iPhone 14 Pro faced 'unprecedented' setback leading to removal of new GPU
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Sometimes these article titles are ridiculous and I'm quite tired of this hyperbole, especially in tech. What about "iPhone engineers tried a powerful GPU but had to use a less powerful one".
> And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever.
Having a roadmap with a more powerful GPU with senior management being told its deliverable right up until very close to the end is a pretty major set-back. Yes Apple is so dominant and well respected in their market it's unlikely to have significant impact, but may produce fewer iPhone 14 Pro sales. Also Apple have got to that position specifically because they've been doing a great job executing to ambitious road-maps without things like this. So short-term, looking at this product, yes, maybe not that big a deal, long-term they need to ask themselves how they're ensuring this doesn't happen again. Given they're restructuring the team and getting rid of managers sounds like Apple leadership take this pretty seriously.
Doing what? Sitting on the counter? I want a phone that can stream data all day (music and maps) while occasionally taking photos and sending messages.
Also pick up an Apple Pencil and download procreate, if only for the “well that’s pretty cool” experience.
The iPhone 14 pro is a pretty sad upgrade too with regression in battery life from the 13. I've owned almost every iphone since 4 and the 14 is the one i skipped because it doesn't even have a SIM slot! Lets see if they can bring it around in 15.
To be fair to Apple I don't think any company is too concerned with features aimed at people who don't use the product.
Or are you saying you have to contact them to transfer eSIMs to new phones? You don’t have to do that anymore.
"shareholder value" for the carrier.
For a GPU on an oversized phone, you could have been looking at additional video or picture editing operations that did not get released.
You mean had a word beating chip team. I heard that the M1 team pretty much all left.
The "unprecedented" is because they found this after the 13 launch, and it's not an integration issue – it's a core issue. It's not possible to go back to architectural drawing boards in the current product iteration. So they had to do a hail mary and revert back to the previous launch's GPU.
That does count as a major goof up (if it happened ofc). We have many popular YouTube reviewers saying there is no reason to buy the 14 series, the 13 series are equally as good _(except the Pro Max's dynamic island)_. Apple just happens to be in a comfortable position. These kind of things could kill smaller hardware product companies.
That’s the unprecedented part - the 14 only showed small gains whereas previous generations all showed big leaps.
In a case like that, unprecedented fits. It’s not hyperbole.
The incident is reportedly unprecedented in Apple's chip design history
Early specs of engineering project don’t match final specs, oh the humanity!, more at 11.
News content is frequently very stupid.
That doesn’t seem “unprecedented” to me.
...except if writing two consecutive identical posts, the second one being then not unprecedented, but making that pair unprecedented.
Ok, I'll stop now:)
When was "It Just Works" abandoned as a guiding principle?
You think nobody should care, but you cared enough to comment so I was just curious. If I'm not interested in bananas I don't visit threads about them. HN seems mostly rational, so I'm legit interested what has driven you to click and comment.
so then, what was the precedent in an earlier generation of iPhones where a new set of chips was designed and developed which could be marketed as a leap in performance, but shortly before committing to manufacture they were forced to abandon the plan and roll back to the chips of a previous iPhone generation, leaving marketing with no performance boost to trumpet, especially in the context where the previous generation was also considered a disappointingly marginal improvement over its predecessor?
There's something strange going on.
I got the new 14 Pro, but only because I wanted the mag charger feature. Before that, the 11 Pro was still a solid phone and did everything I wanted and more. Won't be upgrading at least 3 years
A new iPhone every 5 years for example, would be dumb. Ignore the hype and marketing and just pick the one you'd like if and when you upgrade.
A tangent:
Personally, I wish more things had yearly upgrades and the backwards/forward compatibility Apple devices generally have. It's a different model, but it would be nice if game consoles had improved iterations yearly. The once a half decade model creates too much of a boom/bust cycle imho. If the Switch had a new, better version every year that was both forward and backward compatible within a "software generation" a lot of games like Pokemon wouldn't look and perform absolutely terribly.
Take pre-orders a few weeks in advance, then everyone can have it day 1. No scalpers reselling them on eBay for 10 times the cost. No stampede at Apple stores because they already have a few weeks of inventory.
The accelerated product cycle is why you have awful launches like consoles. The product is barely finished and rushed into production in time for Christmas. There's not time to build the actual units. Slow down a bit and you can solve that problem.
