Hello completely unjustified price hike.
On top of a 2018 already unjustified price hike..
If they don't make the MacBook 12" convertible. I see no more apple products in my future.
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Kuo: Mini-LED Displays to Debut in Apple's Next iPad Pro
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Hello completely unjustified price hike.
On top of a 2018 already unjustified price hike..
If they don't make the MacBook 12" convertible. I see no more apple products in my future.
I'm interested in your thinking - would you mind elaborating? Is the Air overpriced for what's under the hood? Granted the RAM is TBD.
This isn't true. Mini-LED isn't simpple technology and Samsung has never used mini-LED tech in their TV's. In fact, they are rumored to introduce their first mini-LED TV in 2021. They are also going to continue working on their micro-LED tech, but micro-LED isn't coming to consumers anytime soon. Samsung is also going to introduce QD-OLED. Ironically, they won't be the first to bring their tech to consumers. My man Vincent has a good piece about it.
Leading the way? If this were about micro-LED, I would agree. But there is a reason not many are pursuing mini-LED displays (otherwise known as FALD- fully array local dimming). It's inferior to OLED in all aspects except for brightness.
The only great leap forward for inorganic LED-based displays will be micro-LED. Mini-LED is nothing to write home about.
Superior peak brightness, bigger color gamut, more stability over lifetime, better battery lifetime. These are all properties that are very desirable in a professional mobile working machine.
If they discontinue the iPad Pro 11 and don't replace it with an 11-12" model with mini-LED, I will simply buy nothing. The Air 4 doesn't have mini-LED, and I have no interest in getting a 12.9" or larger model.
I'll just stick it out with my 10.5" iPad Pro, despite it being a 4 year-old model come Q1 2021. For my usage and preferences, it would be a waste off money going from a non-mini-LED model to another non-mini-LED model. This is doubly true for the Air 4, since it doesn't have Face ID either.
If you want it now or need it now then that's fine, but:
Mini-LED was originally rumoured for Q4 2020. It only shifted to 2021 when the pandemic happened, and by most accounts the delay is just a couple of months.
This is a reasonable concern.
I disagree the 2018 is a steal at regular discounted pricing at most retailers. I guess it depends on how good of a sale it has though, since some retailers do have clearance pricing.
Around here though (Toronto), I have been quite unimpressed by the pricing on the 2018 models.
Well, as you know, it didn't actually get a real SoC update. This is quite unusual.
There won't be micro-LED. It just won't be happening any time soon. Other rumours yes, but none of those represent as much of a change as Mini-LED. Those types of changes happen like every half-decade or so.
In the context of the iPad Pro, it really doesn't matter when the first mini-LED Mac comes out. The first mini-LED Mac could come out before, after, or at the same time as the first mini-LED iPad Pro, but that's basically irrelevant as they are independent product lines.
This. It's obvious the current form factor will be around a while, as the new Air uses it, and accessory compatibility is important. The $350 Magic Keyboard just came out 6 months ago, they can't make it instantly obsolete for bigger iPads.
Don't tell Apple this... but I feel like they've been OVER-innovating the iPad department and vastly under-innovating the MacBook side of the lab. I help run a commercial real estate firm that involves a good bit of travel, measuring, photos, drones, potentially integrating the new LiDAR sensor and augmented reality functionality... and even we can't take advantage of even half of what these new iPad's can do. And iPads last a long time! My original iPad Pro is still my "fun" device for movies, hasn't been in a case for years, and runs like a dream. Apple needs to promote some iPad engineers and R&D the MacBook Touch Bar into it's full potential, or ditch it for new horizons and give me back MagSafe + Touch ID + SD card reader 🥳
mini-LED are going to substantively more expensive screens for over a year or so. If go to the first posting, Kuo is saying the prices will drop over time. They'll be more affordable later . In the mean time, Apple is not going to soak up the higher costs with lower margins for themselves. Apple is just going to pass along the higher cost. Any drop in costs before the next product revision. They just take that too.
Bringing mini-LED to a relatively lower volume product makes more sense first. Not an afforable Mac (or iPad) but something priced relatively high. the iPad Pro 12.9" is a relatively very expensive iPad. That's probably where the mini-LED goes.
If it went to a Mac it would be a "extra Pro" Mac with "Pro XDR/HDR/UltraDR " screen on it with a hefty price tag attached. Pretty good chance Apple is going to through some "Pro something Display" at these mini-LED models over the next 1-3 years.
The XDR display has mini-LED. ( and more power than will probably manged on a Mac or iPad for blinding peak/sustained brightness. )
They wouldn't have shown it if they couldn't get volume A14X chip production until relatively late into the 4th Quarter. It can't get the A14X chips then can't ship product. if can't ship product there is little, to no, reason to put it in the iPad dog and pony show at all.
