Raytracing in the iPhone means Raytracing in iPads and Macs. It’s not going to penalize iPhone users who never or rarely game on their iPhones.
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iPhone 14 Pro Faced 'Unprecedented' Setback Leading to Removal of New Graphics Processor
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Oh, absolutely, but we’re not talking about Switch games and Animal Crossing here.
We’re talking about GPUs that are competitive with PS5 and Xbox, for example. Sounds like that’s what Apple is aiming for - unfortunately it didn’t work out this time around.
The Switch doesn't just play animal crossing. It can also run Doom Eternal and more realistic games, if you optimize it here and there. Yes, it's showing its age, but the point is that if something as old as a switch can have AAA games, why can't Apple GPUs? It's not really a matter of power at this point; it's a matter of Apple being stubborn and a lack of interest from developers (and why would they, if Apple told them it's either Metal or the highway)?
In fact, at this point, even something as small as the iPhone 14 can a game that has PS4-like graphics. Maybe even slightly better than PS4, even. But again, it doesn't get games because politics.
I wouldn't call the Dynamic Island a game changer. It is a dumb marketing name, and it is something that makes the notch get even bigger with notifications. And if you tap on the notification, like to answer a call, it doesn't actually answer the call. It just takes you to the app. The 48MP setting is off by default because no one wants 80MB files per photo. So the majority of people will never use it. The A16 is not a blazing fast chip compared to the A15, or even the A14. Why do you think the A15 is still in the iPhone 14? It is only marginally faster, and the article explains why. But I am guessing you commented without reading it. Compared to the 13 Pro, the 14 Pro is a mediocre upgrade.
OK, let's look at that sentence: "Apple [...] was forced to scrap plans for the new GPU late in development"
WHO forced Apple to scrap plans? WHO? The US president? Putin? Xi Jinping?
That's the sort of weasel-word language you use when you want to say something that is kinda sorta technically in line with what your sources told you, but sounds dramatic, much more dramatic than:
"Apple management looked at the features of the proposed design, like they look at the features of every proposed design every year; and after some discussion with the engineers, decided that trying to force this feature onto an N4 chip rather than the N3 for which it was designed, while feasible, would ultimately result in the wrong set of tradeoffs"...
When anyone (journalist or internet rando) makes ANY claims, the first question you should ask is: compared to what?
Yes, people have left Apple in the past few years. New people have also joined Apple. Is the Apple exodus "unprecedented"? Compared to what...?
To make claims that engineers leaving Apple is an important factor would, at the very least, require knowledge of how many engineers have left every year, both recently but also in the past, since Apple started with the A4. Is the recent turnover in fact unusual? How would you know if you have NO FSCKING CLUE what the turnover was in, say, 2015?
We have had, for example, that before GWIII left, Jim Keller left. Was that a disaster for Apple? Uh...
What happened to Apple in the past few years is the same thing that happened to EVERYONE: covid happened. You don't need any crazy theories beyond that to explain everything we see.
NERFs are generally agreed to be the next big thing in computer imagery of all sorts, a way of generating imagery from a combination of synthetic 3D data and real world data (or quasi-real world, like movies).
One part of NERF is AI hardware; a second part is ray tracing.
Apple is very interested in NERF (as is anyone who doesn't plan to be obsolete in computing in 10 years...)
NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields
A method for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views.
www.matthewtancik.com
So your question is somewhat like, in 2007, asking "why bother to put a GPU in a phone?"
And now you're writing your own reports. Next you'll tell the sources what they are supposed to say! 🙄
For AR, mapping 3D objects into a space with correct lighting is extremely important for realism. In the sense that ray casting helps with making existing graphics more realistic, all the better.
My comments were more about people saying this means Apple is getting into high tier gaming GPUs, as if there aren't fundamental trade-offs of scene complexity for real-time rendering vs power and heat in battery-operated, passively cooled devices.
