByte/s? On a TB5 bus yes.

No idea if the TB5 ports on the Macs with M4 Pro and Max are sharing ports per TB5 bus or not, but if it is like their TB4 design, each TB5 port has a dedicated bus to it. You'd need to find an actual TB5 external SSD, or a TB5 to PCIe expansion box which you can install PCIe SSDs.

It's going to be interesting to hear the hollering when people learn that this or that TB5 SSD comes with a big heatsink, a power brick, and possibly even a fan. A 7.4 GB/s SSD is on the ragged edge of being bus-powered? Might be throttled? 

kmarei said:

if i am reading the first chart correcty
the iphone 13 was the biggest seller (4Q 2021)  (followed by the 15, 4Q 2023) , and the 16 is lower than all the others
judging by the height of the blue bar in 4th quarter? or am i reading it wrong?
wearables and ipads have been more or less the same since 2020
services is going up, which makes sense, since each year, the pool of iphones (needing icloud, apple music etc) goes up
worryingly, macs are going down

Since Apple's revenue is highly cyclical with the holiday quarter always being the highest, you have to compare year over year quarters. The just reported calendar 3Q24 results looked to have the highest iPhone revenue for a 3Q. The tall blue bar for the iPhone 16 cycle is happening right now, 4Q24, and we won't know its revenue until end of January. It's not on the plot.

You have to be pretty careful interpreting results. The 2020 through 2022 years were COVID years with lots of government money flowing. So, they got an extra bump. You shouldn't conclude anything regarding a specific phone's attractiveness to people without taking account of macroeconomic trends.

I'm pretty negative about Gen AI products. This going to be a tabletop and countertop product where you verbally interact with it? Another niche product. It's better than an audio only product, maybe?

Well, that prediction is eventually going to be correct, no? It seems Apple has settled on OLED, or, OLED has won the display quality for the price war with miniLED, LCD, and whatever else. The wait will be longer for OLED 27" and larger 220 to 250 PPI monitors. Apple is basically the only customer for that kind of PPI.

Also, be mindful that Ross Young has made so many miniLED predictions for Apple products in the past. He doesn't want to wait until the mass production contract is awarded. Like 5 years ago, he was predicting 6 products would have miniLED. The mass economies of scale just didn't go fast enough for miniLED to get into lower end products while OLED has improved faster. So, there you go.

It will depend on the component cost Apple is getting for OLEDs in an iPad mini. If too much, it's just going to be pushed to the next cycle.