Apple’s Bold Platform Risk

October 17, 2015

Steve Cheney, in his interesting and good post entitled “On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage”:

In 2007, when Steve Ballmer famously declared “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance”, Jobs was off creating a chip design team. If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off.

Read the whole piece. It’s great.

John Gruber commented on Cheney’s post, and one thought that struck a cord with me was this:

We should clarify one point from Cheney’s headline — Apple’s lead is formidable, not insurmountable. Nothing in tech is insurmountable.

Why did I notice that bit? Perhaps because of my view on this.

Intel Working on an iPhone Modem: New Chatter

October 16, 2015

Mark Sullivan, for VentureBeat:

Intel now has a thousand people or more working to outfit a 2016 iPhone with its lauded 7360 LTE modem chip, sources say. If all goes well, Intel may end up providing both the modem and the fabrication for a new Apple system on a chip. […]

Apple may dual-source the LTE modems in its new iPhones from both Intel and Qualcomm. Today, Qualcomm’s 9X45 LTE chip is baked into all iPhone modems. […]

One source said Intel needs a small army of people on the Apple account because of the importance of the project to Apple’s future in the mobile market, because of the complexity of the project, and because Apple is a demanding client with an extremely popular phone.

You can be sure this modem meets a lot of Apple’s specific requirements, especially in terms of power. If any other OEMs purchase the same (or similar) part from Intel, they may benefit from some of those attributes, but not from all. When you’re as effective and important as Apple, you can shape product requirements in a way that helps you stay ahead of commoditization, even if others can technically buy the “same” part.

Sullivan’s sources also speculate that Apple may, eventually, integrate this modem into the system-on-a-chip (SoC). At that point, the combined function, power, and performance characteristics (of the modem alone) will be difficult for others to emulate.

Friday Assorted Links

September 18, 2015

1. Apple Acquires Mapsense, a Mapping Visualization Startup

2. Samsung to mass produce transparent displays for home electronics products

Samsung is also prepping to display new products at CES 2016 that include devices with transparent displays, the reports noted.

3. MediaTek chipsets power new Amazon devices

4. Vehicles may contain as many as 10 cameras when the age of self-driving cars arrive (Thanks to Vladimir Koifman, who linked to this on Image Sensor World.)

5. Tesla signs another deal with a company developing a lithium mine

Tuesday Assorted Links

September 1, 2015

1. Samsung Takes Smartwatch Fight to Apple Considering that there’s no release date, price, or launch market specified, I think this headline is 2X the overstatement that it would be anyway. It runs Tizen, by the way. A variant will have a 3G modem. In terms of the modem and call functionality, I’m sincerely looking forward to seeing how that performs and what consumers think.

2. ‘It’s time’: Lenovo sends out invites for a Moto 360 2 unveiling on September 8th

3. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 uses machine learning to fight malware

Instead of relying on a static list of threats to protect you, it’ll actually watch out for suspicious app behavior. […]

“Snapdragon Smart Protect is engineered to look at the actual behavior of device applications in real time and almost instantly detect and classify any application behavior that is considered suspicious or anomalous,” Qualcomm wrote in a blog post. “Suspicious applications are classified into severity levels of malware […].

4. Apple partners with Cisco to boost enterprise business I get uneasy when I read things like this. There’s no meaningful consumer problem to solve here. And for Apple, what’s the worst down-side to *not* doing this? To me, it means X fewer people working on new products or helping existing customers have a meaningfully better experience.

One big problem, Messrs. Cook and Chambers said, is ensuring employees get adequate networking performance in the workplace. Apple and Cisco said they aim to establish a “fast lane” for iOS devices in the corporate world, prioritizing wireless and Web connections so critical business applications aren’t compromised by a streaming cat videos and other nonbusiness fare.

5. Xiaomi said to release notebook in 2016 with help from Inventec and Foxconn Will it use Windows? First Windows device of more to come?