It kinda surprises me when people think it's all about FPS (frames per seconds) and FPS (first person shooters). If anything, the console market seemed to thoroughly disprove that when the Nintendo Wii became a party gaming appliance and a lot of the big studios realized they were going to have to make original games (and radical re-thinks of existing titles) rather than just release ports for the system like everything else.
Apple needs desktop machines with workstation class graphics integrated (and imho really needs eGPU support added back in future hardware as well).
Exactly -- desktop versus mobile is two very different use cases with two very different set of constraints. With AR/VR it's both high performance *and* mobile, which is a tough corner to be in.
Apple has changed its GPU story so often over the years that it's unsurprising the PC owns the high-performance graphics world.
Let's be honest here. Even if games came ported to Apple Silicon with slightly downgraded graphics, do you really believe at this point it's a technical issue? It's just not. At the very least, current Apple silicon can deliver graphics better than the Switch, and comparable or better to the PS4.
It might not be state-of-the-art, but you can deliver plenty of games with those levels of graphics already. So, as we discussed before, it's a political matter / Apple not wanting to commit to industry standards and APIs, thinking that people will magically adopt Metal.
Spoiler: they won't.
From Apple's point of view, that's a feature, not a bug.
With the App Store, Apple makes more money from gaming than Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony put together.
Apple earns more from gaming than Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision combined | AppleInsider
Apple's profits from gaming outweighed those of major game companies, according to a report, with Apple earning more from App Store games in its 2019 fiscal year than Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and Sony combined.
Having said that, Apple's decision to pull out of the Khronos Group and not support Vulkan as a first-class citizen after all is frustrating, given that Vulkan is the industry-standard replacement for OpenGL, although the existence of MoltenVK (open-sourced by Valve) mostly makes up for it.
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From Apple's point of view, that's a feature, not a bug.
With the App Store, Apple makes more money from gaming than Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony put together.
Apple earns more from gaming than Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision combined | AppleInsider
Apple's profits from gaming outweighed those of major game companies, according to a report, with Apple earning more from App Store games in its 2019 fiscal year than Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and Sony combined.appleinsider.com
They do NOW, but they're making money short term and not building a market, like Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony did.
In every platform, there are exclusive games that remind me of these brands (Forza; Mario; Crash Bandicoot).
Apple has pay-to-win.
For a few years now, Apple has been doing exactly taht: taking decisions that make the brand earn money in the short run, but damage the reputation on the long run.
And yet they're making more and more money every year, literally billions more in game revenue every year. They have no incentive to change their strategy because their strategy is a growth strategy working well for them -- it's just not the same strategy as the PC or console industry. Apple just doesn't see their gaming position as a problem to be fixed, because from a revenue perspective, it ain't broken.
I'd *like* to be able to play AAA games on my Mac, and maybe things like dxvk and MoltenVK will start to lower the barriers to porting to Mac. But first you'd have to convince Apple that their current strategy, which pours cash on them in ever-increasing torrents, is wrong.
Well, how u can have not realtime ray tracing IN GAMES? U play today without RT, and then the day after u download the replay with RT applied to it? 😂😂😂
As a developer, who can see in real time Apple's insane push towards subscription and micro-transaction based ads, rather than the freemium model for games, I absolutely loath Apple. Apple essentially has developers by the balls, due to the amount of money you make on iOS vs every other platform. But I don't know that it will necessarily translate to end users seeing any problem, since there's always another developer to step in and play Apple's games, and another user to step in and pay for apps. And if the consumers do get fed up with all of the micro-transactions and ads, there's always the "Apple Arcade" route, where you still end up paying paying paying.
Apple is scary good at making money without appearing to make money. Look at how long it took for them to phase out Lightning, and that required the EU to pass a law to get it done.
The thing is, it isn't about the small iterations. They're simply steps on the path. They add up, and you can't simply go from current performance to game changer in one go because its too difficult both from a manufacturing and cost perspective and also risk. You need to sell product to fund the advance.