Inventory in a warehouse does not have the kind of cost you think it does. Most of the "cost" people talk about are hypothetical profits that a different product occupying that space might generate in the same time. The real costs are insurance and warehouse leases. Per unit, it's almost nothing.
A company like Apple could easily stockpile months worth of inventory and never even notice the real physical cost of storing it.
Opportunity costs, or any other "virtual" cost, are still meaningful figures.
They sorta do a tick-tock cycle now, generally, its form factors on the 'tick', and significant hardware refresh on the 'tock'
I couldn’t say the same about an Android phone of similar vintage (not counting lineageOS - there I can even still get the latest Android on my Oneplus One, but it’s more rough around the edges compared to the original OS)
Well, not Macs. They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there. In the past I guess they could blame Intel somehow, but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.
It was fairly easy. Intel's released products often would not meet original spec, or once it was throttled to fit into spec it didn't have significant performance gains over the prior generation. Often they would go generations without the performance warranting the increased part cost.
> They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there
They would like an annual incremental upgrade cycle and a five year design cycle.
Even without Intel, they still have supply chain constraints. For instance, even with their own silicon, they are relying on TSMC to be able to meet process and production volume targets.
Releasing chips on a new process will likely lead to really odd effects due to yield issues - for instance, having a new CPU show up first in products with lower sales volume. That includes tiering, either with things like a regular vs "pro" phone, or retaining the older model of computer while charging more for the newer version.
Right now they appear to be on an 18 month cycle for Apple silicon, which is driving their new hardware (either with a new machine serving as the launch platform of some new SoC, or a design revamp of a machine based on existing SoC).
Humorously, the only product which has had an incremental update so far is the MacBook Pro 13".
I suspect they'll eventually have a two or three year "architecture" tick for their Mac and iPad SoCs. Depending on those architectures and the upstream changes at TSMC, there might be a lot of different SoCs released against that tick.
> but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.
I'd be really shocked if they don't release a M2 iMac, most likely in March.
People (usually from the Android camp) complain that Apple never innovates on brings anything new, which is kinda true if you only take the delta between the two latest devices.
But they fail to take into account the person going from a phone that gets dropped by the latest iOS release (5+ years old) to the latest and greatest. The leap in features is staggering.
Everything about the MacBook is better than its predecessor but I was particularly blown away by the iPad Air and the handwriting recognition. I put my 1st gen Apple Pencil in the drawer not long after buying the original iPad Pro and eventually sold it. Now I use my 2nd gen pencil every day and I’m even thinking of buying an iPad mini as a really portable digital notebook.
I get the same pleasure again next year when I finally get to upgrade my iPhone 8 Plus. Battery life on my 8 is terrible now and it will get dropped from OS upgrades next year. I’m probably going to upgrade to a Pro Max because I’ve heard the current generation get 48 hours+ battery. But most exciting of all next year: USB-C!
I much preferred the old form factor and would readily give up the faster processor, etc, for it.
Apparently, and this explains my experience, after an OS update the phone will use a lot of battery while it does post processing of any photos you have and other random stuff.
After a full night’s charge, the next morning my iPhone SE battery plummeted so fast that the numbers were ticking down every few seconds.
After some Googling I read about this post-update battery usage issue. I deleted all the photos from my phone and my battery is now fine.
I wonder how many people have bought new phones because of thinking their phone battery is on the way out when really it is just post update activity.
Photo processing should only happen when plugged in.
Funnily enough, after transferring everything to the new phone, the first thing I did was go through all my photo's and start deleting a lot of photos. I didn't realize it, but any time a photo is texted to you it saves it (makes sense, I just never thought about it), so I ended up deleting random photos going back years.
The charge port had gotten so finicky I couldn't get it to charge half the time and it was really a matter of economics. Spend $200-300 (or more) asking someone to fix it or spend a bit more and get a new one, so I decided to spend a bit more and get guaranteed good hardware.
I just really lament the form factor change.
Nah, that never got to production. The internet collectively lost their shit and the project was cancelled.
They just teach the image ML model to detect new kinds of stuff and it takes a while for it to go through your library.
While the iPhone is always a good time to buy because next years one won’t obsolete this years.
They don't have planning meetings once iOS 16 or iPhone 14 ships to decide what to work on next year - like most companies, the products are divided into components, for is divided into features, where those features have multi-year pipelines and land when they are ready (although they often land incrementally).
