A Close Look At Apple's A4 Chip 245
PabloSandoval48 writes "Apple's A4 processor is heavily influenced by Apple's long-established relationship with Samsung and represents an evolution rather than a revolution in circuit design. A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
Evidence On The A4 (Score:5, Funny)
A team of experts takes a look at the evidence on A4 in an attempt to determine its origins and the influence of recent Apple acquisitions in the area of chip design."
The team of experts concludes the A4 was designed by Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Revolver.
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Yeah, that's about what I got from the article.
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You get an Apple article on their sales? Its super easy to troll. These tech articles are a little more difficult.
Well played, good sir.
The power of A4! (Score:5, Funny)
Not interesting. It's a consumer-grade processor. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
Re:Not interesting. It's a consumer-grade processo (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
I think it is just because it is Apple. For some reason, the thought of Apple being involved in processor design makes these people jizz in their pants.
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So investors are caught up in the hype and RDF as much as the media or anyone else right now...
But yes - maybe now people can drop the myth that Apple are a "little company": "Look how amazing it is that Apple have done so well, managing a whole 5% of the phone market in just 3 years" they cry, as if Apple weren't some billion dollar company that can easily enter any market it wants. Or "Isn't it amazing that Apple can create a device for me to access the Internet" as if this was anything special in 2007 on
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Apple has historically and to the present day, shown considerable distaste for entering low margin markets(with occasional exceptions in the service of making their high margin gear more attractive: the original "airport", for instance, was actually cheaper than the Lucent gear that it was a
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Except, Apple's got a microarchitecture license. They haven't
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Depends on what you mean by "licensed core". If you look at the history of Apple, you'll see a clear pattern: Apple licenses other people's cores or buys their chips at the end of the design process, but is quite frequently involved in designing those cores to begin with.
Let's review:
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I don't see what's so interesting here. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade embedded processor. There are billions of these around in all sorts of devices.
Isn't that sorta like saying a Core i7 is just another x86 chip. It's a standard, general-purpose, consumer-grade processor. I don't know about you but I can't design an ARM chip and you discount the work of engineers who did the design work. From what I know about it, Apple designed the chip to be more powerful and and more energy efficient than a standard A8. Making something to do both isn't an easy task. Now it won't turn into the next Skynet but it is an improvement for those who might use it.
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Doesn't the article discount the work of ARM's engineers by pretending that Apple created this thing?
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It's unlikely the CPU core was modified much, they probably used some more efficient in comparison to what they had DSPs/etc., or throttling methods of those; so A8 part doesn't really come into consideration (and even if - then Apple has it just in time for A9 SoCs showing up, for example)
Oh, and you overestimate how designing SoC can often look nowadays... [design-reuse.com] (screenshot; yes, even basically point'n'click CPU customisation)
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Is this one of those things that people get excited about just because it's from Apple, but is otherwise totally unremarkable?
No more or less unremarkable than Snapdragon, Tegra 2, or any of the other similar products that are of great interest in this space. Those are all fairly standard ARM cores, too, but nobody's saying anything about their limited scope of customization as being "off the shelf".
It's more likely that this is one of those things that provides a springboard for bitching about Apple out of selective and convenient comparisons, because that Apple logo is a waving red cape in the bullfightingshit arena. Instead o
Re:Not interesting. It's a consumer-grade processo (Score:5, Insightful)
Processors chips are basically at the stage now where you can customize them. This is analogous to me going to a store and building my own PC from off-the-shelf boards and parts; or maybe going to a web site and choosing which components I want in my PC.
This article is of interest in terms of the detective work and reverse engineering though. But it seems uninteresting in terms of it being about Apple.
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Of course they didn't took "a general purpose processor", they just made some modifications to a design which is already pretty appropriate to have a SoC they want. Lots of companies do that...
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IOW. There is no reason for this to be news. The only reason anyone even noticed or bothered to submit it here is the fact that it is Apple.
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The use of a modified ARM based chip for mobile devices is in itself not interesting either. That it is a relatively fast version, well OK.
What's interesting is that they use it specifically within their company. I would expect that most ARM derivatives are created by chip companies which then sell them to device manufacturers.
Technically it is interesting exactly what they've added and in what configuration. Unfortunately they article is very light on the devices embedded within the SoC. We'll probably hav
Re:Not interesting. It's a consumer-grade processo (Score:4, Insightful)
This SoC is no more off-the-shelf that any ASIC, even if built from already-designed IP blocks.
