It’s a really a shame to put such a good cpu in such an artificially limited phone. Apple already has all the elements required for effective convergence but would rather have us lug gimped devices out of greed. The current situation is so sad for actual innovation.
I don’t want a MacBook with an A19, I want to use the A19 I already have connected to a screen and a keyboard with a proper software stack.
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
It was a compelling value proposition to Crackberries of the era; Apple clearly did market research before flinging it to the masses. Danger Inc / Google were already converging on this with their first Android.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
Cannibalising their product line is probably the most plausible explanation, but I'm sceptical. I reckon it's just that they haven't found a "killer" use case for it and probably bottom in the list of ideas for improving the product (if it even made a list).
Yeah, the appetite for something iPhone like had been clear for quite some time, Apple was just the first to pull off a really solid version. Getting the touch interface right was a big factor.
But for earlier examples, I had a Palm VII back in 1999. I was working for a CRM reseller and we got one to play with as a potential solution for a client project.
It was super limited but being able to browse the web while on the go was immediately obvious as a very big deal. BlackBerries didn't get web until a couple years later but I'm sure users of that would say something similar.
There have been numerous attempts at dockable phones over the years.
> The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
No it won’t. Nobody is cross-shopping a full size laptop with screen and keyboard or a phone with a tiny screen and no keyboard.
the most recent attempt with linux is pretty good, but it was held back by the slow hardware and driver support.
If the pinephone had enough power to record a video, and maybe better waydroid integration I would use it. I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
Apple has the funding to do this, but they choose not to. It would damage their whole market segmentation scheme. It is a penetration strategy
> I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
And almost all of my apps have iPhone, iPad and Mac versions with cloud syncing of the data between them.
It’s just a flag for developers to allow iPad apps to run on ARM based Macs without any modifications.
> *and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.*
With ARM based Macs, they basically are the same except for the screen size. Compilation speed would be much slower on an iPhone than a Mac.
When the iPhone was introduced, the worldwide penetration of cell phones was already 1 billion. Jobs said he wanted to sell 10 million or 1% of the market during the first year.
The iPad and the Mac combined is 20% of Apple’s revenue. People buy iPads because they want a larger screen.
I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
> I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
Have some imagination? I know plenty of folks that use their phone as their main computer, but could use more screen space on occasion to finish a complex task at a desk with a mouse and keyboard.
Something like phone mirroring that utilizes the full display (Perhaps full macOS?) would be amazing for that use case. Could be wireless or a magsafe stand, or even a homepod-style handoff thing with the phone’s nfc chip.
The hardware for this is pretty much there, Apple just needs to productize it.
Okay you can already use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on an iPhone and the USB powered portable monitor I have can be used with my USB C iPhone. Because of power constraints, it can only drive the display up to 50% brightness. But you can plug power up to the other USB C port on my monitor to power the display at full brightness and charge the phone.
This is my iPhone 16 Pro Max with my external portable monitor. The phone is connected with a standard USB C cord and the Anker battery is plugged in with another USB C cord into the monitor.
That’s really neat, I just wish Apple would go all-in on monitor support.
There’s no good reason I shouldn’t be able to plug my phone into my Studio Display when I need a bit more room to work on a task I started on my phone. Yes, there’s handoff between iOS & macOS, but it’s very tied to specific apps, and requires another Mac that may not really be necessary.
Well, that monitor has a just a regular old monitor with two USB C ports and a mini HDMI port. I am connecting it with a regular USB C to USB C cord. There is no reason you can’t use a standard USB C to HDMI cord to connect the phone to your Studio Display.
What work would you start on your phone that doesn’t either have an app on your Mac where everything is synced via cloud services and/or there isn’t a web app where you can’t start on one and keep going on another?
I can already use GSuite (work and personal), Office365 (personal subscription), and iWorks across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad using apps and/or the web and things automatically sync and of course notes, calendar, mail, messages, Slack, etc are synced between everything.
My personal Trello board is synced between all of them and even my third party podcast app - Overcast - has an iPhone, iPad, Mac and web interface that syncs.
> The vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though
s/uninterested/unaware/
In reality, for such hardware to make sense, it would have to be a full MacBook Air minus the PCB. Would you be willing to spend 500-1000 USD for a piece of hardware that only works when your phone is connected? (i.e. an iPhone accessory)
This works with Macs, Windows PCs and USB C based iPhones and iPads. You just connect it with a USB C cable. It gets power and video from the USB C cable.