Slower releases likely mean that there'd be more motivation to aggressively push changes out, e.g. your team's changes either ships in 3 months or have to wait two extra years. That means that a slower release cycle can actually decrease quality, and is IMHO one of the reasons that many longtime MacOS users have decided they'll never install an OS until the dot-two release.
Even if that isn't the case, slower release cycles mean that developers are less nimble in correcting the problems that inevitably exist.
A non-Apple example - Java before 1.9 is a great case study of how a poor release process cost insane amounts of efficiency, and cause a language to be too slow to take advantage of market opportunities. Their new process is faster and more predictable, and has resulted in significant gains for the language and VM.
> I got the new 14 Pro, but only because I wanted the mag charger feature. Before that, the 11 Pro was still a solid phone and did everything I wanted and more. Won't be upgrading at least 3 years
Sure, most people don't upgrade their hardware every year. That doesn't mean creating and selling new hardware is a bad idea.
The iPhone 14 (non pro) uses much of the iPhone 13’s internals, while the Pro gets upgraded. I think this is basically how the watch already is. I expect this is the future, the upgraded won’t really matter and won’t really exist beyond slight aesthetic tweaks. It’s like cars, no matter which year you get, they all drive just fine and are mostly the same internally. I’ve long said that cars are the natural comparison to these sort of electronics. Cars and phones are probably the two most expensive and utilitarian things people regularly buy. They come out with new ones every year, but don’t do major refreshes every year so you don’t really have a reason to tine when to buy one. I think it also indicates that we’ll see a price stagnating base-model phone and an ever increasing top-tier model as the companies explore how much people are willing to spend (a Corolla vs a Mercedes).
The nice thing about the steady new versions is that you can always go to the store and buy the biggest-number iPhone version and not worry about lifespan or if it’s good (contrast with a game console: if you buy the PS4 6mo before the PS5 comes out, you made a mistake).
I don't think so.
A Mercedes will get you laid, the latest iphone won't and likely never will.
cell phones stopped being status symbols long before smart phones were created by apple and I don't see them going back to that.
Only because it’s a sign you have money, not because cars are cool.
> the latest iphone won't and likely never will.
When apple has a $5k iPhone it may once again become a status symbol.
Almost 50% of Americans have an iPhone of some version. It’s obviously not a status symbol of everyone has one. iPhones, like cars, are mostly undifferentiated.
Apple has a lot of room to build a status symbol, but admittedly they haven’t been too successful when trying with the Apple Watch, so I will admit the odds are low they’ll succeed, but I believe the market exists in the long run.
Smartphones are present in ~85% of US households, and about 45% of US smartphone users have an iPhone; that’s significantly less than 50% of Americans with an iPhone.
The other issue is copying it is too easy, so even if Apple tried the look of it would very quickly get copied.
Not having one might harm your chances, though.
maybe this is what we should expect, though, as the tech matures -- like cars: there's a new model every year, but only significant upgrades every half decade or so.
but mostly 'ciz work paid for it & and i could give my old phone to my brother-in-law (who had recently lost his in a hilarious dating mishap -- a hike, a river, old shorts w/ holes in the pockets...).
to be fair, the camera is better -- but im such a pitiful photographer it's wasted on me.
also, the pill sucks compared to the notch. (notch disappears mentally, pill doesn't.)
As long as people are willing to upgrade for minor features, why wouldn't they release a new phone each year?
I say this as a person who would (will) absolutely upgrade just for USB-C hopefully next year.
I will not play the nickel and diming game on DRAM, 6GB on a flagship phone ain't enough for a five year phone.
I've praised Apple for allowing me to do this by continuing to put out security updates for older phones, but the most recent set of pretty important security updates (15.7.2) have artificially been restricted to only devices that don't support 16. This is incredibly frustrating because all the work has been put into making my older device secure without having to update to the latest OS, Apple won't let me have the update and I have to go to 16 instead.
When a company doesn't have a yearly big flagship product launch, people assume something is very very wrong.
Let's pretend Samsung skips releasing a new Galaxy this year. Mums the word, no news at all, they just don't announce anything.
Well crap, to the average person who wants a new phone, that is scary, they want a phone that is going to be supported, not a phone from a company that might go out of business tomorrow! Or at least stop making phones.
And who wants to buy a 1 year old phone? Heck phones have a huge drop off in purchase within months after release, 6 months on the market and unless you need a phone, mine as well wait another 6 months and either get the model you're looking at on serious discount, or get something that'll last longer.
And then the tech press will go crazy with speculation! "OMFG END OF THE WORLD FOR THAT COMPANY!!!"
