Apple dives into display-making to cut reliance on Samsung

Not Android because it has a direct competition that is arguably doing much better ( More user switching to Apple than Android ) and is forced to improve in other to compete.

They both had to, f was dominant.

The M1 MacBook Pro is the best laptop I’ve ever used.

M1 is a big improvement over that even without the upgrade flexibility early intel years offered.

M1 can run windows in parallels and it works well enough for most cases

When you have all you need theoretically in house but your moves are rushed and come only as a reaction to the competition you are the very example I was trying to make, of milking your cash cow and waiting too long. Google had to change the strategy [0], reorganize [1], and struggle to launch your product in an emergency as a response to competition. This is the very definition of not having a well thought out long term strategy, isn't it?

Google owned Brain and DeepMind as rival divisions since before OpenAI existed. They didn't cooperate, didn't launch any revolutionary product, and didn't compete in any way with Google's main offering. They were left to their own devices like side projects until the competition dashed in front and hit Google's most sensitive area and dictated their strategy.

I don't know if Bard is a good or bad product. But we may have different definitions of a coherent investment in a long term strategy to make a better product. None of the above shouts "coherent", "long term strategy", or even necessarily "better product".

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/feari...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/googles-ai-panic-for...

This is exactly the opposite of what was meant

bart is only being made public because openai did a thing

I don't think we are in disagreement. But the fact is very few companies do this regardless. When it comes to the product that's their bread and butter they tend to put it on a pedestal never to be touched until it falls into irrelevance.

Apple didn't launch an improved iPod and retire the old. They didn't try to sell a phone and a music player by artificially differentiating them, or by sabotaging one of them. They didn't try to make $250 off the iPod and another $250 from a phone that "shouldn't compete too well". They launched 2 product lines made by different parts of the company, knowing that the iPhone may undermine the iPod userbase and then still fail, possibly souring those customers.

They wouldn't necessarily do this today. iDevices now are clearly (and artificially) differentiated from the Macs: different OS, no options to use them in a way they truly compete despite having such similar hardware theoretical capabilities.

Again to give the Google example, when they tried to have competing lines (Google/Nest) they managed to fail at both and lose the customers completely.

The iPod Classic got relatively little updates toward the end of the iPod line because while it had a dedicated fan base due to its ability to store truly massive music libraries, it just wasn't selling much.

This was also the first time we really saw the scale Tim Cook could push for - competitors had difficulty going up against Apple because they hadn't just bought out all the available flash in the channel - they had funded building new factories for building denser/cheaper flash, in return for their entire initial production.

[0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/325034/apples-music-streaming-nego...

[1]: https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/spotify-at-days-close-what...

Google News took over and they gave up. Gmail got huge and they stopped doing much other than adding ads. Maps slowed down, other than adding ads. Google search keeps getting worse, they can’t seem to fix the SEO/spam problem. But they can add more ads.

Left to their own devices, Google seems happy to collect rent.

Apple, historically, makes their money by selling new hardware, and that requires improving things enough people want to buy it.

But if you prefer a system that just gets out of your way so you don’t need to think about it, and just use it as a tool to do something else then Apple is nearly unbeatable.

And I say this as a recent Apple convert. I reluctantly started using their tech a few years ago when a Macbook was the laptop given to me at a new job. But since embracing the idea of “meh I’ll just use the defaults and let the system get out of my way”, I feel like I get to spend more time on things where I add value.

I switched to an iPhone for the first time in 2020 with the SE, and it is still running fine today with no problems, on the latest software update. I don’t care about the screen-to-body ratio, I just want it to work well as a tool

There was a reason for OLED. The first Android phones with OLED looked hideous. The saturation was all wrong and they used pentile subpixel arrangements. Further more I remember seeing pictures of burn-in on some (cheaper/off brand?) OLED phones.

Apple has their priorities. And display quality is one of them. Look at professional reviews of their monitors and other displays like the iPhones and iPads. Whatever people think of the cost/features they tend to be be impressed with the display accuracy out of the box.

They waited until they could get enough OLED screens to handle their demand. But they also wanted certain levels of color accuracy, I assume non-pentile, and something that could handle avoiding burn in for the expected lifetime of the phone.