The problem is that the A14 in the iPad Air and also in the iPhone 12 variants to going to soak up almost all of Apple's 5nm wafer allocation for several months. That means it will be even harder to make the bigger A14X. Since those dies are bigger they soak up even more wafers. When the initial demand bubble for the iPhone 12 dies down slightly then Apple can shift over to the bigger chip. All of that would slide the iPad Pro out to early 2021.
The iPad Pro 12.9" model isn't some Christmas stocking stuff gift. Demand will be there after the peak holiday buying season too for a professional product.
He shouldn't have been surprised. The iPhone slide because of the pandemic. It has a more complicated set of radios that have to be validated out in the field to qualify. If folks are on home quarantine then it is going to be hard to do really authentic field testing.
Similarly iOS got a much shorter window to do beta testing. Similar goofiness in that had to ship iOS 14 'early' because WatchOS 7 had to go out the door with the watches. (and iPad OS with the iPads). Apple covers the existing products and only a limited use iPad Air of the A14 with the "not fully baked" release.
If it had not slid then the the iPhone 12 , Air, and Watch could dropped the same day.
the other upside that Apple gets is that the iPad Air initial demand bubble is decoupled from the iPhones. If the demand for the iPhone 12 is unexpectedly 'soft' then the iPad Air can soak up the 'excess' A14 SoCs. If the iPhone 12 demand is unexpectantly high ... then Apple has a "product is so great there are shortages ... better get one you are missing out " free publicity. Either way more money , more money , more money.
Anandtech is just looking at it from the "new tech porn" perspective. Apple is a business.
iPad Pro probably is not coming with an A14. It probably has an A14X. That would be a bigger die. Apple probably doesn't have the wafer allocation to make a bigger die version(s) right now for both the Mac and iPad Pro . So that will be kicked to later in Q4 and the iPad Pro product probably slides into early 2021. And the relatively limited big die wafer allocation given to pushing out some "corner case" Mac laptop that is on the expensive and limited demand side. (e.g., high priced super , ultra , thin MacBook ).
iPad Pro wouldn't be running macOS.
If the iPad Pro update is sliding into early 2021 then the iPad Pro mid-Spring update this year is also put something out there so iPad Pro market doen't feel ignored in "zombie product" land. Unlike how Apple's pace on most of the Mac desktop line up.
^This. A lot of people would be REALLY annoyed if their $350 keyboards did not work for the new iPad Pros.
Apple could bump the 11" model with just primarily a A14X upgrade and it would be a better system (same case. Maybe small tweak to put a touchID power button in ... or not ) . I could be that only the 12.9" is getting a case/enclosure refresh driven by a different screen.
If Apple uses mini-LED to push up the peak and sustained brightness then these screens could consume more power which might be problematical for smaller enclosure iMacs on this SoC iteration. If Apple is also trying to 'crank up' the compute power with the A14X also then the SoC may not show much savings. So some battery tap dance to push in more electrical storage capacity and perhaps not running super peak brightness unless plugged into external power source .
Cranking up the iPad Air doesn't make much sense. This model already jumped up $100 in price point and has limited cameras. Trying to pack an A-X series or the enhanced camera stuff into the Air is only going to push that higher.
The 11" is not as unwieldy as the 12.9". It doesn't "have to" chase the screen tech into the battery draining zone and still hit a wide set of workloads.
The 11" might lag behind on the A12Z if the Mac demand for 5nm SoCs is so high that Apple doesn't have any 5nm wafer allocation to assign to the iPad Pro 11" model. that's probably a "plan b" though.
There is a 10.2" mini screen in the min-LED roadmap. Apple may have some initially odd looking reasons wants to go smaller with the entry iPad Pro , but disappear completely? Probably not.
The iPad Air has a different role to play in the line up. Next iteration, there is a good chance it is going to slide back $100 to the classic iPad price. The super , blazing edge 5nm fab process is substantively more expensive than the last generation blazing edge. Apple is doing some expensive SoC risk management by throwing it into the iPad Air "early".
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And, the form factor is already REALLY good for current iPad Pros! It's one of the few designs that actually has no aesthetics or mechanical complaints, i.e. don't fix what ain't broken. Well, many people would prefer a landscape camera, but that doesn't necessitate a form factor redesign.
More likely that is associated with the higher priced 5nm SoC in the iPad Air than anything to do with screen tech.
If the upcoming iPad Pros get both an even larger 5nm SoC ( A14X ) and mini-LED the the prices will likely go even higher ( at least for a product iteration).