Apple (same as anyone else) are improving in incremental steps as manufacturing capabilities and costs improve to suit. The end game isn't just a faster phone - the end game is to use something in the iphone thermal/power envelope (or better) to power other devices, like a VR headset and other stuff we likely don't consider yet - because without the processing power the uses haven't been considered yet.
Apple right now are simply riding a wave of success with the A and M series chips while the other guys have been doing it tough. But all the companies are trying to do the same thing - manageable bumps in the short term that add up to the next big processing capability (and therefore next big product category) over time.
Most people weren't interested in tablets until there was a decent tablet on the market either. AR/VR combined with smarter AI will be the next revolution in how people work. It will be as big as the desktop/laptop computer was, when its ready.
To paraphrase Henry Ford back in the day "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Most people don't know what they really want until someone builds it. And without the tech advance in the individual component parts to enable building new things, they don't get built.
There's a way to go, but as per above, you can't go from nothing to fully baked in one step. AR/VR is in its infancy at the moment; its only recently we've had anything at all useful, despite companies originally starting work on VR back in the early 90s.
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When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he sat on stage in a nice leather chair and read a newspaper in the most relaxing way possible, demonstrating the use case for every fool to get it. Will we see Tim Apple with a clumsy VR helmet pretending to have fun while entering the Metaverse?
Henry Ford was an idiot, who never invented the car. So that quote always sounded very stupid to me.
"My first customer was a lunatic. My second had a death wish." — Carl Benz
I know what I want and it's not a VR helmet. That's something to try out at an amusement park, but nothing to privately own in terms of consumer electronics.
The Sensorama was a machine that is one of the earliest known examples of immersive, multi-sensory (now known as multimodal) technology. This technology, which was introduced in 1962 by Morton Heilig, is considered one of the earliest virtual reality (VR) systems. Sensorama − Wikipedia
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Probably not. In the Jobs era, keynotes were mostly focused on Steve as a presenter. In the Cook era, there's a much wider variety, in part because Tim isn't as good a speaker as Steve was, and in part because a white dude being the main character of a keynote doesn't play as well in the 2020s as it did in the 2000s.
They had some misfires (Eddy Cue dancing), but for the most parts, they just have domain experts to their respective segment. I still don't really know what the Apple AR/VR thing will be, if it exists at all. But it sounds a lot like it'll have one person showing off playing games on it, and another showing serious™ apps. Neither will likely be Tim Cook. He may tease or even announce it, but will then hand over to someone else.
Well, then it's dead on arrival. Nobody will make games for a VR set nobody owns. And nobody will buy a VR set unless there are plenty of high quality games making use of the technology. I don't care who's presenting the use case, but there must be a use case which improves my life. And since you and nobody else knows what it really is, there's no reason for this product to exist. I hope Apple is still smart enough to understand this and won't become another Meta Platforms, Inc. failure.
I don't know about that. It would have been easy to make the same prediction about the iPhone ca. 2007.
It's perfectly conceivable that someone at Apple has a great idea (or great execution of a mundane idea). Wouldn't be unprecedented.
Well, Zuckerberg bet big on one thing and seems to be losing. Apple so far isn't doing that. Their existing platforms are doing between fine (Apple TV) and great (iPhone), both financially and in terms of customer sat™.
If you ignore Horizon Worlds (whose innovation doesn't really seem to exist beyond "what if we did Second Life but in VR, and… no, that's pretty much it"), it's not like great Oculus products don't exist. Both tech demos of what could be (like Google Earth), and games people actually enjoy (like Beat Saber). A lot of what works against Meta is that nobody likes (much less trusts) their brand any more. The same isn't true for Apple.
The first iPhone sold as three revolutionary products:
1. Widescreen iPod with touch controls
2. Revolutionary mobile phone
3. Breakthrough internet communicator
Right from the start it had access to all iTunes songs, all phone numbers and all websites (without Flash).