15 ms·
Truly impressive. Smaller, yet faster than the competition. Surprising how many of the chips are now internal Apple components: 1. CPU/GPU 2. Auxiliary Machine
by mankash666 9y ago
Truly impressive. Smaller, yet faster than the competition. Surprising how many of the chips are now internal Apple components:
1. CPU/GPU
2. Auxiliary Machine Learning/AI chip
3. NAND controller
4. IR Deapth sensor & signal processing chip
5. Power management IC (surprising that Apple is doing Analog IC design too!)
Axiom in the tech world is that "Apple is a software company that builds hardware". Above is ample evidence of Apple being a hardware-heavy innovation machine.
A software company building hardware is Google, and it's Pixel phones show
- alvis 9y agoStrategically, I think Apple has made a right move by internalising all the hardware designs. That said, as many have suggested, the new iPhone is no more than just another faster, smaller, and costlier.
- criddell 9y agoDoesn't Samsung do that as well though? They make screens, and CPUs and many of the other components in a modern phone, don't they? I'm wondering when Apple will start making their own camera sensors.
- muninn_ 9y agoBasically, yeah, they don't make the OS. I think the parent comment was more aimed at software companies. Though, you could look at it from the opposite point of view as well.
- valuearb 9y agoSamsung's screens are excellent, but their CPU/GPU performance is a generation (or more) behind Apple. Plus they are way behind in integrated functionality such as motion coprocessor, ai processing, and secure enclave. I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that the Samsung OLED screen on the iPhone X is significantly better than the ones Samsung puts on it's flagship phones, in color fidelity especially. Partly because of Apple's attention to detail, but also because Samsung's flagship phones ship in much higher volume than the X is expected to.
- MBCook 9y agoI can believe it. The quality is all about cost. What level of rejected units can you accept for price $X? If Apple can pay more (due to cost, scale, or just where the price of the phone is allocated between parts) they can buy a better screen.
- sundvor 9y agoYeah the S8 and S8 Plus had (has?) significant top/side edge colour shift. (Speaking as the owner of the Plus, who has his first replaced and the second is somewhat better but not perfect. Wife's S8 is also affected but she doesn't see it or doesn't care. I would still take that slight imperfection over the horrid notch though).
- vilmosi 9y ago>>> I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that the Samsung OLED screen on the iPhone X is significantly better than the ones Samsung puts on it's flagship phones I can't believe that. I just can't. All iPhone X reviews mention the screen tech difference, all of them say how they don't notice a difference.
- valuearb 9y agoMost reviewers (and people) don't appreciate color fidelity. Jon Gruber was just talking about how Google spent the time/effort to make the colors of the Pixel display more accurate and natural, and then people complain they don't "pop" and look as good as the super-saturated colors on other android phones.
- vilmosi 9y ago>>> Most reviewers (and people) don't appreciate color fidelity It's not about "appreciating". It's that it doesn't matter. Everyone talked about retina resolution, then about "true colors". Today we have Samsung making all the screens. The point is, nobody except professionals care.
- 9y ago
- MBCook 9y agoNot quite. Samsung fabs chips. They may even design chips. But they don’t work ‘together’. Samsung makes 5 processors and puts them on the open market. The another part of Samsung buys those chips off the shelf and used them in their phones. My understanding is the two units don’t work together hand in hand like Apples teams do, they work together the way Samsung and HTC do.
- mankash666 9y agoMultiple differences between Samsung and Apple: 1. Samsung was a semiconductor maker, that successfully moved up to make phones. Apple was a integrator of third party chips that successfully went down to own many of the chips. 2. Apple's chips are significantly better than the competition. Partly because the chip division has a captive customer whose requirements are more apparent, plus no middlemen thanks to the vertical integration 3. Samsung's components need to serve multiple segments of the phone market, and other external customers. Apple only builds for Apple's specs 4. Every new breakthrough on the iPhone has been because of a chip that Apple alone had. From the very first iPhone's capacitive touch sensors to the new IR sensor system, no one else has the access for a couple phone cycles. Apple put out a 64 bit ARM processor even before arm had finalized the instruction set
- Vogtinator 9y ago4. Is absolutely wrong in every aspect. Most "innovation" was bought tech (primesense, for instance). The ARMv8 ISA was finalized ages before the chips got designed. Middle of 2011 IIRC.