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Think Programming instead of IC design.
These days design of chips like A4 is more like programming than IC design of the 80s.
- Import the ARM Cortex 8 library, customized with configuration
- import other libraries e.g. memory controller, graphics chip etc
- write code to bind them together
compile... oops.. I mean send to foundry. Get back A4 or your Snapdragon.
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"Off-the-shelf" means it's a vendor's product, not a custom in-house design. It means Apple ordered it from Samsung as a finished product, though they ordered specific design features to be included (which is common in industries with customers who spend millions of dollars on a single run of parts). It does not mean there is a literal shelf the average Joe can go and find an A4 for purchase.
You could, however, order an S5PC110A01 from Samsung, it's the same chip. The S5PC110A01 is found in other devices
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They probably just took a normal ARM SoC and removed any MPEG2 or DIVX support.
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Re:Not interesting. It's a consumer-grade processo (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you read the actual article? Do you know anything about how the ARM architecture works?
Its sort of a "plug and play" architecture-- they license out the core design, the Cortex A8, but that design isn't set in stone. It includes options and modules that you can decide what to include or not, and there's all kinds of ways you can choose to optimize it and modify it to suit your needs.
Some people take this design and market their own customized version of the architecture for various purposes -- Nvidia's Tegra is one such. Its an ARM chip, but not all ARM chips are created equal (and it depends greatly on the purpose one customized an ARM chip for).
The A4 isn't some entirely new sort of chip-- its not as custom as Quallcomm's Snapdragon-- but its also not the same as any other chip on the market. They left some things out. They added some things in(or, more, changed some things). They tweaked its design to suit their purposes. Its not a general-purpose chip, needed for multiple vendors and different device types, so they left off some things to optimize it.
Therefore... its not off-the-shelf. You can't buy one. If you're an ARM-licensee, you could make one if you really wanted if you peered close enough and figured out which modules all the various parts on the die are.
Short version for the non-experts among us (Score:3, Interesting)
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Apple's own video about the iPhone 4 mentions the power-saving advances of the A4. Not sure what they did though, and the article does not talk about that.
Re:Short version for the non-experts among us (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, it's just another Samsung processor like the ones in previous iPhones, which were already Apple-custom anyway. A4 is just marketing. Apple has been using more and more custom application processors for a while now; they've just decided to flip the PR switch and use it as an advertised feature.
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From what I know about chips, real estate is important. You only have so much space to put things on a chip. When most companies get a chip from Samsung, they often get a generic chip. Even with customizations, they may have components that they don't need. For example, they may have to take a chip that has camera inputs even though the phone might not have a camera because it matches other specifications. It looks like Apple went further into customizations by specifying what should and should not be
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And that differs from any other highly integrated SoC from Samsung or everybody else?
Hubris. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple is not a semiconductor company. Sure, they bought one but it's not their core competency. So like everything, they thought they could do a better job than everyone else at this too.
They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living. They're going to have to keep them competitive with the ever-improving Atom chips which are slowly encroaching on sub-watt territory held by ARM. Otherwise, their hardware will lag behind. They're already in a world of hurt with so many vendors ramping to release Android portable devices of all sorts form factors, now they have to compete in the CPU arena too?
I just don't see the point. It'll be interesting in 3 years to look back and see if this was a wise decision.
Born of desperation (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you will about the position Apple is currently in, but they have been screwed over many times by other companies (Microsoft with Office, Adobe with Premiere, IBM with PowerPC @ 3ghz), and they figured that it was critical to their success that they take control of their own destiny.
What they've done is made a streamlined version of an ARM processor that is useful for their current needs; they do not need to "keep up" with anyone in that they get their processor to do what they want it to do for this particular need. If anything, by not having to cater to anyone but themselves, they have the ability to have custom hardware, but still based on the widely-used ARM architecture, so they don't have to completely re-tool when they come up with an A5 or A6 or whatever. Jobs himself said that they are not in the business of licensing their technology. You won't see an A4 being offered in lots of 100 to anyone for other purposes, it's a chip for Apple and their products only.
I was wondering too about the wisdom of this move, but it shows that they are not going to hitch their wagon to anyone's horse but their own, and that they have the ability to modify the horse to pull whatever load is necessary at that moment, a new iPad, new iPhone, AppleTV, whatever.
