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This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented'. It's in the same category as "I made an unprecedented dietary decision today and decided to drink chamomile tea i

This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented'. It's in the same category as "I made an unprecedented dietary decision today and decided to drink chamomile tea instead of mint". Yes, it might be unprecedented because I've never done that before, but it's also super boring. Who cares? So they tried to put too much graphics power in the iPhone and it didn't work. And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever. Sometimes these article titles are ridiculous and I'm quite tired of this hyperbole, especially in tech. What about "iPhone engineers tried a powerful GPU but had to use a less powerful one".

colechristensen 4y ago
Yes this is the engineering equivalent of putting too much ham on your plate at Christmas dinner. Unprecedented amounts of ham go uneaten! Early specs of engineering project don’t match final specs, oh the humanity!, more at 11. News content is frequently very stupid.
squarefoot 4y ago
Apparently, every post we write here is unprecedented too. ...except if writing two consecutive identical posts, the second one being then not unprecedented, but making that pair unprecedented. Ok, I'll stop now:)
Spooky23 4y ago
Exactly. “Engineer Blows Budget” is also known as a day that ends in “y”.
mbreese 4y ago
Agreed. When they wrote “missteps”, I figured that there were errors found in the GPU design. Instead, it seems like the design was fine, but had an unexpectedly high power draw. The GPU worked, it just needed more power than they expected. That doesn’t seem “unprecedented” to me.
- ip26 4y ago
  Unless they had previously perfectly modeled and predicted power, until this moment. (But that seems unlikely)
- amelius 4y ago
  Attention to power should be given importantance in the design process, especially in mobile devices.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
There is this weired thing, that when mudnane things happen, but Apple or Tesla is involved, they are suddenly unorecedented and newsworthy.
- twiceaday 4y ago
  Stories about popular topics will have a natural leg-up in becoming viral. However, while a mundane story could become popular it will be hurt by people wondering why they are seeing it, other than simply because its about a popular topic. So it is common for such stories to also bake-in a facade reason for their popularity. No, no, no. You are not seeing this story on your feed simply because its about Apple. You are seeing it because something 'unprecedented' happened at Apple. And surely the more engagement you see on it, the more unprecedented the thing was! This effect has been weaponized in politics and crypto, where you get a huge base of proponents upvoting anything related to their pet topic.
gchadwick 4y ago
Seems quite reasonable to me, we've got a world-leading chip team who have been doing great work responsible for a pretty major cock-up. Sounds like they're not used to these kinds of failures in apple silicon development. > And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever. Having a roadmap with a more powerful GPU with senior management being told its deliverable right up until very close to the end is a pretty major set-back. Yes Apple is so dominant and well respected in their market it's unlikely to have significant impact, but may produce fewer iPhone 14 Pro sales. Also Apple have got to that position specifically because they've been doing a great job executing to ambitious road-maps without things like this. So short-term, looking at this product, yes, maybe not that big a deal, long-term they need to ask themselves how they're ensuring this doesn't happen again. Given they're restructuring the team and getting rid of managers sounds like Apple leadership take this pretty seriously.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Perhaps not with this phone but with other devices, it's not uncommon for a manufacturer to work with other companies to make sure there's something to show off on this device. For a GPU on an oversized phone, you could have been looking at additional video or picture editing operations that did not get released.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  I wish more companies would "cock-up" by shipping functional products.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    And prioritise battery life over faster processors.
    - tnel77 4y ago
      “Our product can last all day!” Doing what? Sitting on the counter? I want a phone that can stream data all day (music and maps) while occasionally taking photos and sending messages.
thefourthchime 4y ago
I would rather hear headlines about Apple failing at a stretch goal than them just falling behind.
tshaddox 4y ago
The key thing being that they apparently had a fallback plan, which I assume is always the case for every generation of iPhone. That means that while it might be unprecedented, it apparently wasn't unanticipated.
- bpye 4y ago
  It wasn't clear from the article that there was a fallback plan, or that they decided to use a lightly modified previous gen GPU because that was the only way to get working silicon in the timeframe?
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I suppose you’re right, although I find it hard to believe that wasn’t the explicit backup plan long before they even started investigating the new stuff that ended up not working out.
fsckboy 4y ago
>This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented' so then, what was the precedent in an earlier generation of iPhones where a new set of chips was designed and developed which could be marketed as a leap in performance, but shortly before committing to manufacture they were forced to abandon the plan and roll back to the chips of a previous iPhone generation, leaving marketing with no performance boost to trumpet, especially in the context where the previous generation was also considered a disappointingly marginal improvement over its predecessor?
- aendruk 4y ago
  Odd, not false.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    Odd, meaning literal, you mean. Odd use of odd.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I disagree. It is not odd to say that an overly literal use of a word is odd.
- fexecve 4y ago
  You're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
comboy 4y ago
How did you end up in this thread?
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  How did you end up replying?
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    How did any of us come to be?
    - beckman466 4y ago
      Lynn Margulis knows the answer.
  - comboy 4y ago
    I was interested in the topic. You think nobody should care, but you cared enough to comment so I was just curious. If I'm not interested in bananas I don't visit threads about them. HN seems mostly rational, so I'm legit interested what has driven you to click and comment.
sieabahlpark 4y ago
[dead]
frozenport 4y ago
The incident is reportedly unprecedented in Apple's chip design history Did ya read the article?
amelius 4y ago
HN should run all headlines through the following GPT prompt: "please rewrite the following headline without hyperbole: $HEADLINE"
msla 4y ago
Also, am I wrong, or are Apple products suffering more hardware flaws? When was "It Just Works" abandoned as a guiding principle?
bitwize 4y ago
The iPhone is the best smartphone in the world. Its mobile CPU is the best mobile CPU in the world. People are used to Apple pushing the envelope with its mobile SoCs. If they step back and decide to include last gen's GPU on this gen's chip, that is unprecedented and it is significant.
hluska 4y ago
They discovered the flaw late in their process. Since they discovered it so late, the had to base the iPhone 14’s GPU on the iPhone 13’s. Because of that, the 14 only delivered small graphical improvements. According to benchmarking firms, prior generations showed major leaps over their predecessor. That’s the unprecedented part - the 14 only showed small gains whereas previous generations all showed big leaps. In a case like that, unprecedented fits. It’s not hyperbole.
rdsubhas 4y ago
Any hardware product company has to be atleast one cycle/model ahead in prototyping and development. If the 13 is launched today, then 14 should have already finished prototyping and development. The "unprecedented" is because they found this after the 13 launch, and it's not an integration issue – it's a core issue. It's not possible to go back to architectural drawing boards in the current product iteration. So they had to do a hail mary and revert back to the previous launch's GPU. That does count as a major goof up (if it happened ofc). We have many popular YouTube reviewers saying there is no reason to buy the 14 series, the 13 series are equally as good _(except the Pro Max's dynamic island)_. Apple just happens to be in a comfortable position. These kind of things could kill smaller hardware product companies.

