As usual, this Rene Ritchie explainer is a firehose of information, but really well explained. What I found most interesting is the comparison of the iPhone processors, like the A14, to their Mac counterparts.
As you watch Rene walk through the various Apple Silicon architectures, he lays out the similarities between the iPhone and Mac chips, makes it clear how one begat the other, and how the design evolved from the iPhone’s smaller enclosure to the bigger, higher powered, better cooled Mac.
Rene Ritchie:
Lightning has pretty much been stuck at USB2’s half a gigabit per second, since… 2012.
And:
You can now record the highest quality video of any phone on the planet, you just can’t get it off any faster than the cheapest phone on the block.
That’s the speed issue, an issue (as Rene points out) that impacts a small subset of iPhone users. But combine that with an issue that impacts a huge number of iPhone users (anyone with, say, a modern iPad): That blasted need for two different cables, Lightning for your iPhone, USB-C for your iPad.
Rene does a nice job laying all this out (watch the video embedded below). As usual, a firehose of detail, but easy to follow, especially with the edited for clarity transcript in the linked post, if reading is more your style.
Bloomberg:
Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said.
And:
The purchase — poised to become the biggest semiconductor deal in history when it was announced in September 2020 — has drawn a fierce backlash from regulators and the chip industry, including Arm’s own customers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the transaction in December, arguing that Nvidia would become too powerful if it gained control over Arm’s chip designs.
And:
SoftBank and Arm are entitled to keep $2 billion Nvidia paid at signing, including a $1.25 billion breakup fee, whether the deal goes through or not.
Apple’s good either way, as long as they can keep their chip design talent on board.
Amazing rise for Nvidia, going from a graphics card maker to the second most valuable chipmaker on the planet, behind only TSMC, with a market cap of $582 billion.
Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:
Ever since Apple removed the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 in 2016, rumors have swirled that Apple eventually aims to ditch the Lightning port next for a completely portless design. Indeed, analysts originally predicted that the highest-end iPhone 13 would offer a “completely wireless experience.” Of course, that didn’t happen, but a portless iPhone 14 in 2022 looks just as unlikely, for the following reasons.
There’s this:
With no Lightning port, you wouldn’t be able to physically connect your iPhone directly to a computer to reset an unresponsive iPhone through recovery mode.
But, more importantly:
In 2020, Eric Ravenscraft of Debugger found that wireless charging uses around 47% more power than wired charging for the same amount of power.
Here’s a link to that article, titled Wireless Charging Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen.
Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS:
USB used to mean one kind of connector for a computer: Type-A, which was flat, rectangular, and had one correct orientation. A peripheral either had a directly wired cord or sported a Type-B USB port: blocky, nearly square, and with only one correct orientation as well.
Along the way, though, we accumulated others: Mini-B, a thick trapezoid used by Texas Instruments graphing calculators, early Amazon Kindles, and other devices; and Micro-B, a slim trapezoid that became the de-facto charging shape for mobile devices, headphones, and other battery-powered hardware. More obscure connectors also appeared, like the wide and oddly shaped USB 3.0 Micro-B, though you may never have seen one as it flourished only briefly.
Even with all these choices, an educated glance at a port told you what kind of connector you needed. Whether you had one in your cable drawer was another matter entirely. If you did, chances are strong you were golden.
The initial premise of USB-C was that it brought all the goodness of a solid standard with the ease of a single, reversible connector, so you’d alway have the right cable on hand, and it was easy to plug it in.
USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way.
This is a terrific, detailed walk through the USB-C morass, with some very readable charts showing off things like pre-USB-C connector profiles, certified USB logos, and USB cable connector combinations.
Don’t miss the section at the end offering a “partial list of the possible data and power support you could find in a cable with USB-C connectors on both ends”.
Great work from Glenn Fleishman, worth bookmarking and passing along.
Apple:
Apple today announced Self Service Repair, which will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools. Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.
And:
The initial phase of the program will focus on the most commonly serviced modules, such as the iPhone display, battery, and camera. The ability for additional repairs will be available later next year.
Big news for the right-to-repair movement and for folks (like me) who like fixing their own stuff.
And, on Apple’s just announced Self Service Repair Online Store:
To ensure a customer can safely perform a repair, it’s important they first review the Repair Manual. Then a customer will place an order for the Apple genuine parts and tools using the Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. Following the repair, customers who return their used part for recycling will receive credit toward their purchase.
The new store will offer more than 200 individual parts and tools, enabling customers to complete the most common repairs on iPhone 12 and iPhone 13.