I think this is a pretty poor reading of the market. Everyone has a phone. An increasing segment now has little access to desktop or laptop computing. I know I hate that I have to pick up my laptop to do relatively small tasks that I'm halfway through on my phone.
Offering a dockable screen/keyboard/mouse, using the phone battery/compute/storage seems like it would be trivial for Apple.
Obviously cannibalises laptop or tablet sales, but that's not the market's disinterest.
It would be interesting to see a tablet sized dual mode device where the OS and user apps could seamlessly switch back and forth between a 100% touch mode UI and a 100% precision pointing mode UI without restarting or losing data.
It would mean a lot more work for developers though if your app needs two different UI designs.
One issue that sticks out is that touch controls of a usable size just take up so much more screen space.
Also, look at how many years it took Microsoft to provide touch friendly access to the Windows control panels.
I think it largely comes down to the App Store limitation at this point (the UI is... livable enough now, though it does still seem a waste to not just have the macOS UI in keyboard-attached mode). Consumers can't take things like their Steam library over and workers can't just run existing enterprise apps - it has to be Apple approved apps which fit the Apple architectural requirements and are purchased/distributed through the Apple Store.
For a small subset that is absolutely also stuff like terminal and Docker, but there's nothing special about that group beyond "they use a different set of apps not allowed in the App Store".
That's pretty much Microsoft's approach on every system now - even if you install Outlook or Teams, it's just a web app. If it weren't for that I wonder if keyboards on iPads would even still be common at all. That said, there is a heck of a lot more to enterprise apps than things like email still out there. When I was still at a health system we'd try to use tablets for new things whenever possible (they are just physically convenient in many work environments) but we'd inevitably end up with "web stuff" on the tablet and "everything else" on a laptop (sometimes with mobile cart) for this exact reason.
I also worked in B2B health SaaS companies. Even then some health systems used whatever you call the hosted Windows servers and people used their computers as dumb terminals to run apps. There were clients for iPads.
I work in customer facing cloud consulting specializing in app dev. My days are spent:
1. Zoom
2. The AWS console in a web browser
3. The terminal - and I can bring up CloudShell for simple things from the AWS web console
4. Slack/Notion/GSuite apps/Jira
5. Visual Studio Code and using Docker. For that, I would just spin up a Windows based AWS WorkSpace with the iPad client app and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference when using a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Most “enterprise apps” these days are web based SaaS apps.
The PC games market is really not that large in the grand scheme of things and what serious game player would want to play games on laptop class hardware? Even with the iPad Pro you are talking about MacBook Air level hardware with worse thermals for games.
And the most popular office Apps - Microsoft Office and GSuite are a per seat license - for both home and office. Meaning you can use the apps on your phone, laptop, or mobile devices and sync apps between them.
How many productivity apps don’t “fit in Apple’s guideline”?
You should talk to this person for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399380 since they argue these chips are already ideal for high intensity video games. It doesn't have to be AAA titles though, many games (simple and advance) make it to the "top paid apps" section of the app store once they "make the leap across" so to say. The thing is, not every game/app has made the leap, and when they do they don't all transfer ownership.
I don't mean office apps, I mean enterprise apps. I do see them becoming more web focused with time (which I think is a good thing - it's ultra portable when they are) but we're certainly not ready to claim victory just because most email and document editing can be done from a webview. Hell, there's one app I have to use daily which is still officially only 32 bit Windows (it, thankfully, works in Crossover).
What are these enterprise apps? And how many of them would run on an ARM based Mac? If they don’t port them to Macs, what are the chances they would port them to iPads?
Interesting how people rationalize this stuff. My phone can dock to a screen; I've never used the feature, but it doesn't obstruct anything I do. It's a nice-to-have, and it would be kinda appealing if Firefox and Spotify both work like normal. I might even deign to say I could get work done on it (though I've never tried).
Presumably the real reason is that Apple is still afraid to segment their market. A plug-in iPhone would stop people from buying the AppleTV or Mac Mini for home theater applications.