colechristensen 4y ago

Yes this is the engineering equivalent of putting too much ham on your plate at Christmas dinner. Unprecedented amounts of ham go uneaten! Early specs of engineering project don’t match final specs, oh the humanity!, more at 11. News content is frequently very stupid.

squarefoot 4y ago

Apparently, every post we write here is unprecedented too. ...except if writing two consecutive identical posts, the second one being then not unprecedented, but making that pair unprecedented. Ok, I'll stop now:)

Spooky23 4y ago

Exactly. “Engineer Blows Budget” is also known as a day that ends in “y”.

mbreese 4y ago

Agreed. When they wrote “missteps”, I figured that there were errors found in the GPU design. Instead, it seems like the design was fine, but had an unexpectedly high power draw. The GPU worked, it just needed more power than they expected. That doesn’t seem “unprecedented” to me.

ip26 4y ago
Unless they had previously perfectly modeled and predicted power, until this moment. (But that seems unlikely)
amelius 4y ago
Attention to power should be given importantance in the design process, especially in mobile devices.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

There is this weired thing, that when mudnane things happen, but Apple or Tesla is involved, they are suddenly unorecedented and newsworthy.

twiceaday 4y ago
Stories about popular topics will have a natural leg-up in becoming viral. However, while a mundane story could become popular it will be hurt by people wondering why they are seeing it, other than simply because its about a popular topic. So it is common for such stories to also bake-in a facade reason for their popularity. No, no, no. You are not seeing this story on your feed simply because its about Apple. You are seeing it because something 'unprecedented' happened at Apple. And surely the more engagement you see on it, the more unprecedented the thing was! This effect has been weaponized in politics and crypto, where you get a huge base of proponents upvoting anything related to their pet topic.