Saturday Assorted Links

August 29, 2015

1. On Amazon’s Plans for a Low Cost Smartphone

At one point, the company planned a stripped-down Fire phone, but Amazon has stretched out its timeline for smartphone development indefinitely, people familiar with the matter said.

2. You can download Cortana for your Android device right now – here’s how Just interesting to see Microsoft’s cross-platform strategy evolve.

3. Xiaomi Will Launch In Africa In Sept Through Distributor

4. Xiaomi to release two chipsets for in-house use next year Focus appears to be cost. See my prior related post.

5. Huawei brings online smartphone brand Honor to Europe “Handsets would be mainly promoted and sold on-line […].”

6. Revealed: the first hydrogen-powered battery that will charge your Apple iPhone for a week Note: most small companies use an iPhone to demonstrate their capability. Primarily because it makes the invention look ready for prime time. And — as you can see — it increases the odds of generating a click-bait headline. Plus, yes, they’re hoping someone at Apple notices and sees “how well it fits in”, so to speak. Or that another potential acquirer thinks “Oh – I wouldn’t want Apple to buy them”.

Intel: Yes, They’ll Sell Modems to Apple, Says Raymond James

August 25, 2015

Tiernan Ray, helping us get the latest analyst perspective at Tech Trader Daily (both highly recommended):

Writes Mosesmann, Intel’s comments mean the company will probably get some “low-end” business from Apple starting next year:

We got multiple Valley datapoints that support Intel’s success at Apple with the new 7360 LTE mobile chip for 2016. At IDF, the Street got the opportunity to meet newly promoted GM of the Communications and Devices Group, Aicha Evans, who refreshingly and bluntly told the audience of analysts and investors that if Intel couldn’t get to scale in modems, it would basically be done. Our sense is that she knows it will have scale and Apple is that avenue. Tavis McCourt, who covers Apple and Qualcomm for Raymond James, views any Qualcomm competitor incursions into Apple as coming at the low end of the iPhone portfolio in 2016, and calls for flagship penetrations in 2017, at the earliest.

Why flag rumors, speculation, or developments like this? Anything related to processors (baseband processors in this case) and Apple is interesting.

Processors, in the abstract, are dense bundles of capability. They drive a large range of performance, efficiency, and design decisions in mobile devices.

Apple competes on many levels, and a primary one is hardware. In the context of processors, Apple advances the practical leading edge, in CPU, GPU, sensor hub and, potentially, baseband performance (think Apple Watch modem).

Any bit of information therefore, about what Apple may be ruling in / ruling out is interesting. Sometimes because it’s accurate. Other times because it simply gets you thinking or keeps you aware.

Intel Unlikely to Get iPhone Modem Business, Says Bernstein

August 20, 2015

Tiernan Ray, writing for Barron’s Tech Trader Daily, fills us in on Bernstein’s latest analysis:

Bernstein Research’s Mark Li […] offered up a skeptical view of recent speculation that Intel (INTC) may be poised to win as much as half of the business supplying the wireless modem chip for Apple’s (AAPL) next iPhone model, at the expense of current supplier Qualcomm (QCOM).

On Intel’s modem, he outlines the shortcomings:

INTC does not have a mature modem […]. […] The first one, XMM726x, has only gained adoption in a few low-volume models since 2014 and field test track record has been spotty. The chip is made with 28nm and hence is not most competitive in power efficiency. The second chip, X3-C3440 (SoFIA LTE), is an SoC with an integrated processor, but Apple has its own processor & needs just a standalone modem. Plus, the chip is not yet ready. The third chip, XMM7360, despite featuring Cat 10, is not ready for mass production either. […]

We won’t hold high hope on INTC getting the business in the future but won’t rule that possibility out completely either.

Wednesday Assorted Links

August 19, 2015

1. Samsung Pay and Apple Pay Are Only Fighting Over 20 Percent of the Smartphone Market Perhaps… but it’s a 20% that likely has ~80% of the most valuable consumers. And it won’t stay 20% for long. Being there first, with a better solution, matters. And, as @eric_analytics points out on Twitter, Apple Pay vs. Google Wallet would have been a better comparison.