Ok, another fun fact, profitability of consumer electronics, at least in the US, generally relies upon holiday sales. iPhones pop out in September, which is about optimal timing for reviews to hit en-masse, to build mindshare, and have partners do their initial huge full price sales before holiday promos kick in.
Start releasing every 18 months instead and you fall off that train, your choices are pretty much 12m or 24m cycles to hit that holiday release.
but if none of that interests you then yes, i guess it could be considered a terrible cycle.
Most people aren’t updating every year.
Imagine if they only updated every second year. You would pay full price for a phone that came out 23 months ago?? Don’t be daft.
It's not exactly surprising when Nvidia parts handily beat the M1/M2, but when both Qualcomm and Mediatek have better GPU performance _and_ efficiency [0] something is up, especially given just how far ahead Apple has been in mobile CPU
[0] https://twitter.com/Golden_Reviewer/status/16056046174164295...
They have only been designing the GPU since A11.
GPUs are highly parallelized and specialized systems. The workloads are already being optimized for the GPU, rather than having a CPU which is being optimized to deal with more arbitrary workloads (with things like branch prediction, superscalar architecture, etc).
So you could say, without creating new instructions to represent the workflow better, there is a fixed amount of digital logic needed to perform the given work, and that translates to a fixed amount of power draw needed on a particular fabrication process.
So Apple could throw more transistors at the problem (with a memory bus that can support the extra need), but the same amount of work still would take the same amount of power and generate the same amount of heat. It is usually far easier and more efficient to create dedicated logic for particular common problems, such as certain ML operations or toward hardware video encoding/decoding.
> It's not exactly surprising when Nvidia parts handily beat the M1/M2, but when both Qualcomm and Mediatek have better GPU performance _and_ efficiency [0]
Benchmarks are highly subjective, so I'd wait for more reviews (preferably by people with more established reputations, and perhaps a website). Reviewers who might try to determine _why_ one platform is doing better than another.
GPU benchmarks are even more so, because again the workloads are targeted toward the GPU, while the GPU is also optimized for handling particular workloads. This means that benchmarks can be apple-to-oranges comparisons - even before you find out that a given benchmark was optimized differently for different platforms.
There is also of course the reality that some vendors will optimize their code for the benchmarks specifically, going as far as to overclock the chip or to skip requested instructions when a particular benchmark is detected.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-8-Gen-2-be...
Nvidia primarily makes add on GPU's, if I understand their business correctly. Apple integrated a GPU onto its m2 (or whichever chip is used in their studio) that performs comparably to the 3060, and even beat the the 3090 in some benchmarks/workloads. I think that's pretty impressive.
https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/razer-blade-15-2022...
Like I absolutely love my M2 air, it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned but it is definitely not a competitive gaming machine.
The idea of trying to fit a 3090 in a laptop is amusing.
> Nvidia primarily makes add on GPU's, if I understand their business correctly. Apple integrated a GPU onto its m2 (or whichever chip is used in their studio) that performs comparably to the 3060, and even beat the the 3090 in some benchmarks/workloads. I think that's pretty impressive.
The form-factor of the 3090 isn't relevant.
The situation on the desktop/laptop is muddied by CUDA and other Nvidia-exclusive tech - while the M1/M2s indeed trade blows with laptop parts like the 3060 in some specific tasks, once CUDA comes into play Nvidia walks it (unfortunately IMO, even AMD can't compete there and its holding the industry back)
Did it actually do that or was it in the "performance per watt" comparison?
This isn't an ARM vs AMD64 competition where Apple has a 40 year instruction set advantage it can exploit. The 3090 is nearly state of the art.
gpus, on the otherhand, are already risc. so where is apple going to improve? not by integrating everything: lots of companies have done this for years and years. if you want to do more with the same transistors, you'll need an even more clever execution model...
Anyway, these issues could be user issues or bad luck (so please don’t comment on this), but I have one nitpick which isn’t:
USB 2.0 speeds for pro-res footage are a joke. Why even praise your camera and the pro resolution format being introduced on iphone, when I can’t get it off my PC via cable vat decent speeds? I only used it once to make for a side project, and had ~30min of footage. Took about 1.5h to copy.
Likewise, USB-C ports on a spec-compliant device do not indicate greater than USB 2.0 speeds (e.g. high speed), nor do cables with USB-C ports on both ends indicate greater than high speed.