You order a replacement part from Apple, return the used part for credit. The only thing missing is the ability to use parts from 3rd parties for repairs.
As the announcement says, Self Service Repair will open up early 2022 in the US. I’ll definitely be giving it a try.
Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge:
Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC “designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs” that would be able to go head to head with Apple’s M-series processors.
And:
The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company’s A-series chips.
Taking this with a grain of salt.
Qualcomm doesn’t expect their first of the new generation of chips in consumer machines before 2023, and I’d expect Apple to be at least one generation further along by then (with the M2 rumored to drop in 2022).
iFixit:
Normally we get to the battery last because, well, they suck to remove. But as we peer into the guts, we notice something we haven’t seen in a long time in a MacBook Pro, three words that make our hair stand on end: battery pull tabs.
Even better, it appears the battery isn’t trapped under the logic board. That could mean battery swaps without removing all the brains first—a procedure we’ve been dreaming about for a while.
And:
The four outer battery cells have easily-noticeable pull tabs, which are the typical thin white strips we know and love from the iPhone and MacBook Air. But wait, we don’t see any pull tabs on the middle cells. Are we screwed—or, worse, glued?
Not entirely! We removed the trackpad and, lo and behold, there are cut-outs to access the pull tabs that hold the middle battery cells in place.
And:
We’ve still got a long way to go with disassembly, but this new MacBook Pro has, at the very least, the first reasonably DIY-friendly battery replacement procedure since 2012.
Great news! I’m looking forward to the detailed teardown.
Tom Warren, The Verge:
Apple hit Intel hard with its first M1 chips, offering a rare step-change improvement in performance with its 2020 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Less than a year later, it’s already starting to compete with the best GPUs from AMD and Nvidia as well. The new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max offer a first glimpse at how well Apple’s M1 chips can scale to provide raw performance that rivals the discrete graphics cards we typically find inside Windows-powered laptops.
This walkthrough highlights the incredible performance gains made by Apple’s M1 series, especially where the GPU is concerned.
At the core of the review is AnandTech’s Apple’s M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights. Jumping to the GPU analysis page:
Traditional OEMs have been fine with a small(ish) CPU and then adding a discrete GPU as necessary. It’s cost and performance effective: you only need to add as big of a dGPU as the customer needs performance, and even laptop-grade dGPUs can offer very high performance. But like any other engineering decision, it’s a trade-off: discrete GPUs result in multiple display adapters, require their own VRAM, and come with a power/cooling cost.
And that’s where Apple’s gains are coming from: The new M1 series, by being incredibly space efficient, runs much more coolly than a traditional discrete GPU laptop can, and consumes far less power.
The gains here are obvious, especially when Apple’s pro apps, or third party apps specifically built for the M1, are involved. As to PC gaming, Apple is still not there. Scroll through the AnandTech post for benchmarks to get a sense of this. But my gut (I’m no expert) tells me that if game developers make it their mission to develop with the M1 Max in mind, that could change.
One last bit from the AnandTech post:
Overall, it’s clear that Apple’s ongoing experience with GPUs has paid off with the development of their A-series chips, and now their M1 family of SoCs. Apple has been able to scale up the small and efficient M1 into a far more powerful configuration; Apple built SoCs with 2x/4x the GPU hardware of the original M1, and that’s almost exactly what they’re getting out of the M1 Pro and M1 Max, respectively. Put succinctly, the new M1 SoCs prove that Apple can build the kind of big and powerful GPUs that they need for their high-end machines. AMD and NVIDIA need not apply.
Follow the headline link to read the Anandtech take on CPU performance and power efficiency. I’ve never doubted that in those categories, the M1 chips would win, hands down.
What really interests me is the GPU performance. The original M1 stands toe-to-toe with traditional laptop GPUs, but falls well behind a PC desktop with a discrete GPU. Not a slam on the M1. That’s just to be expected with an integrated GPU.
But this from Anandtech:
Apple’s GPU performance is claimed to vastly outclass any previous generation competitor integrated graphics performance, so the company opted to make direct comparisons to medium-end discrete laptop graphics. In this case, pitting the M1 Pro against a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB, with the Apple chip achieving similar performance at 70% less power.
And:
While the M1 Pro catches up and outpaces the laptop competition in terms of performance, the M1 Max is aiming at delivering something never-before seen: supercharging the GPU to a total of 32 cores. Essentially it’s no longer an SoC with an integrated GPU, rather it’s a GPU with an SoC around it.
