iPhone Plus
You know, something you put about like an A5X in the Apple TV thing.
By the way, I'm an idiot for that.
It's going into the Retina iPad Mini, of course.
Oh, the A5X, yeah.
It's a die shrink that's going into the Retina iPad Mini, of course.
No, but wasn't Anand saying he thought the A5X was going to the shrunk in Apple TV?
Yeah, well, he said that, and he said he believes it'll be a die shrink, which makes sense, because the full-size one would be too much heat for that, probably.
And, of course, if you're going to have a die-shrunk A5X, that's going to be a really inexpensive way to Retina-ify the Mini, while still maintaining good separation for people to buy the high-priced one with the faster chip.
and keep those margins a little bit healthier on the Mini.
The reason I totally believe it for the Apple TV is because you said it yourself, they're going to put the ones there with two of the GPU cores burned out.
Right.
Because you've got four GPU cores in there, and it's like, all right, we're going to have a lot of parts where one of those four GPU cores is no good right to the Apple TV because it does not need more.
Maybe they'll intentionally burn out two.
Even if one fails, they will intentionally short out two of them.
Because the CPU in the current one is an A5 with one core burned out.
Right, and crappy GPU.
If you put an A5X in there, it's like, now we've got four cores.
If any one of them is bad, we're going to intentionally burn out two of them just to save power.
You know what I mean?
It's 1080p.
It's the max resolution.
You do not need four cores for that.
I'm upset that it's an A5X in all likelihood.
I'm upset because the A5X is a shitty CPU for iPad programming because it's four times the graphics power, but
The same CPU power.
And so CPU-bound graphics operations become four times slower than an iPad 2.
And that's really, really terrible.
I don't know.
For the Apple TV, I totally believe that it's going to be A5X with stuff shorted out.
Oh, yeah, because the Apple TV doesn't matter.
But for the Retina Mini, I still think that's going to be an A6.
Yeah, I hope so.
But if that's the case, then why, besides, I guess, having a bunch of extra, you know, binned out A5Xs, but then why would they put the A5X in the Apple TV?
I think that's what it is.
I think it's like they've been, they made the iPad 3 for a long time, right?
Not really, like seven months.
I know, but they sold a lot of them.
It's not like how many Apple TVs they sell in those seven months versus how many iPad 3s they sell.
The mini wasn't even around.
The iPad 3, I guess they had the iPad 2 still around.
Maybe because it's such a large die, they had a whole bunch of failures.
I think it's because that chip is such a big monster that they had to have a lot of rejects, and they're looking for something to do with those rejects.
Because otherwise, what are you going to do?
You throw them away, right?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
It's basically like free money.
And what do you do?
You put it in your...
your crappy, low-selling little TV thing.
You've got them laying around.
They're probably telling them, don't throw those out.
Just keep them on the side.
We'll think of something for those.
And, you know, here you go, Apple TV.
that's if you believe Van's rumors, but it seemed like I looked at his investigative work and I buy it.
Yeah.
I mean, and I don't think he would post something that confidently without having, having good stuff to back it up.
So I, I believe it too.
And that's why I figure like the only two options, the only two explanations are using up old, old bin chips or upcoming retina.
I've had many using that particular die shrink of that particular chip, but I really don't want that to be true.
It's like, just, I hate that chip so much.
Yeah.
Yeah, it depends on how desperate I think they are for Retina Mini.
I always assume a Retina Mini would not arrive for like a year.
Yeah, I was thinking like next Thanksgiving season, you know, next fall.
But this could be for them.
Apple's doing some crazy things these days.
What the hell with the 128 gigabyte thing?
That was a weird... Like, why now?
You know, there's lots of theories.
Like, I like... My favorite one was...
You know, they just got off their earnings thing where people yelled to them about their margins.
You're like, fine, you want our stupid margins to go up here?
We'll just throw in an even higher margin iPad because the margins of that thing has just got to be monstrous.
But no one's going to buy it.
I know, but it's like, well, they'll say, look, we can do this.
We can make this thing.
If we make this thing, we're going to sell a non-zero number of them, and the margins are going to be awesome.
And they probably have some demand from some people who want it.
So, like, you know what?
Fine.
Slap in 28 gigs.
Sell it for a ridiculous price.
Like, what chance will that?
Because pretty soon they're going to have to do the line shift where they do, like, okay, 16s are gone.
It's 32, 64, 128.
All for the same price points.
You know?
Like, that's going to happen eventually.
This is their one chance to sell 128 gigs with a ridiculous markup.
And...
It's, you know, it doesn't bring the margins down, right?
The mini is dragging their iPad margins down.