I think Apple has already built some pricing "pad" into the 12.9 iPad Pro price range. That will blunt the blow a bit there. The smaller screen may just have to wait. Which really isn't much of a problem if that also gives better battery life. ( mini-LED is more for brighter than , lower power ).
That doesn't really make sense.
The 5 nm A14X in 2021 should cost roughly as much (within 5% anyhow) as 7 nm A12X did in 2018.
If Apple shifted to LDDR5 that might very well be 8GB. If throwing at double digit number of cores at the A14X SoC then to be respectable need to move into the double digit number of GBs too if don't want to starve off cores from a decent working set size per core for heavyweight burst workloads.
Apple skimps on RAM to save power. If the RAM tech has power savings then they can move up in capacity with a more modest trade-off.
Chuckle. errr no. If these numbers are near accurate then wafer costs have dramatically gone up.
TSMC’s Estimated Wafer Prices Revealed: 300mm Wafer at 5nm Is Nearly $17,000
High performance and high transistor density come at a cost
and apple keeps the die size roughly the same ( buy adding lots more transitors to do more stuff. Much bigger caches. more AI cores. etc. ) . The dies are going to get more expensive.
Being on the bleeding edge fab process costs lots of money. It isn't cheaper and has been more expensive on the last several iteration. Throw on top Apple throwing money at TSMC for "exclusion" of other folks ( paying to consuming a large percentage at the front of the line) and even less likely that costs are the same as the last iteration.
The Bloomberg article talked of the A14X having 12 cores ( maybe 8 big and 4 small . Or perhaps if that budget is too big. 4 big and 8 small. Either way going to hard to not stay the same size when Apple also cranked up the allocations to the AI/ML cores alot and the caches. The GPU isn't getting smaller and the display/raster part isn't if going to step up to handingle 6K sized screens and/or multiple screens. )
if apple wasn't shooting for higher performance curves and just die size shrinkage then cost might have gone down if had much smaller chips. But most indications are now that isn't what they did. They went "bigger" transistor budget. That is going to largely fill up the same footprint they were using before with "more stuff".
If you’ve been following MiniLED, then get ready for high input lag. More dimming zones = more processing = much higher input lag. Good thing Fortnite is banned so you won’t need low input lag hahahahaha.
Unless I am misreading that table, those much cheaper 7 nm wafer prices are prices in 2020. The prices in the initial year would be vastly different.Chuckle. errr no. If these numbers are near accurate then wafer costs have dramatically gone up.
TSMC’s Estimated Wafer Prices Revealed: 300mm Wafer at 5nm Is Nearly $17,000
High performance and high transistor density come at a costwww.tomshardware.com
and apple keeps the die size roughly the same ( buy adding lots more transitors to do more stuff. Much bigger caches. more AI cores. etc. ) . The dies are going to get more expensive.
Being on the bleeding edge fab process costs lots of money. It isn't cheaper and has been more expensive on the last several iteration. Throw on top Apple throwing money at TSMC for "exclusion" of other folks ( paying to consuming a large percentage at the front of the line) and even less likely that costs are the same as the last iteration.
The Bloomberg article talked of the A14X having 12 cores ( maybe 8 big and 4 small . Or perhaps if that budget is too big. 4 big and 8 small. Either way going to hard to not stay the same size when Apple also cranked up the allocations to the AI/ML cores alot and the caches. The GPU isn't getting smaller and the display/raster part isn't if going to step up to handingle 6K sized screens and/or multiple screens. )
if apple wasn't shooting for higher performance curves and just die size shrinkage then cost might have gone down if had much smaller chips. But most indications are now that isn't what they did. They went "bigger" transistor budget. That is going to largely fill up the same footprint they were using before with "more stuff".
ie:
$14267: 2018 Q3 at 7 nm
$16746: 2020 Q1 at 5 nm
???????: 2020 Q4 at 5 nm <-- This is when we expect the iPad Pro chips to be manufactured.
The bigger reason Apple skimps on RAM is to save money. And they can get away with it because they usually make the entire line the same amount of RAM, and which provides a single RAM target for the developers.
Some may point to the 1 TB 2018 model with 6 GB RAM, but it should be noted that the extra RAM appears to be available only for multi-tasking and not for individual applications. The increase RAM availability for individual applications did not arrive until the 2020 models, and I suspect they will keep that 6 GB RAM target for at least 2 generations, to include the 2021 models.
At best, Apple might release a single 1 TB model with 8 GB RAM, while keeping the other models (including that poster's preferred 512 GB model) at 6 GB RAM.