I'll chuck in another rationalisation from just one angle (of many). It's a low in demand feature that if they implement they would have to support. One thing that Apple does incredibly well (I really can't think of any tech company that comes close) is provide front line support for virtually every capability and feature in the Apple ecosystem. This means they have to resource support people to know how the feature works, and troubleshoot it when things have issue, dedicate engineer resources if an issue cannot be fixed and requires escalation, etc.
Just having such a feature involves a cost, and the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
Curious, if your phone supports the feature and it doesn't work, what is your recourse?
You really think Apple is worried about the sales of the AppleTV and Mac Mini? Two of their lowest selling devices? You can already plug an iPhone into a TV for video with a standard non proprietary HDMI to USB C cable and AirPlay is available on $49 Roku sticks.
Only around 10% of Apple’s revenue is the Mac and every estimate is 70% of those are laptops. The AppleTV is far behind in market share for media center devices or whatever you call Roku, Fire sticks etc.
You can already stream from your iPhone via AirPlay to at least Roku sticks/TVs and I assume others. The number of people who want to use an iPhone as a full computer is miniscule.
Yeah, I totally agree with you but usually people who complain about not being able to plug their phone want a desktop, not a laptop. Even then, sitting down at a desk gives you a thermal envelope that is only limited by the noise of its cooling, so you can put extremely powerful chips on desktops again defeating the purpose.
I stopped using Windows when Microsoft made it obvious that they fully intend to force users to use an online account to log into their own local machine.
Requiring an online account if you want to use optional online features was perfectly acceptable.
This bodes well for the rumored entry level MacBook with an A-series chip inside. If they can get the price on those down to $500-$600 it’ll run circles around everything else at the price point.
Surely the cost to Apple of A-series vs M-series isn't that significant though? I'd think they'd need to cut a lot (or their margin) to get down to that price point on a laptop.
One big difference is volume. They sell way, way more A-series devices than M-series devices and so they may benefit from economy of scale.
With all of Apple's service offerings these days, they could also potentially justify slim margins by positioning the A-series MacBook as both a loss leader and gateway drug.
The future is going to be a single line of chips that goes into iPhone, iPad and Mac. Pricing doesn't have much to do with it. If Apple wanted to sell a $500 MacBook they would have done it already. The processor isn't what is standing in the way.
What do you mean "future"? This is already the case. M-series chips share the same architecture with A-series CPUs. If you increase the A19 core count you'll end up with something close to M5.
They could technically do it today but I imagine they want differentiation so that the cheap MacBook doesn't cannibalize sales of the Air and Pro too heavily.
I'm a backend dev, I've been using a base model m1 air since it was released, I've never felt it slow down, I still have no reason to update. 99% of people who will buy these entry level machines will not hit thermal throttling or if they do they won't care
I’m a backend dev with an m1max and 64gb ram. I run golang, various docker containers and an occasional ollama llm plus a few games. This machine still feels like it has infinite resources.
Man, it's wild how we have such different experiences. I have a base level M1 air, and I feel like it chugs along anytime I ask it to do anything even vaguely computationally expensive. Obviously that's not rigorous, but that's my subjective impression.
This is similar to me, without ollama. I sometimes fantasize about a new MacBook but even my docker containers offload their hard work to apis, so outside of memory, I do not want for much.
My m1max is getting along quite nicely, I love this thing.
I disagree. I’ve used a M1 air as my daily driver at work for the last four years. It only ever truly throttles during periods where I’m running one build after another for ~half an hour plus. If anything, the limit on memory to 16GB is the real killer
More interesting, these results are from the base iPhone with the base A19, not the iPhone Pro with a vapor chamber to act as a heat spreader and the A19 Pro.
I've been using an M1 since release date and I never have my fans kick in unless I'm doing something that pegs CPU for minutes on end. The last time I noticed fans spinning was the last time I ran a benchmark.
The A series has been passively cooled for 15 years inside of systems with much less thermal mass.
Not really a problem with how those usually only throttle with sustained load. Very few people do anything that keeps the CPU tied up for longer than a minute or two.
And even then, my M1 air is still fast under sustained load. As fast as it would be with a fan? Surely not. But fast enough that unless I'm racing compilers or something I really don't care.
It helps that for heavier work I tend to use my desktop I guess.
Yeah these things have margin for days, so they’re still reasonably snappy even when throttled. It’s not like you’re cut back to Intel Atom performance levels or something.