And:
In terms of performance, Apple is battling it out with the very best available in the market, comparing the performance of the M1 Max to that of a mobile GeForce RTX 3080, at 100W less power (60W vs 160W). Apple also includes a 100W TDP variant of the RTX 3080 for comparison, here, outperforming the NVIDIA discrete GPU, while still using 40% less power.
This is no small thing. If Apple is able to go head-to-head with a traditional, discrete PC GPU in terms of performance, that does change things. GPU performance, especially for gaming, is the reason we still have a desktop PC in our house. Though a fast GPU does not trivialize porting and running PC games on a Mac (perhaps via Rosetta 2 or via an M1 port), it is a necessary first step.
And we’ll soon know how true those performance claims are as the graphics benchmarks start rolling in. From this first such report:
The M1 Max looked pretty good beside the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile or Radeon RX 6800M. Apple’s chip outperformed Nvidia and AMD’s GPUs in some workloads and stayed within a small margin in others. The M1 Max’s power efficiency was the most impressive feat, considering that the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile and Radeon RX 6800M conform to TDP ratings of 160W and 145W, respectively.
Looking forward to more benchmark results, and hearing from experts on any caveats. But so far, so good.
More from the Apple hackery “Will It Work?” channel, on a mission to create the longest Lightning EarPods possible using only the iPhone’s battery power.
Andrei Frumusanu, AnandTech:
This year’s new iPhone 13 series have been extremely promising in terms of battery life as Apple has improved this aspect of the devices through a slew of different improvements. All the new phones feature new generation displays, most notably the new Pro models which have new variable refresh displays, along with increases in battery capacities. After a few arduous days of battery life testing, we can come to some very positive conclusions.
There’s a detailed discussion of LTPO VRR. If that’s just alphabet soup to you, here’s a bit from this discussion of LTPO:
LTPO is the snappy acronym that stands for low-temperature Polycrystalline oxide. In short, it allows for a display to dynamically change its refresh rate without needing any additional hardware components to sit between a device’s graphics processing unit and the display controller.
And VRR is variable refresh rate, which is being branded as ProMotion. Apple’s rates vary from 10Hz to 120Hz.
If the screen discussion doesn’t grab you, scroll down the the section labeled “Bigger Batteries”. The first table compares battery capacity of all the iPhone 12 models to that of the iPhone 13s. Big jumps (ranging from 8% to 18% across the board) in every model.
Next up is a bar chart showing web browsing battery life (in hours) for a variety of phones. From. the description:
All the new phones showcase extremely large generational gains compared to their predecessors. For the iPhone 13, we’re getting results that are 34% better than the iPhone 12, which exceeds the +14.6% battery capacity increase. The new SoC efficiency as well as increased display power efficiency would explain the remainder of the difference.
The iPhone 13 battery life is a big leap forward.
Jason Aten, writing for Inc:
It takes a lot of energy to light up and refresh that display, so the fewer times it has to redraw what you’re looking at, the better. Other devices with high refresh rates might adjust based on what is showing on the display. For example, if you’re watching a film shot at 24 frames per second, the display might refresh at 24 or 48Hz. If you’re playing a game, it might refresh at 120Hz.
And:
On the iPhone, that’s still true, but Apple took it further by quietly included a remarkable way of deciding what refresh rate to use. Your iPhone 13 Pro or 13 Pro Max literally measures the speed of your finger on the screen, and then adjusts the refresh rate of the display.
And:
Reading a tweet, the iPhone 13 Pro drops down to 10Hz. If you start to scroll slowly, it might choose a faster refresh rate, say 60Hz. If you scroll quickly, it can ramp up to 90 or 120Hz. Apple doesn’t say exactly how many different refresh rates the display uses, only that it designed the system to match the refresh rate to the speed of your finger.
Great read.
In my opinion, ProMotion is an under appreciated feature. It works everywhere on the 13 Pro models, scrolling is smooth as glass, and there are no artifacts that hint at refresh rate changes. Beautifully implemented.
The “cat /dev/brain” blog:
iOS 15.0 introduces a new feature: an iPhone can be located with Find My even while the iPhone is turned “off”. How does it work? Is it a security concern?
This is a bit of a techie rabbit hole, but I found it fascinating.
At its core is a discussion of the AOP, or Always On Processor:
All chips and various embedded devices Apple manufactures run a real-time operating system, called RTKitOS. The AOP on the iPhone is no exception. However, the AOP has a special role. It connects to almost every other chip in the iPhone. For some chips, it only does basic tasks like power management, and for other chips, it acts as a transparent proxy that wakes up iOS when needed.