Re:Born of desperation (Score:4, Interesting)
IBM Eventually got the Power line of processors up to 6 GHz in their test labs. Apple just wasn't patient enough to wait for it, though.
Re:Born of desperation (Score:5, Informative)
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As someone who heated a 1 bedroom apartment with a QuadCore G5, let me tell you the real reason what not the 3Ghz mark. I mean most chips today are still around that 2 - 3Ghz mark only now with multiple cores. The problem with the PPC 900 series was they were never going to work in a laptop form factor. And they saw that is where the market was going. The switch to intel had to do with the failure of being able to put a "G5" chip into a laptop.
Re:Born of desperation (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also they can always leave themselves the option of going back to 3rd party ARM chips or whatever the new big thing is if they fall too far behind with their own efforts. If they keep this option in mind as they move forward, they can certainly leave themselves in a position where doing so isn't even particularly difficult or painful. They've made some serious architecture switches with the Mac platform already, they know how to handle that sort of thing.
Re:Hubris. (Score:4, Insightful)
They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living.
Why? It's not as if they are marketing the A4 to other companies in competition to those other chips. The A4 is being built for themselves only so it only has to be enough to fit their needs.
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Why?
Umm, for starters there are going to be 2GHz Android modible phones by the end of this year. Android phone makers can select from a variety of different processors. If Apple cannot innovate faster than the whole of them. Companies like Samsung and Intel will school them.
Just look at the smart phone market, look at how much faster Android is innovating, look at how in the last 1.5 years Android came from behind to being the leader. Apple is chasing Android innovations or ignoring what customers want
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Re:Hubris. (Score:4, Insightful)
But they are not going to have to spend time and money trying to design a chip that will be able to be used in 10 different products.
See, from my own experience, SoC companies pack more features in their SoC so that they can fit in several products or markets. Apple will only worries about their own devices.
In short, Qualcomm is trying to please 5 or 6 different handsets manufacturers with their snapdragon, each with their own ideas and requests, and they will have to make compromise, while Apple can just focus on getting the exact chip they want for their products.
How is it hubris to make use of what you have? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple is not a semiconductor company. Sure, they bought one but it's not their core competency.
Why can't it be?
Why would a company so focused on making consumer electronics and computers, not decide that over time it is of benefit to move in the direction of also being strong in semiconductor design?
After all, it's not like they built the A4 from scratch thinking they could do better than anyone. That would be hubris. No, instead they took the ARM core and customized around it, which seems perfectly withi
I disagree... (Score:2)
It helps to keep things in perspective. AMD has a market capitalization of 6 billion dollars. Apple has 4x that in cash alone, and is worth 40x what AMD is. Apple's interest in the CPU market is far less involved than AMD's, so even this isn't a fair comparison. It is a fairly minor investment, considering Apple's size.
Another way of looking at it is that Apple is a company that primarily sells CPUs and other computer components packaged really well. In this context, control over the components is important
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WTF are you smoking and why won't you share it with the rest of us?
World of hurt? The iPhone 4 is probably going to break all previous sale's records. This is like saying that Apple is a world of hurt because Gateway/Dell/Sony/Toshiba offer more models and sell more quantity than Apple. Yeah, Apple is hurting there too, with their mar
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-Android runs on anything. Which means when android phones add things like gyroscope, most apps will likely be ignore it for the first year since they can't rely on certain features being present. The innovation in this aspect will have lag behind if Apple stays determined. The interface I'm sure isn't as reliable from model to model
Android OS already has a standard interface for accessing gyroscopes. I don't know if any phones use it yet but if developers want to they can support it in their code today.
and I never heard iPhone users tell each other to download and install the latest firmware (yes, iTunes does it automatically).
iTunes does it? You mean the phone can't update itself? Hardly sounds like an advantage. For the last Android update that was released, I was able to update my phone as soon as it came out while sitting in a coffee shop away from my computer.
Build quality. For having dozens of models, every goddamn android phone looks like the same basic heap of cheap plastic with the 4 confusing buttons in front.
Sturgeon's Law, this is nothing new. But there are high quality Android phones if that's what yo
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They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living.