Ehh. A lot of people play games. I can make the fans spin heavy on my m3 pro. Especially when most games on mac today mean running through a translation layer and weren't multithreaded to begin with. Throttling is a nonstarter for games. Might be ok for compiling but for gaming the lag induced by throttling makes it entirely unplayable.
This is great news for the entire ARM ecosystem. The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.
> The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.
Haven't they been playing leap frog for years now? I avoid the ARM ecosystem now because of how non-standardized BIOS is (especially after being burned with several different SoC purchases), and I prefer compatibility over performance, but I think there have been some high performance ARM chips for quite some time
I came to realize by soldering a lot of fast ram on to the board of newer laptops and phones, maybe it's not the instruction set that matters that much.
Modern Apple hardware has so much more memory bandwidth than the x86 systems they're being compared to - I'm not sure it's apples to apples.
I talked to a guy who'd worked at Apple on the chips. He more or less said the same thing, it's the memory that's all the difference.
This makes a lot of sense. If the calculations are fast, they need to be fed quickly. You don't want to spend a bunch of time shuffling various caches.
Memory bandwidth/latency is helpful in certain scenarios, but it can be easily oversold in the performance portion of the story. E.g. the 9950X and 9950X3D are within less than 1/20th of a percentage point of each other in PassMark Single thread (feeding a single core is dead easy) but have a spread of ~6.4% (in favor of the 9950X3D) in the multi-thread (where the cache is starting to help on the one CCD). It could just as easily have been in the other direction or 10 times as much depending on what the benchmark was trying to do. For most day to day user workloads the performance difference from memory bandwidth/latency is the "nil to some" though.
Meanwhile the AI Max+ 395 has at least twice the bandwidth + same number of cores and comes to more like a ~15% loss on single and ~30% loss on multithread due to other "traditional" reasons for performance difference. I still like my 395 though, but more for the following reason.
The more practical advantage of soldered memory on mobile devices is the power/heat reductions, same with increasing the cache on e-cores to get something out of every possible cycle you power rather than try to increase the overall computation with more wattage (i.e. transistors or clocks). Better bandwidth/latency is a cool bonus though.
For a hard number the iPhone 17 Pro Max is supposed to be around 76 GB/s, yet my iPhone 17 Pro Max has a higher PassMark single core performance score than my 9800X3D with larger L3 cache and RAM operating at >100 GB/s. The iPhone does have a TSMC node advantage to consider as well, but I still think it just comes out ahead due to "better overall engineering".
It's very possible I am misinterpreting, but the A19 seems to have less total memory bandwidth than, say, a 9800x (but not by much). And far less than the Max and Ultra chips that go into MacBooks.
So I think there's more to it than memory bandwidth.
A19 has WAY less bandwidth on its 64-bit bus than desktop chips with 128-bit busses . AMD’s strix halo is also slower despite a 256-bit bus.
Pushing this point further, x86 chips are also slower when the entire task fits in cache.
The real observation is how this isn’t some Apple black magic. All three of the big ARM core designers (Apple, ARM, and Qualcomm) are now beating x86 in raw performance and stomping them in performance per watt (and in performance per watt per area).
It’s not just apples deep pockets either. AMD spent more in R&D than ARM’s entire gross profit margin last I checked. Either AMD sucks or x86 has more technical roadblocks than some people like to believe.
X86 compete based on clock speed for the longest time so they use cell libraries designed for higher that. This means the transistors are larger and less dense. Arm cores are targeted at energy efficiency first so they use denser cells that doesn’t clock as fast. The trade off is they can have larger reorder buffers and larger scheduling windows to squeeze better ipc. As frequency scaling slows but not so much density scaling you get better results going the slower route.
This is cool but it’s just one benchmark. It’s not clear to me what exactly PassMark even measures. That doesn’t mean the result is “wrong” but take it with a grain of salt
PassMark single threaded test is a very simple synthetic benchmark according to their docs:
> The single threaded test is an aggregate of the floating point, string sorting and data compression tests.
It’s an impressive score, but there’s more to performance in real apps than these three simple tests. This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip and the great job they did keeping it fed, but PassMark single threaded is about the simplest measurement you can do.
Modern CPUs aren’t really optimized for peak floating point throughput because any GPU will do a much better job at that. It’s also not clear if they actually use SIMD features of the chips, where desktop and server class parts should be able to walk away from the Apple phone chip due to their higher power limit alone.