This way, a processor that is always on actually saves energy. iOS can go to sleep while the AOP waits for hardware events. A simple example is the motion sensor. Without touching any button on the iPhone, the display wakes up.
If this sort of technical arcana is of interest, follow the headline link and dig in. Skip the stuff you don’t understand. After each technical deep dive, the author returns to the surface before discussing the next bit.
Lots of fascinating tidbits here, if teardowns are your thing. But deep down, all the way in Step 10:
Face ID works even when we disconnected the front sensor assembly. However, any display replacement knocks out Face ID. We tried transferring the sensors from the old display and porting over the Face ID hardware, but no dice. It looks like the display is serial-locked to the phone.
And:
TL;DR: Unless Apple revises this behavior in software, screen replacements outside Apple’s authorized repair lose all Face ID functionality.
Is this a security measure to prevent a replacement screen from overriding Face ID on a stolen or seized iPhone? I suspect we’ll never know the logic behind this decision until far down the road.
Reuters:
The $20 billion plants – dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 – will bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six. They will house Intel’s most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company’s effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd
Intel is betting heavily on this re-roll of its chipmaking process.
TSMC, in the meanwhile:
Intel rival TSMC has also purchased land to build its first U.S. campus in Phoenix, not far from Intel’s location, where TSMC plans up to six chip factories.
From TSMC’s announced plans:
The initial fab is relatively modest by industry standards, with a planned output of 20,000 wafers – each of which contains thousands of chips – every month using the company’s most sophisticated 5 nanometre semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Both of these will bring this part of the supply chain onto US shores, though materials that are used in the fabrication process, like silicon, germanium, etc., are still critical path.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
The iPad mini 6 launched this week to much fanfare, thanks to its radically modern redesign and latest-generation A15 processor.
However, as customers receive their new iPads, a prominent issue is being spotted again and again. Colloquially referred to as ‘jelly scrolling’, it seems that one side of the iPad mini display is refreshing slower than the other side, which appears as a noticeable wobble effect down the middle of the screen when content is moving quickly — like scrolling a web page.
Here’s video showing what this looks like in slo-mo:
https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1440678843589689346
I see this on my iPad mini, though I didn’t notice it until I started reading about it. Of course, now I can’t not see it.
This doesn’t bother me, particularly, but I do hate to see this fly in the ointment of a terrific product launch. Since this issue involves the way video refresh is done, not clear if this is simply a software fix, like the Unlock with Apple Watch issue appears to be.
Here’s hoping.
If you are considering an iPhone 13 series phone, this video is worth watching. If nothing else, don’t miss the demonstration of Cinematic Mode and, especially, that bit at 2:37 in showing editing the focus points after the video was shot.
From Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac, yesterday:
In an investor note, Ming-Chi Kuo today said that he expects the upcoming iPhone 13 models to feature a low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite communication mode. This would allow an iPhone 13 user to send messages and make phone calls, even when they are not within standard 4G/5G cell tower coverage.
And today, from Juli Clover, reporting on this paywalled Bloomberg article:
There are at least two emergency features that will rely on satellite networks, and while satellite technology has been in the works for years, these capabilities are not likely to launch in 2021.
The first feature, Emergency Message via Satellite, is designed to let users text emergency services and contacts using a satellite network when there is no signal available, and it will be integrated into the Messages app as a third communications protocol alongside SMS and iMessage. It will feature gray message bubbles rather than green or blue, and message length will be restricted.
And:
The second feature will let users report major emergencies like plane crashes and fires using satellite networks. It will be similar to a “911” call in the U.S. and can provide information like a user’s location and medical ID, in addition to alerting emergency contacts.
Sounds like this will be built into the iPhone 13 hardware, not intended as an alternative to traditional carriers, and those grey bubbles won’t roll out until next year.
If you’ve not seen one of these little cuties, take a jump over to the Playdate front page and take a look.
Some gorgeous design (thanks to the folks at Teenage Engineering), in a fun yellow package.
If this whet your appetite, follow the headline link to the teardown. This looks pretty easy to take apart, which makes me think it’ll be easy to fix myself, and possible for folks to modify.
Check out the warranty sticker inside the unit. Props for not using scare tactics. Breaking voids the warranty. Opening does not.
Howard Oakley:
Over the last nine months, a great deal of work has gone into discovering just what is in Apple’s M1 chip, and what it all does. As Apple prepares to announce its successor in the next few weeks, I thought it might be worth surveying the work which has been accomplished so far, to establish the baseline for future Apple Silicon chips.
