woochifer

The article glaringly omits the fact that among the companies listed, Apple is the only one that doesn't license the actual core designs from ARM. Because Apple has a perpetual architectural license from ARM, they can design their own completely customized core designs while licensing only the instruction sets. Apple has only used their own custom core designs since the A6. Because Apple is one of the original ARM founding partners, I would assume that they have layers upon layers of safeguards built into their licensing terms before they spun off their stakes.

Qualcomm also has an ARM architectural license. But, as their in-house core designs became less competitive compared to ARM's Cortex reference core designs, Qualcomm abandoned designing their own custom cores and began incorporating modified versions of the Cortex cores into their Snapdragon SoCs instead. Qualcomm's reliance on the ARM reference cores, makes them way more vulnerable to any changes that might occur under Nvidia ownership.

Of course, unfair licensing terms and abusive monopolist practices is something that Qualcomm is well versed in. They know well what it's like to dish it out, and probably don't want to find out what the receiving end tastes like.

Apple's only vulnerability would be if the ARM reference designs begin to surpass the performance of their custom cores, and they're forced to consider licensing ARM's reference core designs to remain competitive. But, that seems unlikely to happen for a while considering how Apple can tweak both the OS and the CPU design to meet specific performance goals that might differ significantly from the rest of the market.

Would not exactly be surprising, given that the iPhone 6s and SE were each originally released with iOS 9. Supporting 7 different versions of iOS would be unprecedented for any iPhone model. The iPhone 5s along with the 6s are the only iPhone models that have thus far gone as far as supporting 6 versions of iOS. And the iPhone 5s was able to do so largely because its A7 SoC was such a big leap forward (first 64-bit mobile processor) over the A6 (which was Apple's first SoC with a completely custom ARM CPU architecture).

The article mentioned how iOS support for the iPhone 5s and 6 were bifurcated with the iOS 13 release, where those older models did not support iOS 13 but did receive an iOS 12 security update. The article neglected to mention that the iPhone 5s and 6 subsequently received 6 additional security updates to iOS 12, with the most recent one (iOS 12.4.9) getting posted just two weeks ago on November 5.

So, if past is indeed prologue, the iPhone 6s and SE could well see no more support for feature updates, while continuing to receive security patches to iOS 14 for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of longevity, the iPhone 5s received its latest iOS update (12.4.6) less than a month ago. That would be the 5th update since Apple released iOS 13. Yes, they don't add new features or fix bugs that I'm aware of. But, that's still 6 1/2 years of continual OS support.

For all of the tech press attention glued to shiny objects (FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES), Apple knows how to implement platform transitions better than anyone. There aren't bottlenecks that hold back the ecosystem.Consider Apple's transition to 64-bit. Much of the tech press called the A7 a gimmick. Yet, Apple took a disciplined approach to transitioning the entire product line to 64-bit in less than 2 years, and then unifying iOS and App Store to supporting only 64-bit within 4 years.

Numbers are askew since the iPhone 11 only went on sale in September. The "year old" phones will outsell the newer phones simply because they have a full year of sales to report. If you isolate just the 4th quarter, I would doubt that the XR is outselling the 11 at that point.

The more interesting comparisons are between the models introduced at the same time. In 2018, the more value priced XR outsold both the XS and XS Plus, and for 2019 the 11 outsold both the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max by more than 2-1.