If Geekbench was so misleading, why does the Intel version of Geekbench run so fast on two year old iPad chips? And “Hardware acceleration” isn’t misleading if it’s accelerating commonly done tasks.
Intel is years behind on process and GPUs. Apple is not just getting faster CPU and GPU performance in lower power envelopes, it’s getting those processors at less than half the price. Apple could have switched to AMD to get better faster processors cheaper, but nowhere near half as cheap, and nowhere near as power efficient.
And Apple has no reason to use this to increase margins, when they can use it to dramatically increase volume and market penetration, which will increase margins on its own. Fir example, the iPhone SE is faster than any Android phone ever made, yet Apple still priced it at $399. They wouldn’t risk cannabalizing their higher end phones unless SE margins were comparable to higher end phones. Which again shows you how cheap their Ax CPUs are.
And iPhones and iPads have all day batteries a fraction of the size of laptop batteries, and without the space, mass, or fans of laptops. The A14 will be able to run in MacBooks at a higher power level while still remaining cool, providing for more cores and faster processor speeds.
It will still be using significantly less power than the latest generation Intel laptop CPUs. Also because the SOC will integrate a performance GPU, T2 functionality, Neural Engine, etc all in one package.
> And “Hardware acceleration” isn’t misleading if it’s accelerating commonly done tasks.
Hardware acceleration is misleading because it can give you huge speedups in a single measurement which significantly affect the overall score when it's averaged in, and because it's easy for the competitor to hardware accelerate the same thing if it really matters without losing any of their advantage anywhere else.
> Apple could have switched to AMD to get better faster processors cheaper, but nowhere near half as cheap, and nowhere near as power efficient.
With the amount they have to spend on R&D in order to do this, it's hard to argue "cheap" and the AMD processors have TDPs down to 10W, so it's also hard to argue efficiency.
> And Apple has no reason to use this to increase margins, when they can use it to dramatically increase volume and market penetration, which will increase margins on its own.
Lowering prices never increases margins. It may increase volumes, which reduces amortized costs, but there is a grisly trade off there. If you're selling a phone for $400 which has a $200 unit cost, lowering the price to $300 is probably not going to double your sales but it is going to half your margins.
> Fir example, the iPhone SE is faster than any Android phone ever made, yet Apple still priced it at $399.
Meanwhile this is the cheapest iPhone and it still costs significantly more than the average Android phone, which is around $250.
> And iPhones and iPads have all day batteries a fraction of the size of laptop batteries, and without the space, mass, or fans of laptops.
Predominantly because they have smaller screens, and screens consume more battery than a mostly-idle CPU.
> The A14 will be able to run in MacBooks at a higher power level while still remaining cool, providing for more cores and faster processor speeds.
You still seem to be confused by this. "A higher power level" and "remaining cool" are the opposite of one another. If they use the power budget to have as many cores as e.g. a Ryzen 7 4700U then it will probably use about as much power on the same process node. They're not magic, they're just making different design trade offs for phones than AMD and Intel make for laptops.
Yeah you’re completely missing the mark on the iPhone SE. You physically cannot but an Android device with a faster CPU at ANY PRICE. 1500$, hell 15,000$ cannot get you a faster Android device than the iPhone SE. It’s a great metric for the future of Apple Silicon on desktops and laptops.
But the point isn't whether it's faster or not, it's that they have no reason to give the margins to you instead of keeping them. OP was making out like selling for $399 was some kind of a low price. There are sub-$50 Android devices. Their lowest priced iPhone costs significantly more than the average-priced Android device. Apple has demonstrated no interest in lowering their margins to chase volume.
Also, you can install Android on x64 tablets with basically equivalent single-thread performance and significantly better multi-thread performance. Hardly anybody does this because hardly anybody cares that much about performance on that class of device as long as it meets a particular threshold that any non-garbage modern CPU (including many Qualcomm chips) already does.
399$ is a low price. It is not the lowest it could be, sure, and Apple will indeed never lower their margins to chase volume.
But like they did with the SE, they will lower their parts costs to chase volume. Like they did here, by keeping the same iPhone production lines that built the iPhone 8 going (I'd presume it would be the same production lines that built their phones all the way back to the iPhone 6).
$399 is not a low price. $50 is a low price. $250 is a medium price. $399 is a medium-high price, but that's as low as Apple goes because they don't want to cannibalize sales of their very high price models.
> But like they did with the SE, they will lower their parts costs to chase volume.
This has very little to do with their parts cost. Their problem is that smartphones are increasingly becoming a low margin commodity because the existing hardware is "good enough" and many people would rather save hundreds of dollars than have a phone which is marginally faster in a way they can barely notice. So the price of Android phones goes down over time and on some level they have to compete with that.
But that's true independent of their costs. If Android phone prices get lower and Apple's production costs stay the same, they have to lower prices at the expense of margins or they'll start losing volume to Android. If Android phone prices stay the same and Apple's costs go down, nothing is making them sell for a lower price, so they just get to enjoy higher margins.
In theory there is an optimal sale price which maximizes profits and changing unit costs can affect what it is, but it isn't even guaranteed to be lower when margins are higher. Apple's brand is as a luxury product. If they lowered prices too much at the low end for any reason, that impairs exclusivity and their ability to extract very high margins at the high end.
You don’t get to give an opinion on what’s the numerical value of a low price without any facts to back you up and then deny me doing the same. That’s preposterous.
Intel is years behind on process and GPUs. Apple is not just getting faster CPU and GPU performance in lower power envelopes, it’s getting those processors at less than half the price. Apple could have switched to AMD to get better faster processors cheaper, but nowhere near half as cheap, and nowhere near as power efficient.
And Apple has no reason to use this to increase margins, when they can use it to dramatically increase volume and market penetration, which will increase margins on its own. Fir example, the iPhone SE is faster than any Android phone ever made, yet Apple still priced it at $399. They wouldn’t risk cannabalizing their higher end phones unless SE margins were comparable to higher end phones. Which again shows you how cheap their Ax CPUs are.
And iPhones and iPads have all day batteries a fraction of the size of laptop batteries, and without the space, mass, or fans of laptops. The A14 will be able to run in MacBooks at a higher power level while still remaining cool, providing for more cores and faster processor speeds.
It will still be using significantly less power than the latest generation Intel laptop CPUs. Also because the SOC will integrate a performance GPU, T2 functionality, Neural Engine, etc all in one package.