> This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip
Apple's in house silicon strategy has long been to create wide cores that perform more instructions per clock cycle and then run the cores at a conservative clock speed for power savings.
Running up the clock speed for performance no matter what effect that has on power consumption and heat has been what we've seen from Qualcomm/Intel/AMD/Nvidia.
In Geekbench multicore:
> the A19 Pro delivered a powerful multi-core score of 11,054... while using a remarkably low 12.1W of power... To put that into perspective, other flagship chips from the Android camp had to push their power consumption much higher to even come close to its scores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite, for instance, had to use 17W of power to complete the same benchmark. Meanwhile, the Dimensity 9400 consumed a staggering 18.4W.
PassMark and Geekbench are closed source. I don't know why I should trust them to e.g. treat fundamentally different kinds of devices in a sane and fair way. They have vastly different cooling mechanisms, for one. It matters if they can sustain a certain load for 5 minutes or for 5 hours.
If you have a specific use case in mind you might as well just test that use case directly. E.g. PTS (Phoronix Test Suite) is not a traditional benchmark, it's a workload tester, and it's right up that alley (though you then run into the problem of "the workload I care to compare doesn't run on an iPhone at all", at which point you either compare generalities again or don't care anymore).
In some other context I'd be inclined to agree, but I swear the moment there's an open benchmark, it's going to get gamed by someone. So long as there's money to be made, the incentives don't align, look at Volkswagen for some inspiration.
SPEC has been the industry standard performance benchmark for comparing between different CPU architectures for decades.
It takes all freaking day to run, but Anandtech published the benchmarks as soon as they got their grubby little hands on a new core design for every well known architecture.
Is GeekerWan on YouTube the only outlet still doing this today, albeit in Chinese with English subtitles?
You would think that Chips and Cheese, at least, would take up the gauntlet.
Another reason why Apple should allow the UTM project to use the JIT API in their iOS app. I want to virtualize ARM64 Linux VMs on the fastest CPU in the world. Apple could put Android's Termux to shame, but they don't want to do that, and therefore I have no use for them. What great things are iPhone users going to do with a fast locked down phone? Play Roblox at 120 FPS? Doom scroll at 2x speed? Not know how to use their phone (but faster)?
Does income or number of apps matter for anything here? Like, if given the choice, would you rather only play games from App Store or only games from Steam?
The point they're making is obvious. iOS was and still is a platform for mobile applications and mobile games. Despite how much processing power is crammed into those devices, you can't use similarly for "serious work". All that power will never be used to run actual games (like games from a PC or a console), or render a 3D model in Blender, or do CAD work, or run "full" versions of any software that has a cut-down mobile variant. Which begs the question - why mimic the power of a full computer while having no way of doing the work that full computers need all that power for?
This is correct. What I'm pointing out is that the point they were making wasn't just about pure quantity, even though that's what they said directly. Obviously, the implication is that they're talking about "real" games, as in fully-produced games that are published on PCs and consoles. You may disagree over this point, but I thought this implied subtext was very obvious.
"the market", I preffer to say consumers, becuase I am not a fucking beancouter MBA, demand videogames, is the bigest entertaiment industry in the world, bigger than movies and music combined.
By your own logic because Apple does not sell spread sheet software, databases or porn, "the market" does not demand it.
There have been many games released for iOS. In fact iOS makes up about a third of all revenue for video games. Also just because it can't play some old game for PCs, it doesn't mean that it's useless. It just means that people may have to do work to port those old workloads to iOS if they want legacy software to use new, powerful hardware.
There are already CPUs from companies like Qualcomm that come close in performance and are available to anyone with a large bank account.
The iPhone chips are great but even if they were 2X as fast as the competition it’s not going to open up an entire new world of use cases that don’t already exist
Qualcomm & Samsung kind of fill the market for high end mobile CPU though. I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.
Fair, to entertain the thought though, it'd make little sense if it was COTS due to either a loss or razor thin margins due to low demand. However nobody is stopping a hardware integrator approaching Apple to use it, but it'd probably be stupid expensive and shrouded in secrecy as Apple would not want to cede full control of its deployment due to things like Secure Enclave.
I think it's less about what hardware integrators want more what Apple doesn't want. Apple tries to be as soup to nuts about their solution as possible, they don't want to piece that out to give some of the margin of the best pieces to a 3rd party trying to compete with them instead. Anything they could pay is just from revenue Apple could already target directly and keep all of to themselves.