An interesting, link/detail filled walk through what we know and have inferred about the M1. Especially useful, sitting on the cusp of a rumored release of the next generation of M1.
The new white paper, titled Mac Pro Technology Overview, is chock full of detail, well worth going through if you own, or are considering a Mac Pro.
The paper is pretty long (45 pages), so if you are interested in the new AMD modules, open the PDF and do a find for AMD, which should take you to the description of the Radeon Pro 580X MPX Module.
Also worth checking out is AMD’s Mac Pro-centric web page covering their new graphics cards.
Don Clark, New York Times:
The machine is made by ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven. Its system uses a different kind of light to define ultrasmall circuitry on chips, packing more performance into the small slices of silicon. The tool, which took decades to develop and was introduced for high-volume manufacturing in 2017, costs more than $150 million.
And:
The complex machine is widely acknowledged as necessary for making the most advanced chips, an ability with geopolitical implications. The Trump administration successfully lobbied the Dutch government to block shipments of such a machine to China in 2019, and the Biden administration has shown no signs of reversing that stance.
And:
Manufacturers can’t produce leading-edge chips without the system, and “it is only made by the Dutch firm ASML,” said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which has concluded that it would take China at least a decade to build its own similar equipment. “From China’s perspective, that is a frustrating thing.”
Most importantly:
TSMC uses the tool to make the processors designed by Apple for its latest iPhones.
It’s the most complicated machine in the world, and vital to Apple’s plans. It’s one bit of the stack too expensive and complex for Apple to replicate.
Dr. Ian Cutress, AnandTech:
Every decade is the decade that tests the limits of Moore’s Law, and this decade is no different. With the arrival of Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) technology, the intricacies of multipatterning techniques developed on previous technology nodes can now be applied with the finer resolution that EUV provides. That, along with other more technical improvements, can lead to a decrease in transistor size, enabling the future of semiconductors. To that end, Today IBM is announcing it has created the world’s first 2 nanometer node chip.
Used to be, nanometer size had a very specific meaning related to transistor dimensions. That meaning is in the rear view mirror:
While the process node is being called ‘2 nanometer’, nothing about transistor dimensions resembles a traditional expectation of what 2nm might be. In the past, the dimension used to be an equivalent metric for 2D feature size on the chip, such as 90nm, 65nm, and 40nm. However with the advent of 3D transistor design with FinFETs and others, the process node name is now an interpretation of an ‘equivalent 2D transistor’ design.
Some of the features on this chip are likely to be low single digits in actual nanometers, such as transistor fin leakage protection layers, but it’s important to note the disconnect in how process nodes are currently named.
As long as one manufacturer’s 2nm is equivalent to another manufacturer’s 2nm in terms of performance, this seems fair.
Today’s announcement states that IBM’s 2nm development will improve performance by 45% at the same power, or 75% energy at the same performance, compared to modern 7nm processors.
Good to know. For comparison, Apple’s A14 Bionic and M1 are both 5nm.
FastCompancy, from the interview with Kaiann Drance, Apple’s VP of worldwide iPhone product marketing, and Ron Huang, senior director of sensing and connectivity:
AirTags don’t rely on an internet connection of their own. Instead, they piggyback off of a network of almost a billion iOS devices and Macs already out in the world. Each AirTag sends out a unique encrypted Bluetooth identifier; other Apple devices can detect it and relay the location of the AirTag directly to an owner’s Apple ID account.
And:
This entire process is end-to-end encrypted so that no one but the owner of the AirTag—not the owners of the crowdsourced devices picking up the AirTag’s location or even Apple itself—ever has access to the AirTag’s current or past location. And the Bluetooth identifiers that AirTags emit are not only randomized but “are rotated many times a day and never reused so that as you travel from place to place with the AirTag, you cannot be re-identified,” Huang says.
And:
The AirTag owner can never see which devices its AirTag’s location is pinging off of or who owns those devices.
And:
Every AirTag has a unique serial number printed on it, but the identity of the owner cannot be derived from that number unless that owner activates the AirTag’s Lost Mode. That’s a toggle in the Find My app that marks your AirTag as lost. Once you’ve toggled that option on, someone who finds your lost AirTag can then scan it with any NFC-equipped device (such as an iPhone or Android phone) to display a web URL prompt on that device. Tapping on the prompt will take the finder of your AirTag to an Apple support page featuring the AirTag’s unique serial number and—if the AirTag owner so chooses—the phone number of the AirTag’s owner so the finder can call or text.