No they aren't, the A4 is Samsung's chip. Apple designers were just involved in the process this time. More than likely, they simply had a set of specifications that their designers wanted, all of the grunt work (including 99.9% of the chip design - it's the next iteration of an existing chip line) was Samsung.
Jobs taking credit for the A4 is like Obama taking credit for putting out the oil booms in the Gulf. It's total bull.
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Actually... they were quite a formidable semiconductor company.
For all those PowerPC chips, Apple designed northbridges. Uni-North (Uni-N) is family featured in the G4s.
U3 and U4 is used in G5s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_970).
Chipworks (Score:4, Informative)
Chipworks had some interesting eye-candy die photos and a breakdown of the iPad and A4 for those who haven't seen that yet:
iPad Teardown [chipworks.com]
Needed for TPM? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there ARM designs yet which support the Trusted Platform Module specification? (Remember this fuzz years ago wrt. Microsoft and TCPA/NGSCB?)
If I were a hardware company and want to sell DRM'ed content with a hardware dongle, this would be the way to go, having the encryption key which ties the media to the device stored directly inside the CPU would make my platform very attractive, maybe even a de-facto standard, for certain media control freaks. And you could make sure that only signed code runs it from the moment it boots, turning it into the ultimate closed system where the producing company stays in control.
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Why would you want to do that? First of all, TPM chips need to be able to be simply updated without affecting the rest of the system and TPM would also need to provide the ability for the end-user to update or delete their keys (in case of theft or unauthorized access), therefore integrating them into the processor would be a Bad Idea (tm) - as soon as somebody does something bad (either a bad firmware update or a hacking attempt) you would brick the whole thing and since it's in the processor, you would ha
Re:Needed for TPM? (Score:5, Informative)
The ARM equivalent of TPM is called TrustZone and pretty much all SoCs seem to have it these days. It's not clear whether Apple uses it considering that they never used the TPM in the Mac. Apple may be counting on security by obscurity.
Samsung? (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't samsung end up as the last supplier licensed to use Alpha tech?
Since I choose to believe that Apple has resurrected Alpha, no reasoned argument can change my mind :)
ARM and ImgTec (Score:2)
Surely people are missing the next step? Apple want's to bring the SoC design in-house. It's currently a very fragile all-in-one unit provider. You pay for nothing revolutionary in an Apple product, instead you pay for a unique design/interface and the Apple goodwill 'mark-up'. The latter of which is a license the print money. So really Apple need to hit the semi-conductor market to maintain market dominance through R&D. In-house developments don't run the risk of being licenced to your competitor, and
Apple hired DEC alpha engineers a while back (Score:3, Informative)
This is intesting on a technical level and all... (Score:2)
It's all marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at all the hype the shiny "A4" name has garnered them despite it being essentially made with commonplace cores that are already widely used. The switch to Intel took away the special "uniqueness" factor that Macs had on 68k and PPC. This is just a marketing ploy to convince the fanboys that these new platforms have something extra special that you can't get with any old beigebox phone.
Re:Not sure if this is right... (Score:5, Informative)
...but if I remember correctly, the same A4 chip in the iPad is supposed to be showing up in the new iPhone. Can someone confirm?
Apple does list the processor in the new iPhone 4G as being an A4:
iPhone Design [apple.com]
Re:Not sure if this is right... (Score:4, Informative)
This is overly pedantic, but it's the "iPhone 4", not the "iPhone 4G". It is the 4th generation of the iPhone, so it's "4G" in that sense, but it does not make use of any 4G mobile network.
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This is overly pedantic, but it's the "iPhone 4", not the "iPhone 4G". It is the 4th generation of the iPhone, so it's "4G" in that sense, but it does not make use of any 4G mobile network.
Yeah, it has been called the iPhone 4G in the press for some time and my brain hasn't reconciled its actual name with the name that has been used for the past year or so. That being said, it does support 4G once it becomes available as a service for iPhone-capable networks.
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That being said, it does support 4G once it becomes available as a service for iPhone-capable networks.
I don't know where this rumor started, but the iPhone 4 (in its current implementation) does NOT support 4G. It supports HSDPA 7.2, which is 3G. When AT&T rolls out LTE (rumored to be mid-2011 at the earliest), only then will handsets supporting it be available.
But there'll likely be a 5th-gen iPhone by then.
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It's not a bad thing to be precise.