2. Qualcomm still supplies modem chips for next iPhone, sources claim

The sources believe that Intel is unlikely to obtain modem chip orders for the upcoming iPhones. However, Intel could win orders for the 2017 iPhone models as Apple is searching for additional modem chip suppliers apart from Qualcomm, the sources noted.

Sparks the question: would an Intel baseband processor appear on the iPhone, Apple’s current core business, before it appears on any other product (e.g., iPad)?

3. Xiaomi Bakes Opera’s Data Compression Tech Into Newest Version Of MIUI Android

4. Apple Working on Large Glass Something or Other, Says Global Equities

A device which is 27″ to 50″ Curved Glass somewhat resembling a car windshield or a curved display

The whole surface area acts like an HUD (Heads Up Display)

The various sensors are built right into the Glass

Impossible to tell how accurate this is, but it is interesting. Dimensions (if accurate) don’t appear large enough for a car windshield. Unless it’s a small prototype. This sort of glass assembly is probably something Apple can’t build in-house (i.e., for a prototype). So, with a supplier involved, the odds of a leak are higher. “Leak” isn’t quite the right word, though, since it implies a certainty that this information is accurate.

Monday Assorted Links

August 17, 2015

1. LG bets that OLEDs are the future of displays

It’s investing the equivalent of $8.5 billion into developing OLED technology over the next three years for everything from TVs to cars to wearables.

2. Project Ara delayed until 2016, looking for new locations in US

3. Leaked iPhone 6s schematics hint at the same 16-128 GB storage options, new SiP architecture

Drawings indicate that Apple would indeed be employing a System in Package (SiP) technology along with a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) architecture. The SiP technology is used by Cupertino in the Apple Watch, and it allows for faster production of more compact and more efficient circuitry.

4. Sprint CEO hints at plan to turn old iPhones into new customers

“Used phones and, the iPhone in particular, have tremendous appeal,” Claure said. “We have a surprise in terms of what will happen to these used phones.”

5. Sprint to Abandon Two-Year Contracts

6. Charts Not Playlists

The future is TRUSTED filters directing the audience where to partake of desirable music.

Applies to more than music.

Sunday Assorted Links

August 9, 2015

Still digging out from vacation. Lot of interesting developments.

1. Huawei, Xiaomi to hike adoption of in-house-developed smartphone APs. I think they’re focused on reducing their component costs, and on diversifying or securing supply, rather than on any sort of performance boost. An interesting excerpt, however:

Xiaomi and Huawei’s strategy is expected to directly impact AP providers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm. Within the global top-5 smartphone vendors, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and LG, which together contribute over 60% of worldwide shipments, four of them have already adopted in-house developed APs or have been aggressively increasing their adoption, which could seriously damage independent ARM-AP suppliers as well as x86-based solution supplier Intel.

Note, however, that Leadcore, the AP manufacturer working win Xiaomi claims that “Xiaomi wants its own custom-designed processors to differentiate its products and control its destiny“. I think that’s a bunch of marketing spin, and the “differentiation” is really a cost focus.

2. Microsoft Launches ‘Translator’ Free Apple Watch App. I haven’t tried it yet. In principle, sounds like a good idea; a good fit with the fact that a smartwatch is, in my view, essentially a tool. And it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a team(s) working to quickly deliver apps for Apple Watch.

3. Big Android Makers Will Now Push Monthly Security Updates. … because there’s something magical and comforting about the nice, round 30-day number?

4. Michael Lopp (Rands in Repose): “Busy is a bug, not a feature.” I suppose it depends on the role. I agree that for a leader to be continuously busy, or “too busy”, is not a good sign. Though it is more complicated than that (“war time” vs. “peace time”, etc.). Michael is now at Pinterest. Another interesting part:

“It’s gonna sound like I’m lazy but I swear I’m not lazy,” he says. “My job is to get myself out of a job. I’m aggressively pushing things I think I could be really good at and should actually maybe own to someone else who’s gonna get a ‘B’ at it. But they’re gonna get the opportunity to go do that [and continue to learn in the process]. My job is to — it sounds like I just want to sit here and drink coffee and talk about bread — but it’s about pushing it down, so these things, which naturally come to me [go to others in the company].”