And:
If you’re an iPhone owner running iOS 14.5 or later and someone slips an AirTag into your possession in secret in order to track your movements, your iPhone will warn you this has happened by sending you an “AirTag Found Moving With You” notification. This notification will appear only when an AirTag is following you that is not paired with your Apple ID or another iPhone that is in your vicinity. That distinction is critical so that your iPhone won’t be notified of AirTags that, for instance, belong to other people on the same bus you’re riding.
This whole interview is a riveting read, full of insight into how AirTags work and showing off how much thought Apple put into the privacy and safety aspects. Learned a lot reading this.
Anton Shilov, Tom’s Hardware:
As spotted via Twitter, if you want to boost the power of your Mac, it may be possible with money, skill, time and some real desire by removing the DRAM and NAND chips and adding more capacious versions.
Here’s the tweet:
https://twitter.com/duanrui1205/status/1378721039086067714
Back to Anton:
With a soldering station (its consumer variant is not that expensive at $60), DRAM memory chips and NAND flash memory chips, (which are close to impossible to buy on the consumer level), the engineers reportedly upgraded the Apple M1-based Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage to 16GB and 1TB, respectively, by de-soldering the existing components and adding more capacious chips. According to the post, no firmware modifications were necessary.
There has been a lot of discussion about the M1 memory being on the M1 chip itself. As the tweet above shows, this is a bit misleading. The memory is on the M1 SoC package, as opposed to inside the physical M1 chip.
Here’s a pic, via iFixit, that shows this up close.
Note the M1 chip, which is the silver bit with the Apple logo. And next to it are two RAM chips (the black rectangles), each one with 4GB of SK hynix LPDDR4X memory.
I tweeted about all this here. Please do reply there if you’ve got anything to add or any corrections. I find this fascinating.
Patently Apple:
In response to the development of AI, Internet of Things and other developments, the IP giant ARM Ltd. announced late yesterday that it will launch a new Armv9 architecture. This is the company’s first new Arm architecture in the last decade. It’s to roll out at the end of this year. At this point in time, it’s unknown when Apple’s adoption of this new architecture will take place.
Note that the headline is verbatim from Patently Apple. A quibble, but it implies that Apple has endorsed the new Arm architecture. That last sentence in the quote makes it clear that is not the case. Yet.
Still, this seems important news. And others are jumping on board:
Apple is usually silent when it comes to providing testimonials and this time is no different. However, many of Apple’s competitors such as Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, Google (for Android), Xiaomi and others have all signed on.
Read the article, watch the embedded video for details.
Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:
Apple introduced an innovative milled lattice pattern on the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR in 2019, which is created by machining a spherical array into the internal and external surfaces of the aluminum. The result is a lightweight lattice pattern that maximizes airflow while creating an extremely rigid structure.
The new patent, first spotted by Patently Apple and granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, is titled “Housing construction” and covers expanding the lattice pattern to other devices, such as the iPhone.
Look at that first image. When I saw the article, then the image, my first thought was a check of the date. Nope, too early for April Fools Day. This appears to be a real patent filing.
Here’s a link to the actual patent, with a page showing the cheese grater on the sides of an iPhone.
Still can’t wrap my head around the use case here. A cheese grater on a device Apple worked so hard to waterproof? Not getting it.
I watch every one of the Will It Work videos. Always an interesting twist on connecting obscure hardware/media to your iPhone.
This episode is one of my favorites. It shows off an App Store approved DOS emulator running fresh out of the package DOS games. Nice.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc.’s HomePod mini speaker launched last November with new features such as a home intercom system. But one part of the device has remained secret: a sensor that measures temperature and humidity.
And:
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant never disclosed this component and the device currently lacks consumer-facing features that use it. The company has internally discussed using the sensor to determine a room’s temperature and humidity so internet-connected thermostats can adjust different parts of a home based on current conditions, according to people familiar with the situation. The hardware could also let the HomePod mini automatically trigger other actions, say turning a fan on or off, depending on the temperature.
And:
The part is situated relatively far from the device’s main internal components, meaning it is designed to measure the external environment rather than the temperature of the speaker’s other electronics. Many mobile devices include sensors that can trigger the device to slow performance or disable features to stop components overheating.
Is the sensor for internal use only (monitoring/adjusting to environmental conditions)? As in, nothing to see here, just some normal design, folks.
Or is there, as Mark hints, a stealth opportunity to link to HomeKit in some future iteration?
Very interesting read. No clear answer.