Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
iPad Pro Confusion
Qualcomm buys Apple Silicon Engineers’ startup
And Apple DID fool us with March 23rd – its like a spy thriller!
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iPad Pro confusion
This week we’ve gone from having an event on the way that didn’t materialise to most likely an April event instead, AirPods 3rd generation being ready to ship to Ming Chi Kuo saying they won’t enter production until later in the year, and now we have arguments over iPad Pro.

So Bloomberg is reporting that iPad Pro is expected to debut in April with a big performance boost (because its leapfrogging the A13 generation cores going from A12Z to A14X), expected to have the same performance a the M1 that’s been blowing minds in a Mac, let alone a tablet form factor. Now, as I’ve said before, I’m pretty confident that for the economies of scale that Apple needs, the A14 and M1 will be the same physical silicon, but possibly with firmware that repurposes or disables specific parts of the chips, or with iPad getting those that had specific issues with manufacturing that wouldn’t affect its operation.

Beyond the new SOC, we’re expecting Thunderbolt to come to iPad for the first time (because… its M1) as well as 5G chips from Qualcomm for mobile data and MiniLED, though it may be that only the larger 12.9” version gets this particular update. So will we even see the 11” updated? Reports are mixed on that one. But where MiniLED happens, you get better local dimming, better colour reproduction and better contrast ratios.

Qualcomm buy former Apple Silicon engineers Startup
Silicon giant Qualcomm who supply a number of chips to Apple including expensive 5G modems and who also make the Snapdragon line of chips for many Android phones has finalised their acquisition of Nuvia, a company founded in 2019 by Gerard Williams, Apple’s former chief CPU architect for about a decade. Williams will take on a new role at Qualcomm as SVP of engineering, allowing the company to target the non-Apple market wanting to move away from X86 chips in Laptops, which could be bad news not just for Apple, but far worse for Intel. Right now, intel not only profits from their own chips but also licensing fees from AMD and anyone else wanting to build chips on the platform.

Currently Qualcomm is lagging behind Apple in terms of their chip designs, with their latest SnapDragon 888 being around the performance of A13, and Qualcomm using off the shelf Arm core designs from the Cortex range, while Apple designs their own cores in house, leading to their far higher single core performance.

March 23rd was almost certainly an Apple Decoy.

According to soon to be eyebrow free leaker Jon Prosser who opened up about what happened behind the scenes ahead of the lack of event invites, Its almost certain that Apple was baiting some internal leakers with the March 23rd date, which could mean a few things going forward.

First, it seems that Apple only gave the date to a certain number of staffers – presumably a proportion of those they suspected of being in touch with leakers on the outside. If everyone under suspicion had them, there’s no new information for Apple if it gets out. If only some have it, you know there are leaks within that subset of staff.

So what does it mean for the future of leaks? Well, it might mean they’re fewer and further between. Not because anyone has been caught, but because they may be concerned about being caught and know they’re under suspicion if they were given these dates. There may be an abundance of caution even in the others who know that this is being clamped down on too now, so we may be doing a bit more guess work, and we may have more surprises at the events in future.

But we like spoilers too, and according to Prosser who apparently had one source that was indicating April who he discounted because the others had all said March 23rd, the event will be the Pre-recorded style we’re now used to with details of AirTags and a 10.2” iPad refresh (perhaps to the 10.5” model as we expected), but interestingly he mentions a slim chance of AirPods 3 (which I personally thought would more likely be a press release) and the new iPad Pro – which we all thought was the certain headliner. So, we could be assuming that the Mac stuff that we would have thought was coming April with M1x is now maybe pushed to May, or even if its early in the month, June’s WWDC. We should be getting WWDC invites really soon, so let me know what you think!