5. Smartphones are hurting our children – but the real culprit is bad parenting. The headline says it all.

Sultans of Shrink Pack More Chips into Smart Wearables

July 31, 2015

Michael Gold, for Reuters:

The latest chapter in the miniaturisation of increasingly smart consumer electronics lies in the hands of chip packagers, an indispensable group of firms whose role in the supply chain alone is worth $27 billion. […]

To serve this market [chip packagers] have come up with an assembly process known as System-in-Package (SiP).

“SiP bundles a ton of components into one simple plug-n-play, almost like a Lego block,” said Taipei-based semiconductor analyst Randy Abrams at Credit Suisse. […]

“The SiP inside the Apple Watch was unprecedented,” Vice President Jim Morrison of analysis firm Chipworks told Reuters. Chipworks found as many as 40 chips in the hermetically sealed pod, more than double any other package it had seen before.

The article doesn’t quite say it, but Apple is heavily customizing, if not designing, much of its own SiP, the “S1”. Why? As I wrote back in March:

This degree of customization is the right call – because it affects everything that’s supposed to make a smartwatch appealing and valuable: size, functionality, performance, battery life, and upgradeability.

So, it’s the start of a new era of post-PC, post-smartphone devices. Most device makers opt to use, or have to use, the “Lego” they can procure. Except Apple.

Qualcomm: Break-Up Would Be ‘Value Destructive,’ Says Morgan Stanley

July 27, 2015

Tiernan Ray, at Tech Trader Daily, provides us with excerpts from James Faucet’s (Morgan Stanley) analysis:

Following activist recommendations, Qualcomm announced that the board and management are launching a strategic review of the company’s corporate structure. One of the outcomes activists have encouraged is a separation of the QCT [chipsets] and QTL [licensing] businesses. We would not expect this outcome and believe it could be value destructive. […]

For our part, we have previously been wary of the cost cutting magnitude announced by Qualcomm given the highly competitive market. To wit, there has never been a company in the mobile handset or baseband market that has gone through massive cost reduction programs that has been able to sustain competitive positioning — in every case, those cost reductions were a precursor to lost market presence, and often being pushed fully out of the market.

Splitting the company would be foolish, though it’s a sobering possibility. To use a very, very exaggerated analogy, it’s like splitting a company into the R&D side (chipsets) and Sales and Marketing side (licensing). R&D doesn’t get the new revenue they need for future products. S&M doesn’t get the new products they need for future revenue. The scenario doesn’t end well. (Yes, in reality, the R&D/chipset business will have its own revenue stream (chipset sales), but the analogy illustrates how inter-related the divisions are.)

Intel Anticipates Longer Time Between CPU Process Improvements

July 16, 2015

Don Clark, for WSJ (bold emphasis is mine):

Intel, which tends to brag about shrinking circuitry on its chips more quickly than competitors, disclosed Wednesday that for a second time it would miss a two-year schedule for making more compact chips. The Silicon Valley icon went further than projecting another one-time delay; it set a new definition of what people should expect in the future.

“The last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said during a conference call with analysts to discuss its second-quarter results.

This prompts the question: for vendors who design their CPU in-house (e.g., Apple, Samsung), does the slowdown in process (precision/size) improvement imply that their in-house team gives them greater advantage?

Meaning, will in-house CPU teams now be less focused on changes based on process size, and more focused on other ways to improve performance? Even so, presumably CPU makers will still release CPUs each year. Those, too, would include improvements (even though process size won’t improve every year). So perhaps the slow down in process improvement won’t increase or decrease any advantage that in-house-developed CPUs have. All this is simply my speculation; upcoming facts and others’ insights may change my understanding.

As always, though, in-house teams can focus on the areas that maximize their own products’ performance. In contrast, chip vendors have to consider a range of customers. This aspect of the in-house advantage won’t change.