Everything has a price though. If you offered half of Apple's market cap, I'm sure they'd be changing their tune. (Yes it is an exaggeration, but my point is that there are exceptions.)
The problem lies in that Apple already gets 100% of the profit from being vertically integrated today (so the offer would not only need to be large, but more than what one could reasonably hope to make in return). If it were just that Apple had a really good CPU then both Apple and the 3rd party(ies) would be able to come to the table with a net positive deal, but vertical integration makes it so only 1 party (Apple, in this case) can come out ahead until they are dethroned for other reasons completely.
Wouldn't it be so cool if you could actually do anything with it? Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH, because of course you're never going to take it to a track.
It was only intended for highway travel at best.
But hey, you can scroll at 120hz now, right? Think different!
All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with.
Upvoted because 90% of your comment is great so doesn't deserve to be grayed out, but the Intel bit is wrong. I would definitely recommend checking out AMDs offerings and then backpedaling on the Intel claim because even my four year old AMD chip absolutely screams
> All this tells me is that Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips that you can do anything with.
From context you seem to be talking about overclocking. In which case only a handful of Intel chips are unlocked per generation. By contrast, most of AMD chips are unlocked.
It’s definitely sad and weird. Times and people have changed.
For whatever reason the community now is filled with a weird mix of corporate bootlickers who want to give the largest corporations money while they take away our freedoms and they simultaneously want to make known their entitled behavior by claiming individual developers and small businesses should only ever give away their software for free.
It was bad enough people here chime in technical conversations that they have no experience with loudly contesting the points of actual experts and practitioners, but now they also want to tell us that we don’t have a right to use our property how we want.
It’s definitely sad and weird. Times and people have changed.
Yeah, I grew up tinkering with Linux since 1994; was good times. I've changed.
For whatever reason the community now is filled with a weird mix of corporate bootlickers who want to give the largest corporations money while they take away our freedoms and they simultaneously want to make known their entitled behavior by claiming individual developers and small businesses should only ever give away their software for free.
A bit after the turn of the millennium I became legally blind and I also needed to eat. Apple was able to serve my needs with their accessibility tools and keep me fully functional without additional costs beyond the hardware and base software, and still to this day. Nothing had come close back then nor now. While I appreciate Stallman's ideals and how he wouldn't use assistive technology if it isn't free software, I can't succumb to those artificial restrictions. The reality is that I would have been much worse off financially, being self-sufficient, going through studies, progressing in my career, etc. if it wasn't for Apple's accessibility tech. So yeah I'll own the whole corporate bootlicker nonsense, and it's why in later years of my life I now invest in Apple, because they deliver usable solutions to real problems to the vast population rather than cater to an insignificant population with piddly ideals.
It must be nice if your only issue with tech is that you need it to go brrrrrrrr.
Even if times have changed I will keep being anoying about this.
The hacker culture is something that fascinated me as teenager and the reason I am able to pay the bills today. I don't really know what would be of me without it.
As another commenter said, the part with Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips, doesn't really makes sense.
Right now Intel is losing a lot, lucky to them Nvidia invested. So far I would only use AMD. In my desktop is an AMD, because it is just the fastest desktop CPU und the threadrippers are absolute multicore beasts for servers.
I've been super impressed with AMD chips as well. I have actually had to try to find CPU bound use cases because the damn thing is so fast it makes you question if it actually worked
This is what they are saying - the power is there, but iOS severely gets in the way of interacting with it properly any time you step out of the box of "touch first Apple approved mobile experiences". It'd be awesome if one device could be my phone and laptop instead of trying to make do with the screen share on two completely separate systems.
The iPads even more so, as some literally have the same kinds of hardware as a MacBook already (minus the keyboard detaches).
Android and ChromeOS are merging for these kinds of experiences https://chromeunboxed.com/its-official-google-says-the-andro... and both have already opened up to running anything you'd like in Linux on the side. That said, Android wasn't exactly my first pick of flexibility either.
> Buy a laptop you’ll be ok.
This kind of comment is uncalled for. Anyways, as mentioned, I do the screenshare to a MacBook today. The advantage of having both is clearly for Apple though, not me.
Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH
What workload are you envisaging to be run on an iPhone where this even matters? Hyperbole aside, what target population of iPhone users even care about overclocking, and specifically what tangible benefit will they get out of it?
You are completely missing his point. It's not about the mhz, it's about making a super high performence product but refusing to let you use it for things that actually benefit from that performance.
I actually really don’t see the point. Yea, in this consumer smart phone, there are limits on what you can do with this chip because the operating system is tuned for phone stuff, not workstation stuff.
But there’s good news — this architecture will end up in MacBooks, Mac minis, Mac Studios etc.
It’s like complaining that they put a good engine in a civic when you can also buy that good engine in other configurations that will let you do more with it.
I was asking in quantity rather than identifying those users; tacitly implying that there is a negligible amount of users that actually care or want this as top priority. I know some people, especially on a site like this, might find offence in this, but I'm just stating the reality of the situation.
The focus on profit instead of hacker culture is the cancer of this site.
To me feels like you have a paratistic relationship with the brand of your phone maker. And you will fight other individuals to defend their monopolistic actions.
I mean my relationship with the brand or phone maker is immaterial, even though I have a significant investment and appreciate their direction in general.
But to address your concern, Apple is clearly not for you and that is fine, you have choices, like the premium value and control you get with PinePhone. No corporate bootlicking required!
So a market already exists for those that want full control over hardware and embrace hacker culture and don't subject you to corporate bootlicking, yet this is still not enough? I actually meant what I said when I say Apple is not for you, because this is a segment of the market they're not interested in.
If it matters to you, put your money where your mouth is, and support the markets and initiatives that embodies your values; you never know, you could contribute to efforts in creating a CPU that surpasses Apple or whoever is the incumbent.
It’s a really a shame to put such a good cpu in such an artificially limited phone. Apple already has all the elements required for effective convergence but would rather have us lug gimped devices out of greed. The current situation is so sad for actual innovation.
I don’t want a MacBook with an A19, I want to use the A19 I already have connected to a screen and a keyboard with a proper software stack.
What can’t you do on your phone? You can even code it.
The vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though. So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice.
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.
It was a compelling value proposition to Crackberries of the era; Apple clearly did market research before flinging it to the masses. Danger Inc / Google were already converging on this with their first Android.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
Cannibalising their product line is probably the most plausible explanation, but I'm sceptical. I reckon it's just that they haven't found a "killer" use case for it and probably bottom in the list of ideas for improving the product (if it even made a list).
Yeah, the appetite for something iPhone like had been clear for quite some time, Apple was just the first to pull off a really solid version. Getting the touch interface right was a big factor.
But for earlier examples, I had a Palm VII back in 1999. I was working for a CRM reseller and we got one to play with as a potential solution for a client project.
It was super limited but being able to browse the web while on the go was immediately obvious as a very big deal. BlackBerries didn't get web until a couple years later but I'm sure users of that would say something similar.
There have been numerous attempts at dockable phones over the years.
> The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.
No it won’t. Nobody is cross-shopping a full size laptop with screen and keyboard or a phone with a tiny screen and no keyboard.
the most recent attempt with linux is pretty good, but it was held back by the slow hardware and driver support.
If the pinephone had enough power to record a video, and maybe better waydroid integration I would use it. I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
Apple has the funding to do this, but they choose not to. It would damage their whole market segmentation scheme. It is a penetration strategy
> I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.
And almost all of my apps have iPhone, iPad and Mac versions with cloud syncing of the data between them.
It’s just a flag for developers to allow iPad apps to run on ARM based Macs without any modifications.
> *and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.*
With ARM based Macs, they basically are the same except for the screen size. Compilation speed would be much slower on an iPhone than a Mac.
When the iPhone was introduced, the worldwide penetration of cell phones was already 1 billion. Jobs said he wanted to sell 10 million or 1% of the market during the first year.
The iPad and the Mac combined is 20% of Apple’s revenue. People buy iPads because they want a larger screen.
I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
> I mean you can carry around a portable USB C monitor and plug it into your iPhone today. I have one that gets power and video from one USB cord for my laptop. But most people don’t want to do that.
Have some imagination? I know plenty of folks that use their phone as their main computer, but could use more screen space on occasion to finish a complex task at a desk with a mouse and keyboard.