- mankash666 9y agoTrue - They bought 3rd party companies with the tech. Still doesn't change the observation that they made it better, and tailored it specifically for the iPhone. None of those sensors have drop in replacements. And Apple put out the 64bit proc prior to ARM having IP --> FACt
- unobtaniumstool 9y agoHaving the foresight and capabilities to make the right acquisitions at the right times is just good business. Splitting hairs over whether the technology was internally developed or purchased is irrelevant to the point being made about the exclusivity of the hardware.
- johansch 9y agoNumber 4 got me curious about the latency for the competitors catching up with the various hardware advances. Capacitive touch screen: iPhone: June 29, 2007 HTC Dream/G1: October 20, 2008 (479 days later) Fingerprint sensor: iPhone 5s: September 20, 2013 Galaxy S5: April 11, 2014 (203 days later) ARMv8 (64-bit) ISA: iPhone 5s: September 10, 2013 Galaxy Note 4: October 17, 2014 (402 days later) Tiny bezel: Galaxy S6 Edge: April 10, 2015 iPhone X: November 3, 2017 (938 days later) OLED screen: Samsung Galaxy: June 29, 2009 iPhone X: November 3, 2017 (3049 days later)
- GeekyBear 9y agoSamsung has a problem with adding features to their devices that are simply not well executed. For instance, from the NY Times review of the Galaxy Note 8: >Some of the biometrics, including the ability to unlock your phone by scanning your face or irises, are so poorly executed that they feel like marketing gimmicks as opposed to actual security features. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/technology/personaltech/samsung-galaxy-note-8.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/technology/personaltech/s...
- gehsty 9y agoJust smaller and faster with new technology, never before seen delivered at this size, capability or scale. What does Apple have to do to impress people? Do all this then give the phones away for free?
- chaostheory 9y agoLouis CK - everything is amazing... but no one is happy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ
- hinkley 9y agoEasily one of his best bits and he did it on a talk show.
- chaostheory 9y agoIt helped spawn an app too: https://theymadethat.com https://theymadethat.com
- hinkley 9y agoPeople used to bitch about why people thought the MacBook was so cool when it was “only” 5mm thinner than anything else on the market. The low end doesn’t understand why people pay so much more for fit and finish. Except automobiles. Everyone seems to accept and even approve of the high end for cars.
- TylerE 9y agoFit and finish on many "high end" cars is actually pretty abysmal. Especially basically anything Italian.
- tigershark 9y agoOh..I didn't know that your Ferrari had a shit finish, you must have been quite unlucky...
- bluthru 9y ago>That said, as many have suggested, the new iPhone is no more than just another faster, smaller, and costlier. FaceID is a huge leap and affects how people use their phones. The phone can behave differently if you are looking at it. For example: showing sensitive info only if you're looking at it, and not playing notification sounds as loud (or at all) if you see the notification as it comes in.
- GeekyBear 9y agoThere's an interesting article from the folks at Wired who have been attempting to fool Face ID without any success so far. https://www.wired.com/story/tried-to-beat-face-id-and-failed-so-far/ https://www.wired.com/story/tried-to-beat-face-id-and-failed...
- austenallred 9y ago> the new iPhone is no more than just another faster, smaller, and costlier. I'm sold. I'll take it.
- ksk 9y agoIndeed, Apple is excellent at integration. But at the system level, that leaves them with fewer partners who can help with the business side of things. They had to become excellent in operations, strategy and sales, which they did as well.
- gehsty 9y agoI think Apple explicitly position themselves as the combination of hardware and software and want as much vertical integration as possible... the more hardware they control the better they can make software to run on it.
- wnevets 9y agoWith how buggy iOS 11 is/was, it really does show where their focus has been.
