sevenfeet

I read the Gurman article and it makes a lot of sense.  I've always thought that Apple might try to make an x64 chip of their own at some point.  Is it complicated?  Certainly.  But it's not like others haven't done it and currently, AMD competes against Intel across many product sectors.  While Apple could certainly buy AMD with money they have in the couch cushions, there are serious problems with that approach.

First, Apple's usual plan in acquisitions is to have the acquired company's technology appear in Apple's products exclusively.  They have even gone through the trouble of severing existing customer relationships (P.A. Semi and the US Government, the israeli company that invented the Touch ID technology and their customers, etc).  For AMD, even though they are a fraction of the size of Intel's sales, they are considered to be the main competition with Intel around the world.  Apple probably wouldn't be comfortable for their business model getting into the x64 general purpose chip business.  And then there's the graphics card market which the market depends on an alternative to Nvidia.

And frankly, given the experience Apple has with microprocessor design, I think everyone knows they could do a x64 chip.  The question is whether the scale works.  While Apple is Intel's fifth largest customer, Apple benefits from Intel's other customers subsidizing the effort to get those chips in their machines.  If Apple can make a chip family that can be made at a low enough cost to deal with the scale of Macs these chips would go in, then it could work.  Of course, it may not make a lot of sense to make a Xeon capable chip for the Pro models which would leave Apple coming back to Intel.  But if Apple is not buying Intel chips for the main product line anymore, they wouldn't benefit on best pricing from Intel, which would raise the cost/lower the margins of those machines.

hodar said:

tnw2933 said:

I received my 10 core iMac Pro on December 26th 2017.  I noticed immediately that 95% of the time when I woke my iMac Pro from sleep all the external USB drives were ejected.  This occurred for various external USB3 hard drives from different manufacturers as well as with a Sandisk Extreme 64 GB USB3 flash drive and a 16 GB USB2 Kingston flash drive.  I also discovered that I could not boot into Windows 10 if any external hard drives were connected and that I could not use the Option key> Storage Manager to boot into Windows 10 regardless of whether USB drives were connected or not.  I filed a formal case with Apple Support on January 2, 2018 and I have since been in touch with a total of five Apple Support contacts regarding these two issues -- three of whom are Senior Advisors.  To date, the problem still exists, and I still have an open case with Apple.  I have been using the iMac Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 external hard drives without any problems as long as I do not attach USB drives to the iMac Pro and put it to sleep.  

I have also done extensive editing in FCP 10.4 (latest version) with my iMac Pro.  While some things are indeed faster than my fully maxed out Late 2013 Mac Pro cylinder, I have found that for many common tasks the CPU's and presumably the graphics card are not being used to full efficiency by the iMac Pro in FCP 10.4.  Overall, I have been disappointed with my purchase of this nearly $9,000 computer and especially with the fact that after more than two weeks of working with Apple Senior Advisors (who in turn are passing along information to an engineering team) I am no more able to effectively utilize USB external hard drives with my iMac Pro than I was the day I received it form Apple. 

Tom

Tom, have you used a different external USB3.0 Hub?

I had a very similar problem with the Mac Mini, as I had 4 external drives, Keyboard, mouse and CAC card reader all on a 3rd party powered USB3.0 Hub.  The USB3.0 spec allows over 1000 mA (1 Amp) per USB port, however the power supply for this USB3.0 hub was only 1500mA (1.5A) for 12 ports.  When you power up, a load of this type will cause the USB Hub to hang, and this hang means that the I/O Controller on your Mac is not getting a non-posted response from the USB, so it hangs (ie. waits forever).

I replaced the $30 Hub with one that was rated for 40.0 Watts vs 12.5 Watts, and my problems immediately went away.

i concur on this.  USB hubs can be finicky beasts.  Sometimes they are the cause and sometimes they are the solution to problems.  For example, my Drobo 5D3 wouldn't stay mounted on the desktop of my 2008 Mac Pro with a USB 3.0 PCI card until I added a powered hub.  But sometimes a powered hub can have negative effects.  Of course, we're just speculating here.  Tom didn't even say if he was using a powered hub or not.

One thing he could try...many of the Apple Stores now have iMac Pro display units.  You might take one of your drives into one, hook it up and put it to sleep, then wake it up again.  If it works properly, then your machine needs to be replaced.  If the drives exhibit the same behavior in-store, then that's another data point for Apple's service and engineering team.

The Windows 10 issue is more vexing.  Not understanding what that's all about.

raclark77 said:

If they had told people what they were doing before just slowing peoples phones down without their consent it would be different.

This action is tantamount to malware being pushed out as a software update. More reason to NOT trust company updates.

And now to restore the device to previous conditions the user must pay for a new battery?! How is this not equal to randsomware?! Having to spend money that had not been planned on being spent until this is basically extortion.

At $29 a pop just how many millions will this make them?! This is outrageous, and just laughable that some of the people commenting here are just fine with this as it is.

This just happened to slow down old devices at the exact same time as new Apple phones being sold too! This is too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.

I feel Apple has overstepped with this whole situation. The price reduction on a maintenance that wasn't needed until their actions is not a fix of any kind.

As it stands now, I have no plans to buy anything Apple again. Microsoft, and Apple both are making some boneheaded decisions lately. I almost think they might just be the same company secretly.

They were caught red handed. Me paying them for their actions is not going to make me feel any better about this in any way.

If this was all fine, then why was it secretly/silently done?

Aw, C'MON!!!  This argument is laughable.  Malware?  Really???  Malware would be Apple putting on a daemon into everyone's phone that would mine cryptocurrency for them.  They were trying to extend the life of the product (since most people never change their batteries) by slowing the CPU down in order to avoid abrupt shutdowns.  And people are now keeping their phones on average well past the old 2 year upgrade cycle largely due to the elimination of the old wireless contracts.  The knowledge that batteries age and fail is well known to the general public and has been for more than a century.