Zeroth, Qualcomm’s Effort to Put AI in Your Smartphone

July 9, 2015

Kevin Fitchard, for GigaOm (when it was still operating) wrote an interesting piece on Qualcomm’s “Zeroth” technology, expected soon. It’s from March, but still very relevant.

New cognitive computing technology Zeroth […] aims to bring artificial intelligence out of the cloud and move it – or at least a limited version of it – into your phone. […] I sat down with Qualcomm SVP of product management Raj Talluri, who explained what Zeroth was all about. […]

Zeroth […] will perform basic intuitive tasks and anticipate your actions, thus eliminating many of the rudimentary steps required to operate the increasingly complex smartphone, Talluri explained. […]

The most basic use case would be taking better photos as it can optimize the shot for the types of objects in them. It could also populate photos with tons of useful metadata. Then you could build on that foundation with other applications. Your smartphone might recognize, for instance, that you’re taking a bunch of landscape and architecture shots in foreign locale and automatically upload them to a vacation album on Flickr. A selfie might automatically produce a Facebook post prompt. […]

Other examples of Zeroth applications include devices that could automatically adjust their power performance to the habits of its owner or scan its surroundings sensors to determine what a user’s most likely next smartphone action might be. […]

Zeroth itself isn’t a separate chip or component. It’s a software architecture designed to run across the different elements of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors […].

Exciting. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s enhancements to Siri use similar technology. I’m not sure of the approach that Android, Google Play Services, or Android vendors will take. Perhaps, for instance, Google Now will simply take advantage of Zeroth capabilities for Google-Now-Relevant functionality, while the OEMs apply Zeroth to other consumer problems.

Apple’s Bitcode Technology Hints at the Future [updated 3X]

June 12, 2015

A little gem* from Apple’s WWDC “Platform State of the Union” session, introduced by Andreas Wendker:

Andreas Wendker, VP,OS X Platform, introducing Bitcode. (Source: Apple)

We’re also working on a new technology that is very [much] forward-looking. We’re introducing Bitcode into the app submission process.

Bitcode […] allows the store to re-optimize your apps for each kind of device before they get delivered to the user. […] The store will be in a position to constantly re apply the latest compiler optimizations that we’ve been working on. It also future proofs your apps, because it will allow the store to take advantage of new processor capabilities we might be adding in the future, and all that without you having to resubmit your apps to the store.

This is a strong hint that a future iPad may run on a different processor (e.g., an Intel CPU on the rumored iPad Pro). Or that a future Mac might use an ARM CPU. See this interesting view by “Inertial Lemon“, on Medium.

Curiously, using Bitcode is mandatory on Apple Watch’s watchOS. So then, why might Apple Watch apps ever need to target a new CPU? The most likely reason is that Apple might want to adjust the CPU architecture. “Inertial Lemon” speculates that possibility:

In all likelihood, the S1’s CPU is pretty crappy. [In the sense that it’s a first-version of this CPU.] […]

Imagine that the chip designers know they can make the [Apple Watch’s CPU] S2 leaps and bounds better, but doing so would require making some design changes radical enough that they broke existing software. Should Apple go the iPhone 1.0 route and hold back the SDK for another hardware generation, leaving third party developers in the cold? Could Apple get away with breaking the entire first generation of apps and forcing developers to resubmit to be compatible with the next generation of the Watch? What if there were some magical third option that didn’t have any real downsides?

That third option, Inertial Lemon surmises, is Bitcode.

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*Thanks to Dan Moren for citing it and for Leo Laporte for emphasizing its importance, on Leo’s MacBreak Weekly. Highly recommended.
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Update 3 (July 17): I removed reference to John Siracusa’s Tweet and perspective on ARM, specifically because I think Inertial Lemon’s view is more detailed and offers a broader framing. I also extended the excerpt from Inertial Lemon. Don’t read into this: John is one of my favorite thinkers and podcasters. Details on updates 1 and 2, along with the original post, are here: OLD-Apple’s Bitcode Technology Hints at the Future [updated 2X].

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