- mandeepj 9y agoSoftware bugs can be fixed with iterations but hardware....nope. Not without a recall
- ForrestN 9y agoI think this personification of companies as people is misleading. Whose "focus?" Do you mean you think that the same people within Apple are working on both hardware and software, and are focusing more on hardware? Or that you think many people who write software have been re-educated, re-assigned, and are now working on hardware? I assume that the size of Apple's teams working on iPhone are limited by more than resources, and the recruitment pools are totally separate, so it's not like they're spending too much on hardware engineers and can't afford enough software engineers, right? I just don't really know how you can conceive of such a massive company as having an obviously zero-sum "focus" like a person has.
- brians 9y agoQuality comes from feedback control systems. Quality of design comes from management oversight and correction. Fan-in is a concern. Orphaned teams become a concern at a tenth Apple’s scale. Informal networks and approval based on trust of people rather than examination of product is a concern. Executive attention is expensive.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoWho thinks Apple is a software company? Because they're wrong. Apple started off making hardware and they've always made hardware. They make software to compliment their hardware.
- wmeredith 9y agoThis. They've become more and more a hardware company as they give away almost of their software now to move more IRL gadgets.
- draw_down 9y agoEven they claim it. It’s that old Alan Kay quote, you know.
- psergeant 9y agoKind of depends what you mean, doesn’t it? I buy Apple products because they run Apple software. I like the Apple hardware I have, but if it ran easily and bug free on other hardware, I suspect I’d end up with cheaper knock offs for the hardware itself.
- hinkley 9y ago> Power management IC (surprising that Apple is doing Analog IC design too!) Have you seen the tear down of the old MacBook power bricks? Check it out if you haven’t. There’s a lot of tech in there to improve efficiency (ie keep that tiny brick from melting)
- cjsuk 9y agoThey’re shit. The inrush current is so high it actually damages the plugs with arcing!
- artursapek 9y agoYou must have bought yours on Amazon :)
- cjsuk 9y agoNo from the Apple store. See my other post. This is poor design, regardless of where it came from. There should be a hefty NTC or inrush current limiter in the charger.
- abritinthebay 9y agoYou're describing the cheap Chinese made knock-offs. They look almost perfectly identical and generally you can only tell by opening them up. They're awful. There are a LOT of teardowns of those. It's scary.
- pjc50 9y agoThere's a lot to be said for "if you want something done properly, do it yourself". Hard to do in a connected ecosystem but Apple has the level of platform control that they can do whatever they feel they need to do without having to consider partners, competitors or exogenous forces.
- Illniyar 9y ago"Axiom in the tech world is that "Apple is a software company that builds hardware". " Is that really a common belief? I know many people who think the opposite - apple is a hardware company. In fact Tim Cook went out of his way several times to remind people that apple isn't a hardware company.
- gurkendoktor 9y agoIn terms of profits, yes. But many of us don't buy Apple for the hardware, but because we want to stay in their software ecosystem. I'd rather use a Nexus running iOS than an iPhone X running Android, and I'm even more invested in macOS. That Apple builds nice hardware is a bonus for me (but I'd honestly prefer better software right now). I mean, on paper Apple is making more money from hardware than from software, but how do you measure hardware sales that only happened because of the software?
- mamuf 9y agoApple is making buttload of money on hardware because it does not sell any software anymore. I mean, in the mass consumer market – and they are cutting off the Pro software (which is sad). But remember the hardware sales pay for the software, too. So basically people say Apple is making $$$ on an iPhone price minus manufacturing costs and R&D but great slice of the zillion $$$ is the software part. Anyway, not sure who said what exaclty, but Steve Jobs repeatedly said that Apple is great because of the tight interconnection between sw and hw. So Apple is not a hw company. It is not a sw company either. They do both and the result is greater than just a combination of the two. I see Apple, and the way they present their products supports it, as an appliance company. It's harder and harder to repair their devices and the software is more and more integrated with the hardware – examples: force touch and feedback, Touch/Face ID, all the camera magic, Apple Pay, MBP Touch Bar etc. So basically the sw and hw are more and more inseparable unless you lose "half" the features.
- selectodude 9y agoApple has been very serious about how they’re a hardware company vs a software company for like 30+ years now. Literally the first thing SPJ did after coming back was kill the Mac clones program. They’re obsessed with the feel of the hardware in every way. The software is just a platform.