Unless "being precise" means calling something "Kinect". :p
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Well since we are being pedantic, the iPhone 4 (and 3Gs for that matter) has full support for a variety of 4G networks being deployed, basically LTE.
AT&T is supposedly doing some trials next year and rolling out 4G in 2011.
That is not correct. The current iPhone implementations, including iPhone 4, only support existing GSM networks (GPRS, EDGE, HSPA). LTE would require new hardware.
Verizon will be the first to adopt LTE in the US (by the end of this year), and hopes to have the first LTE handsets available by mid-2011. AT&T's LTE network will come later.
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What are you reading? Its the 5th highlight on the page you listed....
Erm, someone asked the question and I provided the link that confirmed that the A4 was the iPhone processor. What's the problem here?
I wasn't asking that question in my post, I was answering it. That's exactly why I used the html <quote> tag, to show that I was quoting someone.
Re:Not sure if this is right... (Score:4, Informative)
How is it not the 4th model of the iPhone? There was the original, which spoke the 2.5G Edge protocol, then there was the 2nd one which spoke a 3G protocol, then there was the 3rd phone - the 3GS - which added a faster processor and video recording, and now there is the 4th phone, dubbed the iPhone 4.
Re:Not sure if this is right... (Score:5, Funny)
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That sounds like the basis for a religious text.
Well, this is Apple we are talking about....
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According to the article,
Despite offering only an optimized version of a standard CPU, the A4 is becoming increasingly important to Apple's strategy with it appearing now in the iPhone and surely in iPod touches to be released in September—not to mention any future iOS product lines.
.... Yes.
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we've always had different names for different products in the same family.
Intel x86 and Atom are the same x86 family
Arm and A4 are in the same Arm family
Cell is a powerpc core with added cores for "multimedia processing"
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Oh okay. I knew Atom and x86 were the same, but didn't realize A4 was an ARM device, or that the Cell was a PowerPC. That means all three current consoles are running the same PPC architecture, with various modifications.
BTW I remember when we didn't use names. You could choose the 80286 or the 68020 and that's about it. Intel or Motorola.
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It's really more like Apple is sprouting up a bunch of ARM devices and sadly, not opening them as much as any given x86 system.
Note that ARM is widely used on mobile computing platforms in general, of which Apple are just one little fish in a big sea; for example, ARM CPUs are used in about 98% of the more than one billion phones shipped a year. They've shipped more than 15 billion proessors in total.
And thankfully, these devices are far more open than Apple's :) (Well, to be fair, I dislike that phone plat
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Around here, we spell bingo link this: L-A-I-D
Re:Total Vertical Integration - Scary (Score:4, Informative)
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3. A forced 30% cut of all software sales for the iDevices.
4. And now a 40% cut of ad sales in Apps(while conveniently banning Admob).
So Apple reduces developer's profit, but they still continue to support them, helping along their growth in to a monopoly.***
And if they do becoming a monopoly, they will have the power to cut of a developer's "oxygen supply" but banning them from their app store.
***Lets face it, iDevices are on the verge of being the "standard" platform for mobile applications.
PS: I figured since my karma is already shot from criticising Apple in a previous story might as well let it going all the way down.
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***are you sure about this one? Even when looking at impressive number of apps in their store...very large part of those were ebooks packaged as single app. Or audiobooks. Or many non-stellar games (subpar n-th clones or in style of flash games. Having an ebook reader, audiobook player and flash support sort of covers most of the mentioned categories). Better not go into "entertainment" section; but take a look at apps which are essentially packaged rss feeds or UIs for webpages (is mobile Safari suddenly n
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Bad numerology is all a part of Apple's marketing game.
They took a page out of IBM's playbook from the 80s and decided to give it a facelift.
It sounds really convincing to people that aren't particularly detail oriented or math impaired (which is most consumers).
You don't typically hear about specific "killer apps" so much.
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You do realize that the suicide rate at that Chinese plant is actually *lower* than the national average, right?
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Yes, but these deaths can be tenuously linked to Apple! zOMG TEH STEVE JOBS IS KILLING INNOCENT CHINESE FACTORY WORKERS!!! Never mind that Foxconn is the one who determines and pays their salary not Apple or any of the other contractors of Foxconn's plants.
Re:Total Vertical Integration - Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices?