That must have taken time.

Screen to body: I suspect they knew they were getting close on the iPhone X design and wanted it to really stand out, so they stuck with the forehead/chin longer than others. Total guess though.

There's a lot of people upset they switched to larger screens! I suspect that Steve Jobs really wanted the phone to continue to fit in his jeans watch pocket.

Android phones generally had to be larger for engineering reasons. But larger phones sell well.

> They completely slept on OLED and stuck to LCD until the iPhone X, when all mid to high range Android phones had already used OLED for years.

The iPhone has always had great screens. A lot of the early OLED screens were simply not good enough, cheap enough, and/or available at high enough production.

The iPhone X was more expensive and meant to be a smaller run compared to the main consumer line. It needed a screen with a concave cutout. It makes a lot of sense that this was their first OLED iPhone screen.

IIRC correctly, the iPhone X had much higher demand than Apple anticipated, and there were shortages due to the OLED screen.

Generally, android phones compare favorably because people will pick and choose the winning premium features and the lowest price from a set of Android phones, to compare against the single flagship iPhone. It's rigged.

Eventually people will be talking about how late Apple was to get into folding phones, when nearly all Android phones sold are still non-folding phones today, years after the first folder launched - and folders typically sell at over $1k premium.

> They slept on the screen-to-body ratio. They were years behind their Android competition when they finally changed their course with the iPhone X.

Is replacing hardware buttons with an always-displayed button bar really changing the screen-to-body ratio?

And that’s a huge part of the problem. Any move like that would tarnish iOS in everyone’s eyes. Apple wants you to buy a real iPhone, even if it’s the model from 2 years ago, instead.

If BMW started selling a ton of $18,000 cars do you think that would help or hurt sales of the M3 and the 5 Series?

That bit then with the clones. The competition undercut them. You know what that high Apple price does? Help pay to develop iOS.

They would have to charge enough to make up for the money they would lose on the list phone sales. And seriously risk their reputation in the process.

Apple has been through a lot in their 40 years. They have an atavistic reaction at this point against anything that prevents them from controlling their own destiny. It’s hurt them too many times.

I suspect that’s why they’re doing this. They don’t want to be beholden to Samsung, LG, or anyone else for displays.

Much the same thing as happened to Apple when they licensed their OS in the 90s, I imagine.

My oldest OLED TV will turn 6 in August and has exhibited no burn-in.

I think it ultimately comes down to what you're watching. You're likely to experience burn-in if you watch something with a persistent banner like 24 hour news.

For example, my 2 year old LED VA Panel monitor already has burn-in where the task bar is displayed.

Intel Optane is barely faster than flash — roughly 3x (for 4k random read) compared to the fastest Samsung SSD [1].

Optane was a failure because it failed to deliver the promised result. Intel would have never poured money into a new technology only three times faster than an existing technology. I recall initial promises were RAM-like speeds.

If Apple is able to spit out 200 million of these screens in a year, I have a very hard time imagining what ingredient could go into the production causing a greater per unit price than a Samsung display.

[1] https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/

Source: Where I work is tooling up to start producing uLED products for SLA 3D printing. UV uLED + LCD filter all in one. I'm having to teach them how to utilize LIFT.

There's something incredibly realistic about highlights being super bright, I think it's going to look more like a window than a TV.

Now we just need to make them...

Viewing distance also varies a lot - I recall reading somewhere the empirical observed viewing distance for smartphones is between 6 and 15 inches sitting and between 4 and 9 inches lying down. Environmental brightness also varies, obviously.

Just to give a personal example, my near vision was measured at 20/16 with correction, I am currently holding my phone 7 inches from my eyes, and I have my room lit with four 1500-lumen bulbs (to simulate daylight). I don’t know what the correct PPI would be there, but it’s obviously going to be higher than the usual amount.

In addition, it’s not clear that “cannot distinguish individual pixels” is even the same thing as “no more visual quality can be gained with higher pixel density”. At 30fps the human eye can’t distinguish individual frames, but 60fps still has visual benefits over 30fps, and many people are able to consistently detect the difference between 60fps and 144fps. Past 144fps is when you get to “no more visual quality can be obtained by higher frame rates” (as opposed to proxies like “individual frames are not distinguishable”). I suspect a similar thing is true for pixel density.