- rufugee 9y agoTyping this from a Pixel 2 XL after having been a happy Pixel XL owner. The 2 is truly the greatest phone I've ever owned, and that includes iphones along the way. If this is what you get with a software company building hardware, I'd say keep it up.
- microcolonel 9y agoIf iPhones ran today's Android, they would lead the pack; but because they run iOS, they're pretty MOR in terms of everyday performance and responsiveness (and perhaps especially disappointing WRT battery life). This is quite a role reversal from the situation five years ago.
- lostlogin 9y agoName an android phone that’s faster than last years iPhone.
- microcolonel 9y agoCompare last year's Samsung Galaxy to whatever iPhone was available at the time, and you'll find that the Samsung loads equivalent applications (preferably the same or same function) faster, retains them for longer, and lasts considerably longer on battery, all while charging faster. It's not that hard, I'm sure somebody's done this on video, do the test yourself if you're not convinced, I don't have an iPhone 7 Plus and 20 hours of time on my hands. iOS is a hog, and the A series chips are clearly not competitive in idle power consumption as configured by iOS.
- enraged_camel 9y agoOnce again, anecdotal evidence is not data. We have confirmed reports that Pixel 2's build quality is... questionable: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-is-investigating-reports-of-pixel-2-xl-display-burn-in/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-is-investigat... edit: keep downvoting. You can't change the facts :)
- matwood 9y ago
- abritinthebay 9y ago> "Apple is a software company that builds hardware". Above is ample evidence of Apple being a hardware-heavy innovation machine. I disagree with both. Apple is a design company that builds hardware and software together so the design works as intended.
- marcell 9y ago> A software company building hardware is Google, and it's Pixel phones show FWIW Google has put a lot of effort in the hardware of their datacenters, and in that sense they're a hardware giant as well. Compared to their datacenter projects, Pixel is a funny hobbby for Google.
- aliasxneo 9y agoAs a datacenter technician for Google, this makes me happy to see other people recognize this.
- kuschku 9y agoIt’s just sad that we’ll never see any of that openly available, or described.
- j-walker 9y agoThere's a lot of openly available networking hardware on the Open Compute Project.
- kuschku 9y agoSure, but that's not even close to the "every board and switch is custom designed" story.
- pyvpx 9y agothere isn't as much exotic "stuff" as you might think. they have the same ODMs build switches and line cards to their specifications, with chips from the same vendors (Broadcom, Cavium, etc) only they can easily hire a team and sign the NDA and write/optimize/perfect the forwarding plane and control plane implementations. hell, the IS-IS implementation in Quagga is usable because of Google :)
- jankey 9y agoIt's not a lot, but there are a bunch of pictures on google.com/about/datacenters, including a 'street view' inside our DC in North Carolina. There are also a bunch of papers on the network architecture, https://research.google.com/pubs/Networking.html https://research.google.com/pubs/Networking.html . But yes, a lot is closed for the obvious reason that this is really core to the business Google is running. (I'm a datacenter engineer at Google)
- mwilliaams 9y agoApple is a hardware company that also makes software, and its software shows.
- Jack000 9y agoI think Apple is a Design company, as in that's their main value add. Like Steve Jobs said, design is not just how their products look but how they work - something that requires both software and hardware. On the other hand Google seems to be more of a software company, which reflects in their general culture and hiring practices.
- johnchristopher 9y ago> I think Apple is a Design company, as in that's their main value add. Like Steve Jobs said, design is not just how their products look but how they work - something that requires both software and hardware. That's just word redefining. And I have an old iMac 20 that has all its USB ports on the back and every time I have to twist my wrist to plug something I am reminded how Apple isn't that good at functional design. The thing is pretty though.
- Jack000 9y agothose macs had a target user of designers/creative industry professionals. For these people the aesthetics is pretty much a part of the function. Apple's biggest innovation is probably the realization that "normal" people care about very different things than engineers, when it comes to computers.
- manojlds 9y agoWasn't it always like Apple was a hardware company doing software for its hardware, while Microsoft was the other way around?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]