It's like, how can we pull the iPad margins back up?
Well, you put a higher end model in there.
Well, it's like, it's off cycle.
It's weird.
What if, what if this actually is like, you know, the same way the iPad four came out only like seven months after the three, uh, what if they really are moving to a more, more like twice a year update schedule?
Cause the iPhone and iPad are their most important products.
And yeah,
And they often get dinged in comparisons and the press and reviews and everything.
Yeah, because they're old.
Because they're shipping an 11-month-old model against somebody's brand-new thing with a brand-new core and a brand-new radio and stuff like that.
And they always have to balance that.
They're always getting dings in comparison to whatever the hell the latest Android phone is.
But any individual Android phone...
the makers want to be on the market for some period of time because you just don't get the economies of scale unless you sell it for a couple of months at least.
Right.
So, like, you know, it's got to strike a balance between not – they're just one maker.
They're never going to be – except for, like, when they first introduce a phone, then they can be a little bit ahead of everybody else, but everyone else will catch up immediately.
They just have to be okay with three months, six months of just being a little bit behind because during that time they're, like, cranking on, you know.
So I totally buy –
trying to go to an eight month or a six month cycle or a twice a year cycle, especially if they stick with the like four, four S five, five S cadence where you just, uh, you know, upgrade the guts.
And also, especially since like we went, you know, edge three G LTE, uh, in, in a pretty quick sequence, relatively speaking, there's nothing surpassing LTE except for maybe, you know, 802 11 AC, uh,
that's going to have to be have to go in there and screw with the radio so they'll be able to iterate on the other parts with like right you know let's relax for a little bit we have like a world phone that does lte and all these other things one or two more revs of that and you know it's not a total upheaval where we go from 3g to lte and have to support all you know what i mean right like the retina screen is done they're probably not going to go with a more dense screen right that doesn't make sense
They could go bigger, maybe.
Honestly, I think they have to go bigger just to keep competitive in the market.
I don't think they have to make their only model bigger, but I think they have to have a bigger model.
Because even though we all make fun of these phablet things, they're really popular.
People love them.
I don't get it.
It doesn't need to be a phablet.
It just needs to be like...
Right now, it's like a skinny four inches.
I think they need to have a more reasonably, like a three by two proportioned four and a half.
It's like the iBook G4 that was 800 by 600.
Old people loved it.
They loved it.
Everything was so big.
You could actually see things.
You could use your big fat old person finger.
They just got to make a 4.5 inch iPhone, same res.
Just blow it up.
I bet the screen would probably be cheaper.
because like the density will be lower so even though the screen is bigger probably cost apple less money to make you could put an even bigger battery in there so that thing like lasts forever i mean you'll get all these awesome advantages well you know what actually so so on you know how the the lcd cutting theory kind of predicted the mini what if you do the math backwards what if you cut the the retina full-sized ipad screen um to retina iphone resolution how big is that
Say that again.
So the way we predicted the mini was by saying, all right, if you just take the 3GS screen and make it iPad resolution, do it backwards from the full-sized retina iPad, from that physical size, or from that DPI, rather, how big would an iPhone 5 resolution screen be at that DPI?
I don't think you need to do that.
I think they just need to decide how much bigger than 4-inch do you want it and just make the screen that big.
The thing about the screen cutting theory is even if you 100% buy that that's how the technology of manufacturing LCDs work, I think Apple changes their screen supplier every single device because they're always chasing the next guy with the next best deal who's going to offer them the better screen for less money.
Yeah.
LG, Sharp, Samsung.
But they also always have volume problems.
They always are shorted on screens.
They always need more screens.
That's why they go with dual.
They have multiple suppliers.
But if you standardize on a couple of sizes, and if that cutting theory is correct, then you can dramatically increase your yields and simplify everything by only having two DPIs that you buy screens at.
But only if you're sticking with someone – like, only if the guy who was making you your Retina iPad screens is also the same guy you're going to get to make you your iPhone Plus size screens.
And I think when the iPhone Plus goes out, they just rebid the entire thing.
And they, like, they give no particular weight or advantage to the guy who was making the screens of the same DPI for some device, especially as far distance as the iPad 3.
Like, they just rebid every time.
two best manufacturers, especially with the IGZO stuff.
I forget what the hell that stands for.
Incel and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
Whoever's offering that, if that guy who was doing the iPad 3 screens, whether it's Sharp or whatever, or Samsung, if they can't offer the IGZO thing, but that guy can't, I think they just rebid all the time and just set the suppliers against each other like dogs and just wait to see who comes out surviving.
That's the TSMC thing or TM, whatever.