But as I said originally, I’m excited that microLEDs might make it viable to have screens with a pixel density not just “beyond what’s reasonably good enough in most circumstances”, not even “beyond what’s detectable by most people in all but the best circumstances”, but in fact well into “provably beyond the limits of what the best human eyes can detect in the best possible conditions at impractically close viewing distances”.

>The 10600 pixels over 20 inches corresponds to 530 pixels per inch, which would indeed appear very sharp. Note in a recent printer test I showed a 600 ppi print had more detail than a 300 ppi print on an HP1220C printer (1200x2400 print dots). I've conducted some blind tests where a viewer had to sort 4 photos (150, 300, 600 and 600 ppi prints). The two 600 ppi were printed at 1200x1200 and 1200x2400 dpi. So far all have gotten the correct order of highest to lowest ppi (includes people up to age 50). See: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/printer-ppi

I have no idea why everyone forgot how shit 300dpi printers were and how much crisper 1200dpi looked.

As far as we know, Apple doesn’t own any of its manufacturing directly. The Mac Pro plant in Texas is operated by either Quanta or Flex[1], depending on who you ask.

You could argue that it’s largely a semantic difference, though, because those facilities are dedicated entirely to Apple and they’re usually the ones funding their construction.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/apple-will-make-the-mac-pro-...

If Apple controls it all and they get it working, they can have an advantage until everyone else figured it out on their own without infringement. Even a 2-3 year advantage (like the A series gave them) would be huge.

Have they ever manufactured components before?

History of TSMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fVrWDdll0g

ARM was born out of the BBC micro project, so if anything a BBC baby.

The thing is most of the world is also pretty reliant on international trade business with mainland China.

The question is really about how willing the world is to disrupt their own economies in order to disrupt China's.

Trade barriers against North Korea and Cuba are basically free for the other country, restricting access to energy imports from Iran or Russia imposes a real cost on the country raising the barriers, but even after decades of grumbling it's hard to find a supply chain for manufactured products that doesn't have a significant dependency on China. That makes it hard to fight a war with China, trade or otherwise.

One thing people miss with the china/taiwan discussion is that China doesn't need to make a single violent move towards Taiwan to subdue it. A naval blockade would force Taiwan's capitulation in almost no time at all.

Even a forceful blockade wouldn't be totally necessary, if China just passed any sort of sanction stopping the export of materials or food to Taiwan, prices would immediately become unsustainable on the island and it would also have to capitulate.

It has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with ideology and projecting power.

The Kuomintang took huge amounts of priceless Chinese artifacts when they fled to Taiwan, which are now in the National Palace Museum[1]. There's a case to be made that the CCP was on an iconoclastic spree and there was good reason to take the artifacts to Taiwan for safekeeping, but the fact remains that vast amounts of priceless Chinese relics are now in Taiwan. China would like them back and is willing to do more than ask politely. Taiwan can blow up the fabs, sure, but they're probably not going to blow up the relics. Chinese leadership would gain a historic amount of face by bringing them home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Palace_Museum

China has no access to the open ocean. The US has bases and strong allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore) surrounding it.

China is in much better of a position both economically and militarily to invade Taiwan today than it was in 1992, 1971, and 1949.

The world is definitely a lot different than it was 50 years ago.

Taking an island 100 miles offshore is definitely doable

Microsoft, Adobe, Motorola, IBM, Intel, nVidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Metroworks, Oracle, and ATI/AMD.

They’ve done everything they can to either kick those to the curb or minimize the risk.

Sony is the one big exception I can think of. Sony makes the camera sensors and I don’t remember hearing of Sony causing issues.

Wouldn’t surprise me if Sony was next on the list after displays though.

Users will pay. One way or another users pay for everything.

But you cannot pay for something that doesnt exist.

Reduced competition is the best way to ensure real choice doesnt exist.

Its the simplest of truths yet we are past the stage of even grasping simple truths.