And how much is Apple making charging $29?  Much less that $80!  In fact, Apple literally just killed the entire third party replacement battery market since no one will be able to make money now that Apple is providing battery replacement at close to their COST (part + labor + recycling).  And trust me, Apple likes profit margins as much as the next company.  But they hate paying lawyers even more and this was the best, customer centric solution to a mounting problem.

Geez, get a clue and stop thinking about every damn conspiracy theory that comes your way.

anshuljain said:

foggyhill said:

anshuljain said:

A simple Reliability analysis on the battery component would have let the engineers know of the expected life of the batteries with a certain confidence (usually around 95% confidence). This should have been followed by an accelerated life testing to determine the age. Seems like they didn't do this proper Reliability assessment properly or discovered it after he products were launched (through extended Reliability tests and/or warranty analysis) is that's pretty dumb. 

Not everyone uses the battery the same, the issue is not the battery reliability  at all ( except for the batch they replaced for the iPhone 6). At least try to read the actual issue.

One can make a fairly good predictive model on the analytical data to predict usage with a fair amount of certainty. Obviously, it isn't a 100% accurate model of the usage pattern, but from a pure reliability engineering standpoint, I'd accept a model that's even 80% accurate to aim for a reliability estimation of the usage. 

Their reliability Engineering team needs to be fired for this fiasco. Guess they relied on the vendors assessment of Reliability estimation (and ask any experienced Reliability engineer and he will never accept a MTBF/MTTF number from a vendor and will perform their own analysis and testing). I know this from my current job in medical devices where we are required to predict battery life for lifesaving medical devices that we design. 

The iPhone is not a medical device.  It's..a..PHONE.  That means that while Apple certainly has the highest standards for components in the industry, the iPhone is not a pacemaker or other device that lives depend on.  And a pacemaker or diabetes pump wearer is required to get a new device well before the battery is subject to failure.  (Full disclosure...I work for a very large software company where I deal with pharma, clinical trials and medical devices customers, and my first post-collegiate job in the 80s was working for Apple).

Apple has had three decades of working with battery technology going all the way back to the original lead-acid powered Mac Portable.  Few other companies have their experience and expertise.  And I'm sure that from the Apple retail stores, they have seen plenty of data through the years from customers who come in complaining that their older iPhone would just drop suddenly when it said it had some battery life left.  I've seen it too where my phone would drop under 20% power but then well before it got to 5% the iPhone will abruptly shut down.  The only solution at the time was to either get a new phone or replace the battery.  Considering that the cost of battery replacement from Apple was close to $100, phone replacement usually was the choice for many.  And the natural upgrade cycle helped since there was always a new product to entice the buyer.

But someone in engineering had an idea...what if you tweaked the speed of the CPU to prevent some of the power spikes usually handled with fresh batteries but less so with older, weaker cells?  You could make a more reliable battery performance for the user and keep customer out of the Apple stores with questions like this since their phones would be less likely to abruptly shut down.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

But Apple is also a company with a disproportionate number of eyes on even the most minute details of their products and operations.  Stuff that no one cares about with their competitors ends up on the national news for Apple (antenna-gate, anyone?).  And I'm sure few if any people are actually speed testing a 4 year old Android phone.  And yes, the change to speed was noticed.  I had a iPhone 6 Plus during this time before my upgrade to the X.  And yes, it was certainly slower.  But it was a lot more slower due to the increased demands of iOS 11 combined with limited RAM memory (1 GB) then it was by the CPU tweak.  And it took until iOS 11.2 for Apple to really get memory management down for tolerable levels in this phone...and this was still with the intentionally slowed CPU.  This isn't a new thing...it happens every year with a new version of iOS and people usually complain about the speed of the oldest supported phones...in this case, the 5s and the 6.

Of course, left to their own devices, people come up with all kinds of silly conspiracy theories for why Apple would do this.  The easiest (and laziest) is that Apple is trying to herd people into buying new iPhones.  Please.  Apple already controls the upgrade process with the choices of what iPhones get the iOS upgrade come September.  This has become more complicated in recent years since Apple no longer discontinues the previous year's iPhone with the introduction of the new product.  Nowadays, the current models (8, X) plus last model years' phone (7) and the year before that (6s) are all being sold side-by-side at different price points.  And since Apple usually likes even their discount iPhones to have 2 years of active iOS supported software, that means that phones as old as the 5s are still supported by iOS 11.  But the oldest 5s batteries out there in users' hands are 4+ years old.  And even the best lithium-ion phone batteries usually are showing significant degradation at the end of year 2.

There are countless things Apple does to their hardware and software that aren't announced.  Revisions here, a tweak or bug fix there...it's standard operating procedure.  But this one was noticed and not only is there a tech press who jumps on things like this, but also law firms just looking to feast on a small part of Apple's considerable war chest.  And what began as just another day in Apple-land has now mushroomed into more PR trouble and legal trouble than the whole thing was worth.  And the amount of money Apple gets from battery upgrades right now are probably a rounding error in the revenue calculations.  So it made more sense just to offer the people who wanted a new battery to get one inexpensively rather than contribute to Apple's usual expected margins.  And it'll make it a lot easier to have these silly lawsuits dismissed and not have money going to lawyers with little if any benefit going to customers.

Live and learn (again).

zoetmb said:

I'm glad Apple never went ahead with full production on an Apple car.   You'd probably have to bring it back to them to change a light bulb.  

You've clearly not tried to replace a light bulb in a modern car.