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".
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.
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.
Get an iPad. I made the mistake of buying one a year or so ago and it completely replaced my personal laptop. It’s basically a massive battery, so it lasts all day and then some.
Also pick up an Apple Pencil and download procreate, if only for the “well that’s pretty cool” experience.
Even iPads are shit now. I have two iPad 11 Pros and they can not last a week just sitting there. My Ipad 2 and 4s? I charge them once every 3-4 months on super light duty. Apple is slowly and surely going down the gutter.
The iPhone 14 pro is a pretty sad upgrade too with regression in battery life from the 13. I've owned almost every iphone since 4 and the 14 is the one i skipped because it doesn't even have a SIM slot! Lets see if they can bring it around in 15.
You can get a data-only eSIM in a couple of clicks for 4,50usd for example. I will be doing this in a couple of days. Very useful when traveling to a country where crazy roaming charges apply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".