Because Apple isn't responsible for the salaries of Foxconn employees? And why do you single out Apple in contrast to the dozens of other huge companies that contract with Foxconn like Microsoft, Logitech, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, HP, or Sony?
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Well, to be fair - at least part of the companies you mention didn't set up themselves in a way which makes them rely to such a large degree on Foxconn (or similar); having their own fabs, most of them not in China, for starters.
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What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices?
Because Apple isn't responsible for the salaries of Foxconn employees? And why do you single out Apple in contrast to the dozens of other huge companies that contract with Foxconn like Microsoft, Logitech, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, HP, or Sony?
Actually from a financial perspective Apple should monitor the difference between the raw material costs and the contract price they pay. Generally if a company is willing to cheat and screw one party, they are very willing to do to other parties, namely Apple Inc., as well. Same reason I don't buy my goods from thieves, if they are clearly willing to be crooked once, they are willing to cheat or steal from me too.
Plus just think of the bad press from an iPhone or iPad packaged with a body part of a suicide
You're spreading something for sure (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple is so innocent, why do you even have to mention the names of the other companies???
If Apple is so guilty, then why NOT mention those other companies?
You have to answer that first before you are allowed any more paranoid rants. You are trying to defect all ills of the world to fall upon Apple's shoulders. Has any other company but Apple in fact even offered a bonus to workers who work on the products the companies are having produced there?
Even if all of them are evil, Apple is less so if only because of that one aspect. Yet, you single Apple out - so obviously you have some other motive in mind rather than Foxconn worker well being. It's pretty sick to take advantage of Chinese suicides to further your own holy crusade against Apple (and Apple only).
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Though some of those companies rely to much lesser degree on Chinese OEMs (the way Apple set up themselves like that). Most of their workforce elligible for any raises...also not there.
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They're already in a world of hurt with so many vendors ramping to release Android portable devices of all sorts form factors, now they have to compete in the CPU arena too?
This statement only true for certain values of "world of hurt"? Exactly which definition of "world of hurt" are you using?
Re:Total Vertical Integration - Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Apple isn't responsible for the salaries of Foxconn employees?
Apple IS responsible, because they know the workers' conditions, and still accept to make business with their direct employers. Those workers work FOR Apple, it doesn't matter how long the control chain between Apple and them is.
Interestingly, among all the companies using that factory (Dell, HP, Nokia, ...) Apple is the only one that has insisted in reviews and reports about the conditions even before this suicide row.
And please don't stop there. 99% of the other chinese crap (not limited to electronics) you buy has been manufactured under conditions that are probably much, much worse than those at Foxconn.
Apple has become a scapegoat of certain people and I totally hate that. Not because I love Apple so much, but because it lets others get away who are often much worse.
Re:Total Vertical Integration - Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you have never shopped at a BP petrol station, since then YOU are responsible for the oil spill, it doesn't matter how long the control chain between BP and you is.
Re:Total Vertical Integration - Scary (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like Apple is looking to dominate the entire vertical space from the silicon in the chip and selling directly to consumers with Apple stores along with all the software that consumers buy. And it wants a cut of everything:
For your conspiracy theory to make some sort of sense, Apple would have to get a cut of anything that Samsung makes. It doesn't. Apple contracted Samsung to make a chip for them. Like other customers, Apple created their own design for Samsung to manufacture. Unlike other customers, Apple went deeper into the design customizations than other customers. Samsung does not owe Apple for any other ARM chips they make for other customers; and it is unlikely that Apple will allow Samsung to manufacture the A4 for their other customers.
1. Hardware of the iDevices
The last time I checked, Apple made their hardware or contracted parties to make it. This is no different than any manufacturer these days. Dell, HP does exactly the same Are you objecting that these companies make money off their own products?
2. Monthly kickback from AT&T on iPhone users monthly fees. (This is the real reason for exclusivity to shitty AT&T, Apple is just too greedy)
Many cell phones makers have exclusive contracts with carriers for certain models that have kickbacks. When a carrier advertises "free" phones, do you really think that the manufacturer really got no money when you got a free phone with a new contract/contract extension.
3. A forced 30% cut of all software sales for the iDevices.
I believe that is something called "overhead" that Apple charges a developer to sell through their store. I don't know if you ever developed for mobile devices before but that is very reasonable. Before the App store, some stores charged 45% plus fees. And this is no different than other stores like Android. If a developer charges no fees for the app, Apple will not charge the developer.