gchadwick 4y ago

Seems quite reasonable to me, we've got a world-leading chip team who have been doing great work responsible for a pretty major cock-up. Sounds like they're not used to these kinds of failures in apple silicon development. > And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever. Having a roadmap with a more powerful GPU with senior management being told its deliverable right up until very close to the end is a pretty major set-back. Yes Apple is so dominant and well respected in their market it's unlikely to have significant impact, but may produce fewer iPhone 14 Pro sales. Also Apple have got to that position specifically because they've been doing a great job executing to ambitious road-maps without things like this. So short-term, looking at this product, yes, maybe not that big a deal, long-term they need to ask themselves how they're ensuring this doesn't happen again. Given they're restructuring the team and getting rid of managers sounds like Apple leadership take this pretty seriously.

hinkley 4y ago
Perhaps not with this phone but with other devices, it's not uncommon for a manufacturer to work with other companies to make sure there's something to show off on this device. For a GPU on an oversized phone, you could have been looking at additional video or picture editing operations that did not get released.
tedunangst 4y ago
I wish more companies would "cock-up" by shipping functional products.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  And prioritise battery life over faster processors.
  - tnel77 4y ago
    “Our product can last all day!” Doing what? Sitting on the counter? I want a phone that can stream data all day (music and maps) while occasionally taking photos and sending messages.

thefourthchime 4y ago

I would rather hear headlines about Apple failing at a stretch goal than them just falling behind.

tshaddox 4y ago

The key thing being that they apparently had a fallback plan, which I assume is always the case for every generation of iPhone. That means that while it might be unprecedented, it apparently wasn't unanticipated.

bpye 4y ago
It wasn't clear from the article that there was a fallback plan, or that they decided to use a lightly modified previous gen GPU because that was the only way to get working silicon in the timeframe?
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I suppose you’re right, although I find it hard to believe that wasn’t the explicit backup plan long before they even started investigating the new stuff that ended up not working out.

fsckboy 4y ago

>This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented' so then, what was the precedent in an earlier generation of iPhones where a new set of chips was designed and developed which could be marketed as a leap in performance, but shortly before committing to manufacture they were forced to abandon the plan and roll back to the chips of a previous iPhone generation, leaving marketing with no performance boost to trumpet, especially in the context where the previous generation was also considered a disappointingly marginal improvement over its predecessor?

aendruk 4y ago
Odd, not false.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  Odd, meaning literal, you mean. Odd use of odd.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    I disagree. It is not odd to say that an overly literal use of a word is odd.
fexecve 4y ago
You're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

comboy 4y ago

How did you end up in this thread?

vouaobrasil 4y ago
How did you end up replying?
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  How did any of us come to be?
  - beckman466 4y ago
    Lynn Margulis knows the answer.
- comboy 4y ago
  I was interested in the topic. You think nobody should care, but you cared enough to comment so I was just curious. If I'm not interested in bananas I don't visit threads about them. HN seems mostly rational, so I'm legit interested what has driven you to click and comment.

sieabahlpark 4y ago

[dead]

frozenport 4y ago

The incident is reportedly unprecedented in Apple's chip design history Did ya read the article?

amelius 4y ago

HN should run all headlines through the following GPT prompt: "please rewrite the following headline without hyperbole: $HEADLINE"

msla 4y ago

Also, am I wrong, or are Apple products suffering more hardware flaws? When was "It Just Works" abandoned as a guiding principle?

bitwize 4y ago

The iPhone is the best smartphone in the world. Its mobile CPU is the best mobile CPU in the world. People are used to Apple pushing the envelope with its mobile SoCs. If they step back and decide to include last gen's GPU on this gen's chip, that is unprecedented and it is significant.

hluska 4y ago

They discovered the flaw late in their process. Since they discovered it so late, the had to base the iPhone 14’s GPU on the iPhone 13’s. Because of that, the 14 only delivered small graphical improvements. According to benchmarking firms, prior generations showed major leaps over their predecessor. That’s the unprecedented part - the 14 only showed small gains whereas previous generations all showed big leaps. In a case like that, unprecedented fits. It’s not hyperbole.

rdsubhas 4y ago

Any hardware product company has to be atleast one cycle/model ahead in prototyping and development. If the 13 is launched today, then 14 should have already finished prototyping and development. The "unprecedented" is because they found this after the 13 launch, and it's not an integration issue – it's a core issue. It's not possible to go back to architectural drawing boards in the current product iteration. So they had to do a hail mary and revert back to the previous launch's GPU. That does count as a major goof up (if it happened ofc). We have many popular YouTube reviewers saying there is no reason to buy the 14 series, the 13 series are equally as good _(except the Pro Max's dynamic island)_. Apple just happens to be in a comfortable position. These kind of things could kill smaller hardware product companies.