Yeah, TSMC.
Taiwan Semiconductor.
There was a magazine article about them.
Yeah, I know.
I read.
They're obviously so incredibly hungry, but you do follow video card manufacturing in the ATI and Video Wars back in those days.
They both manufactured it at TSMC, and it was sometimes good and sometimes disastrous.
So I don't doubt that they're hungry.
I do worry that they're going to make a deal that Apple will accept because it's an awesome deal and then just not be able to deliver, and we're all going to be sad.
So I have two questions.
Firstly, if you take a iPhone Plus that is not Retina by standard iPhone standards, because it's late and I'm tired, but the DPI of the Retina iPad is considerably less than the DPI of the iPhone Retina.
Considerably.
Isn't it like, what is it, Mark?
One is 264 and the other one is like...
It's like 312 versus 264, something like that.
That's somewhat considerable.
So anyway, if they make an iPhone Plus with the 264 DPI, don't you think they'll get raked over the coals?
No, it'll still be fine.
It's supposed to be the old people phone.
Old people can't see those pixels.
My parents could not see the difference between an iPad 2 and 3.
When I showed them right in the store in front of them, I said...
These are the two things.
I made them get a three anyway, but they literally could not tell the difference.
I intentionally brought up some text and I held it an inch from their face and said, see how you can see the picture?
Like, oh yeah, I can kind of see it.
It's like, just get the three.
But anyway, like old people phone, I'm telling you, things are bigger on the screen.
They need it to be bigger.
They need to be bigger so they don't drop it.
So it's like just bigger and heavier and bigger pictures and bigger place for their fat fingers to touch.
They love it.
The other question was going to be, well, does Apple really give a shit either way?
You know, if they do get raked over the coals, do they really care?
No, I mean, as long as they sell them, they won't.
People will not complain.
Like, it will not be, you know, it's like, well, it's not real red.
It's fine.
Like, you know, look at all the other phones that are eight bazillion different resolutions.
It's basically like, can you see the pixels or can you not see them?
And 264 is definitely still on the...
not sea realm oh yeah and especially like if the phone itself is bigger you're not going to hold it as close to your face so yeah i mean that's what the old people don't like they don't like to have the thing you know right they want to hold it away like the old people holding the books away so they can read it because otherwise they don't have their reading glasses they need to get it farther away but you get a iphone 5 at arm's length and suddenly you can't read the tiny text honestly i i might consider getting one of the bigger ones if that was the option like if it was otherwise just as good just a little bit bigger i
I managed to go this whole Skype session without making a short joke, even when you talked about how they were trying to give you a mini, and now you're telling me you want to get the 5-inch iPhone.
No, Marco, you have to get the small one.
It's the correct size for you.
It's properly proportioned.
It's armament size.
It's size for your family.
Is your family all small, or is it just you?
Yeah, they're all small.
So that's what I'm saying.
You're Hobbit-derived people.
You've got to stick with it.
You're forbidden from getting the giant iPhone.
It's too big for you.
I just thought something extremely nerdy.
I just made in Photoshop a quick image mock-up, putting the right size rectangle, emailed to myself, putting it onto my iPad.
It is about 4.8 inches diagonally.
yeah i mean that may be a little big i would say 4.65 is as big as i can see them going for the ipad plus because i don't know you're holding it in front of you it's not that bad if you printed it out can you have you have you held like i didn't print that i emailed that i emailed the image to my ipad so i could look at it on the screen on one x honestly it isn't that much bigger like it's not have you held the lumia 920 like the big monster uh windows phones
Um, no.
Only that very first one that was not a monster.
I have held the big monster phones, and there's something to be said for, like... It's got, like, heft.
It feels like you could fend off a mugger with this thing.
Like, it's big.
It's a little bit heavier, but it just fills your hand more than the other thing does.
And I think some people just like that.
I wouldn't like it, because I can't imagine trying to stick that in a pocket.
I like the small...
thin form factor but i think some people like the bigger ones and it definitely it definitely gives a different feel so like if you can so you have it there on your screen cut out a piece of paper like you know make your make your own little paper craft iphone plus and then make a blog post with you holding it and there you go
But again, he can't be the one holding it because he's hobbit-sized.
Yeah, well, you know, your wife's not normal-sized either.
She's also small, right?
She's actually taller than me.
She's like an inch and a half taller than me.
And Adam is.
But give it to Adam because it'll be adorable.
I love the fan movie of him watching the fan in the store.
Oh, yeah.
So you use Vine, apparently.
I do not use Vine, but I click on the links when your wife posts a picture of a baby looking at a fan.
I'll look at that.