4. And now a 40% cut of ad sales in Apps(while conveniently banning Admob).
Apple is setting up an Ad system. They expect to charge for fees. Are you objecting that they should charge for their work?
Looks like Apple is leaving no stone unturned to make money hand over fist and is rolling in billions of cash. What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices? Couldn't hurt Apple's bottomline really that much, can it?
First of all, Apple is not Foxconn's only nor biggest customer. Almost everyone from Dell to nintendo to Intel uses Foxconn. Second, Apple did raise the wages for the employees that work on their products. [slashdot.org] .
Re: (Score:2)
Unlike other customers, Apple went deeper into the design customizations than other customers.
How do we know that? Sure, there are certainly many customers who might just take what Samsung offers, but are there no other who wanted their SoCs modified among some desired lines? (modifications which equal or exceeding those wanted by Apple). And it is quite likely that Samsung is already selling pretty close SoCs to others...
Hell, for that matter why exclude Samsung themselves? You can bet they modify heavily their SoCs for their own needs.
@1. - last time I checked, Apple actually contracted virtually
Re: (Score:2)
The article seems to suggest that while Apple's chip doesn't include any breaking technology, it is more highly customized than a standard A8 in placement.
Apple is designing their chips like their MBs so I'll use MB as an example. For a while you couldn't get a PC MB that didn't have an IR port even though I can't remember ever using it. Only recently have MBs dropped the parallel ports. But almost all of them have PS/2 ports still. Apple dropped their proprietary connectors in favor of USB/Firewire a d
Re: (Score:2)
That's not very precise analogy IMHO; what Apple needs in SoC is pretty damn close to what other mobile phones need (plus...A4 is also for tablets; seems it could be not-so-optimal after all for one of the products in which it is used, don't you think?)
Also, from TFA: "What we found was an APL0398 chip, presumably the next-generation processor from the APL0298 that we found in the iPhone 3GS."
And Samsung has the expertise, that's almost as good already. Or, here, grab the tools & data used with GPL CPU
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Scary maybe, though I note that the ease of moving between mobile platforms means that Apple is unlikely to ever achieve any real lock-in of users.I think you're pretty far off, though, on items 2, 3 and 4. More basically, it's with the concept of a company being "greedy," which I'll get to after I address the specific points.
Yes, Apple apparently did initially get a portion of the monthly fee. (Piper Jaffrey's analysts put that at $18 per phone per month, IIRC.) I don't believe that is the case any more.
Re: (Score:2)
Regarding the last part: you're generally correct of course - too bad that some measures of success work in a bit perverted fashion. Especially when we look at stock market. But also, overall, not rewarding long-term positive societal effects, for example.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Apple gets a cut of 30% on sales of third party apps. So what? They take 30%, and give me (as an iPhone app developer) a platform for sales, a distribution system and a much reduced cost to advertise. The 30% they take for those services is utterly worthwhile, particularly for independent developer
I am getting sick of this argument. The issue is that it's a forced cut and there is no chance for stores that might, say, take only 20%. Same with Admob, if the service sucks, developers will use iAds instead, no need to ban competitors.
The fanboys making these argument seem to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't care about the cut. I object to the monopoly on distribution.
My wife's favorite iPad app is from Cydia.
Re: (Score:2)
> Scary maybe, though I note that the ease of moving between mobile platforms means that Apple is unlikely to ever achieve any real lock-in of users.
Yes. The lock in presented by DRM in books and videos doesn't mean anything.
Nor does the lock in represented by proprietary applications (that Apple takes that 30% cut from).
[/sarcasm]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What boggles the mind is why can't they pay a few more bucks to the people working in Foxconn(who are jumping off buildings) who actually make these iDevices? Couldn't hurt Apple's bottomline really that much, can it?
Uhh, they did -- http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/31/said.to.stem.from.internal.investigation/
Further... You know that Foxconn plant isn't like, an Apple exclusive manufacturer don't you? Dell, HP, Playstations, Wii's, Xbox, the Kindle... phones by plenty of other people, and basically practically anything electronic.
But Apple's greedy and is running the sweatshop and should direct a few bucks to the poor guys (... which they did, a 30% raise). No one else does. Bad, evil, greedy Apple does.
The wh
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that it is an A8.