In fact, there are plenty of devices with USB-C ports which do not support data channels at all (but these tend to have compatibility issues due to not being able to negotiate power delivery)
Don't get me wrong, USB-C is ideal for charging. However, it _always_ became extremely fickle with Android Auto. The connector would develop wiggle overtime, resulting in an unstable connection. You'd have to work voodoo to get it positions correctly - which would often result in even more strain and deterioration. My most recent phone became completely unusable with Android Auto after about 6 months.
3.2/3.1 aren't speeds, they are USB spec numbers. Those specs don't mandate the speeds you think they do.
It’s easier to let the phone upload them to iCloud and then download from there, but that shouldn’t be necessary (and requires a good internet connection).
I don’t think it’s a problem for normal people’s workflows, more if you’re trying to use them for professional video/camera things.
USB 3 will be a couple times faster than WiFi 6, used between modern apple devices, so I see how that would be beneficial, for people editing.
With Gigabit internet iCloud can be faster than USB 2.0
And they're a lot more awkward then using a cable.
They also might not even have a speed advantage over USB 2.0 if the router is in a different room.
I also wonder how this will work for the Metal API. Metal currently does have support for accelerating ray tracing via acceleration structures and a few other things that require GPU hardware features not present on older GPUs that are not specific to ray tracing only. It doesn’t not have support for ray tracing specific hardware acceleration like in NVIDIA’s RTX and AMD’s RDNA2 chips. This means you can buy a 6000 series AMD GPU, stick it in an Intel Mac Pro, and not actually be able to use the RT acceleration hardware!
Just that they didn't implement the raytracing support in the AMD driver side...
Here is a comment from 2016 from a person already tired of explaining this to people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11112078
Mantle morphed into Vulcan even later than that.
The mantle API was a foundation but what came out was quite different.
Much of the Mantle team also went on to work on DX12 and Metal as well, so they have as much lineage to Mantle as Vulkan does
The comment you link to also ignores all the context of the timing, including the significant amount of time between when Metal was released and mantle was donated to khronos, and how much khronos was pushing AZDO OpenGL at the time. The post you linked is quite biased and uninformed.
The iPhone is one of the most popular devices in the world, and they have a 5+ year lifespan between yearly upgrades to people who buy secondhand years later. So an iPhone 14 chip will find use through 2027 or later.
The iPhone chips periodically also end up in lower end iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods, etc.
Beyond that, the engineering efforts impact all apple silicon, including Mac, so the efforts can apply to more devices.
macOS games are dead and iPad games are better but still adding a complex feature for a small group of iPad users might not make financial sense.
That said, unprecedented? Pretty much every chip company I know of has made a chip that didn't meet thermals. The Pentium 5 was the poster child for a while of a reaching too far.
But if an entire h/w project is punted to "the next release" there's more than just one feature that contributed. So maybe the halo feature, raytracing, plus the other new Metal 3 features all contributed?
Leakage power is not hard to quantify, but dynamic power is harder to evaluate, because it's workload-dependent. It's not always completely straightforward to get an answer.
I wonder if this was a bigger setback for the Mac Pro than anything else.
Something similarly groundbreaking would requite a similarly radical redesign. Maybe there will be one another couple decades from now, but I can't even begin to imagine what it would be. Maybe something related to ML if anything.
Sure but..already the second gen didn't show gains _that_ impressive over the first one.
If M1 successors will start showing Intel 2010s gains gen over gen, it's not gonna do great.
I don’t think performance is the only metric. For all we know, there could have been some considerable cost reduction.
It seems natural that M series chips won’t forever be uniquely positioned ahead of the pack. I don’t think that anyone besides Apple actually wants that in the first place though. I have every expectation that they’ll keep up with the pack, or simply move back to third party chips, even if that means changing architectures, which Apple is not scared of doing.
Just... staggered. What an upgrade.
Yes, that was my experience with well-established players like AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm.
Then again, there just aren't that many people in the world with experience designing GPUs or writing systems software for them. What you would often see is a manager and their whole team switching to a competitor. People prefer working with other people they already know and trust.
In addition, GPUs are massively complex and it simply takes a good amount of time to understand a new architecture well enough to make substantial contributions. I spent five years at NVidia and felt that I had only scratched the surface.
When you're as vertically integrated and rich as Apple it makes sense.
