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Adding ray tracing to an iPhone screen as “overly ambitious” is one way of putting it. On that size display, is it even impressive to the user? Are devs going to design to that capability? I just don’t see the point when a lot of desktop users aren’t in possession of nice enough graphics cards to enable ray tracing.

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iPhone chips have a long lifecycle and a large user base.

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.

Seems kind of assbackwards to start baking in ray tracing to the smallest device. Is there some advantage to this?

One possibility is that it doesn’t make sense financially on any other platform for devs.

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.

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