While seeing these deep dives on A series processors is fascinating I find how powerful they are to be highly disappointing.
Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable.
Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe lanes!
All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app stores.
Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of it.
You've got a point. Back in the iPhone 4S days, I speculated that some day there could be a really interesting market for second-hand iPhone "motherboards" to be put to use in… oh I dunno… robotics, OLPC-type things, even blade servers… Of course I knew that Apple would fight rooting (and then the secure enclave came along) but it was fun to imagine.
The article mentions that several leads from the Apple chip division bailed for Nuvia, so at least the future of non-Apple boards looks a bit brighter.
Reading your comment, we certainly have much more computing power but it's no longer general-purpose. It's interesting to see cars waiting to get built while at the same time, yesterday's iPhone gets tossed as e-waste. If only there was a way to make these commodities transferrable between industries.
I mean, ignoring that there are some fairly serious number crunching things to do on iPhones (I think the lidar and basic 3D scanning features intro'd with the iPhone 12 Pro are already quite useful professionally for example, like cameras themselves on smartphones), how can you say this following Apple's switch of Macs to their chips too? Obviously the economies of scale and constraints generated by iPhone development has fed Apple's move up the stack in classic disruptive fashion to the iPad and then last year the Mac. Hwever you feel about smartphones themselves, it seems a little more than a little odd to see this comment now in 2021 given that it's going straight into more classic personal computers as well?
I'm excited about the M1 Macs and the fact they do have bootloaders which can be unlocked. This doesn't change the fact that there are a large magnitude more iPhones that exist that will never be used for their full potential.
Everyone is buying a magical teleporter but it'll only take you down to the corner store. Doesn't matter if 95% would only use it for that anyway, the fact the other 5% can't is what makes me sad.
>This doesn't change the fact that there are a large magnitude more iPhones that exist that will never be used for their full potential.
Depends I guess? Having a lot of power on tap can show up in transparent ways as well as obvious apps. Apple is definitely leaning heavily on their SoC for a lot of their computational photography stuff. Pros may prefer to just shoot RAW of course for decent reason, but having a system make "good shots" fairly point-and-shoot at the cost of a ton of compute is a real value add for lots of regular people. A lot of people also do some real gaming on their iPhones these days, and those can absolutely push the GPU. Maybe that doesn't fall into your definition of serious, but I don't think it's quite fair to dismiss any use-case valued by customers. There are also extremely practical energy saving issues like the race to sleep. Often the faster a chip can do a job and then return to hibernation, the better the energy efficiency. A lot of normal usage is very bursty, and like it or not on the modern web there are tons of sites that can hammer SoCs pretty hard. Everyone cares to some degree about battery life and responsiveness in handhelds.
If there was some big cost for this that'd be one thing, but there really isn't given the economics of modern silicon design and fabrication. Apple amortizes R&D big time across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even stuff like the Apple TV. Relentlessly pushing forward the units on the phones feeds directly into everything else. And even if most people only use the full potential a fraction of the time that may be a very valuable fraction, and what will take off in the future that might use it isn't always clear.
Though one thing that is clear is that wearable displays and serious AR/VR are the big next disruption/extension event for computing, and Apple like every other player needs to be ready. That's going to take a ton of compute power along with highly evolved environmental sensor usage and fusion. They have to be working towards that for years and years beforehand, and clearly are.
I don't understand the comment wrt the MacBooks either.
It looks more like sour grapes that one of the most prestigious computing companies on the planet is out-engineering the "foundation" spin-off of Broadcom, created (very successfully, I might add) to breathe life into an aging chip foundry.
> If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable.
Even if they had access to it I don't think it would be anywhere near as affordable as the Pi foundation wants their devices to be. An M1-powered Raspberry Pi would be amazing, but also probably several hundred dollars.
My iPhone 11 and iPad Pro have more, and more varied, I/O devices available than any of the ~6 computers and dozen or so video game consoles in my house. Like, I could buy more for the others to make them compete, but the i-devices just come with tons of stuff, plus can connect to lots of the same USB devices my other computers can (including, notably, anything MIDI), plus most of my bluetooth peripherals. And they can use external monitors/TVs (mirroring only, but still).
I guess there's a chance my Nintendo Switch comes close, but then, it can't connect to as many BT and USB devices.
Here you have undoubtedly some of the finest processor technology available, manufactured in the hundreds of millions, wasted by the constraints of its platform. If the Pi foundation had access to cores, processes, and even pieces of this level of technology the overall computing world would be so much more capable.
Even beyond that, the iPhones themselves? Severely limited by the I/O they possess. As these devices age they could have several recycled general computing purposes but they're constrained by the single lighting port. iPhone use NVMe storage, they have PCIe lanes!
All this work, effort and engineering for a platform who simply seeks to make more off of the revenue of whales in their app stores.
Edit: I think my comment around Pis is a little misleading. What I meant is the general educational Linux community. Not specifically the Pi foundation. If after X years Apple unlocked the bootloader and you could install other operating systems to better leverage the hardware I'd feel better about the state of it.