Being rich isn’t really related, it’s that they can still profit while doing this (some people say “sheep” while others say “good products with great integration”), where nobody else can, which makes them rich. ;)
It isn't just that Apple can afford a particular part. Apple funds some of the R&D for that part, the building of the factory (sometimes, multiple factories) that create that part, and will commit to buying 100% of its capacity for years.
They aren't just outbidding others for capacity. They are making long-term strategic partnerships to _build_ that capacity.
> Putting memory on package runs counter to repairability, modularity, etc.
Everything is a trade-off. For traditional OEM integration for desktops and laptops, memory on package would be too limiting. Apple is one of the few companies that can pull it off.
Sure, but do we expect AMD/Intel to do this for their processors anytime soon?
Apple can decide that their custom processor only needs two memory configurations to meet their product need.
Intel and AMD can't easily make that decision for all the OEMs in the world, and the architectural ramifications pretty much demand one to decide one way or another for a given chip generation.
It's definitely possible with stacked chips we see a similar mind of process-and-packaging driven boost.
I'd expect more revolutionary changes to not come from digital logic improvements, but rather:
1. Adding specialized silicon for specific tasks
2. manufacturing changes, such as moving to chiplets, allowing for a wider variety of processors.
"...as well as the integrated circuits that were developed in Israel, and the jewel in the crown: the Israeli team played a central role in developing the premium version of the company's flagship M1 processor, including the M1Pro and M1Max chips designed to support premium Mac computers such as MacBook Pro and MacBook Studio. These chips were built here in Israel while working with other teams worldwide, including at the headquarters in Cupertino. The integration with the verification applications and processes was also carried out here."
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-apple-to-open-jerusalem-d...
I really want them to compete with Nvidia release a brand-new, efficient but affordable GPU for mac. So that I can do ML training on mac and not rely on Nvidia and Windows. It would also help people who want to use mac for gaming,
> The error resulted in Apple restructuring its graphics processor team and moving some managers away from the project.
Not suggesting this is or isn’t it, but the manager thing cuts both ways. I’ve had managers who push overly ambitious goals, and managers who defer to the overly ambitious engineers because they seem confident enough and the manager has failed to understand the engineer’s capabilities.
I’ve experienced many engineers who are waaaaay too ambitious and really do not comfortably understand the true development cost to everything. They deliver the first 80% on time and the second 80% puts the project six months behind.
Usually Apple does not ship a new hardware feature without some software feature that showcases it.
At one point Apple seemed all-in on using dot-matrix projections to scan 3D spaces. I wonder if this GPU would have enhanced that capability somehow. Or perhaps it was simply supposed to be the icebreaker for a future M3 chip of some kind.
AR goggles would definitely need to be light weight, so they would probably rely on an iPhone to do all the processing.
I don't game on my phone, so am I missing something wild here where seeing raytraced reflections on a six inch screen would be the ultimate game changer and have everyone rush out to upgrade their phones?
This demo video is pretty convincing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2MEwVZzDaA - looks like it was part of a PhD thesis https://www.peterkan.com/download/kan_phd_thesis.pdf
The M1/M2 are "just" a bunch of the same CPU cores found in A14 and A15.
They do the same with the GPU blocks — the GPUs in M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra (and presumably M2/3/4 etc. iterations of those chips) also have the same GPU cores, "just" more of them (and probably clocked differently, not sure on that).
So missing the RT hardware for iPhone 14 Pro is probably not a huge deal. Missing it for A16 tape-out, which if the pattern holds, means it'll also be missing in M3-generation of chips, is a much bigger one.
So the bottom line is that not a lot of developers can afford to tackle hardware raytracing as a feature at that point. It's too expensive to get right for them.
My understanding is that Metal (and Vulcan) are really meant to be about _not_ doing this, and instead exposing something much closer to the underlying hardware. So it would instead be, Nvidia developer relations working with a game studio to optimize the studio's engine code for Nvidia cards.
This is highly debatable. LTT did a video of a blind test where people were shown games with RTX on and off and we're asked which looked better and most couldn't tell the RTX one was better looking.
Plus, RTX on a 24"+ screen and on a 6" screen are completely different things. If people can't tell RTX on a large PC monitor, what are the changes they'd actually see any difference on a tiny phone screen.
This sounds like an IQ test to me.
You have a team that kept a good track record for making breakthroughs, breakthroughs that made your trillion $ market cap possible. they tried to make another one but not successful this time. So you remove those key figures from the project after dozens have already walked away in the last few years?
You need to have a <100 IQ to cook a paywalled story like the above.