Something like phone mirroring that utilizes the full display (Perhaps full macOS?) would be amazing for that use case. Could be wireless or a magsafe stand, or even a homepod-style handoff thing with the phone’s nfc chip.
The hardware for this is pretty much there, Apple just needs to productize it.
Okay you can already use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on an iPhone and the USB powered portable monitor I have can be used with my USB C iPhone. Because of power constraints, it can only drive the display up to 50% brightness. But you can plug power up to the other USB C port on my monitor to power the display at full brightness and charge the phone.
This is my iPhone 16 Pro Max with my external portable monitor. The phone is connected with a standard USB C cord and the Anker battery is plugged in with another USB C cord into the monitor.
https://imgur.com/a/1Fv6Zc6
I had my Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with me. There is no reason I couldn’t pair them to my phone.
That’s really neat, I just wish Apple would go all-in on monitor support.
There’s no good reason I shouldn’t be able to plug my phone into my Studio Display when I need a bit more room to work on a task I started on my phone. Yes, there’s handoff between iOS & macOS, but it’s very tied to specific apps, and requires another Mac that may not really be necessary.
Well, that monitor has a just a regular old monitor with two USB C ports and a mini HDMI port. I am connecting it with a regular USB C to USB C cord. There is no reason you can’t use a standard USB C to HDMI cord to connect the phone to your Studio Display.
What work would you start on your phone that doesn’t either have an app on your Mac where everything is synced via cloud services and/or there isn’t a web app where you can’t start on one and keep going on another?
I can already use GSuite (work and personal), Office365 (personal subscription), and iWorks across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad using apps and/or the web and things automatically sync and of course notes, calendar, mail, messages, Slack, etc are synced between everything.
My personal Trello board is synced between all of them and even my third party podcast app - Overcast - has an iPhone, iPad, Mac and web interface that syncs.
> The vast majority of the market is totally uninterested in docking their phone like that though
s/uninterested/unaware/
In reality, for such hardware to make sense, it would have to be a full MacBook Air minus the PCB. Would you be willing to spend 500-1000 USD for a piece of hardware that only works when your phone is connected? (i.e. an iPhone accessory)
I simply ask that Apple let me plug my phone into any USB-C dock and use it as if I had done the same with a MacBook.
a bluetooth mouse and keyboard wouldn't suffice? I just found one on amazon for $20
You’re gonna replace your 13/15inch laptop with a 6inch phone screen?
This works with Macs, Windows PCs and USB C based iPhones and iPads. You just connect it with a USB C cable. It gets power and video from the USB C cable.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GG31KX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
I take it with me when I travel.
I think this is a pretty poor reading of the market. Everyone has a phone. An increasing segment now has little access to desktop or laptop computing. I know I hate that I have to pick up my laptop to do relatively small tasks that I'm halfway through on my phone.
Offering a dockable screen/keyboard/mouse, using the phone battery/compute/storage seems like it would be trivial for Apple.
Obviously cannibalises laptop or tablet sales, but that's not the market's disinterest.
>An increasing segment now has little access to desktop or laptop computing.
source? or are we just going off vibes here?
It would be interesting to see a tablet sized dual mode device where the OS and user apps could seamlessly switch back and forth between a 100% touch mode UI and a 100% precision pointing mode UI without restarting or losing data.
It would mean a lot more work for developers though if your app needs two different UI designs.
One issue that sticks out is that touch controls of a usable size just take up so much more screen space.
Also, look at how many years it took Microsoft to provide touch friendly access to the Windows control panels.
I thought the same about putting keyboards on iPads, especially with how limited those still are, but now I don't know what to expect.
So exactly how is an iPad limited for most people with iOS 26?
Please don’t say because they need to run a terminal and Docker.
I think it largely comes down to the App Store limitation at this point (the UI is... livable enough now, though it does still seem a waste to not just have the macOS UI in keyboard-attached mode). Consumers can't take things like their Steam library over and workers can't just run existing enterprise apps - it has to be Apple approved apps which fit the Apple architectural requirements and are purchased/distributed through the Apple Store.
For a small subset that is absolutely also stuff like terminal and Docker, but there's nothing special about that group beyond "they use a different set of apps not allowed in the App Store".
> workers can't just run existing enterprise apps
On iOS, Microsoft apps and a web browser can get you fairly far for many business/corporate use cases.
That's pretty much Microsoft's approach on every system now - even if you install Outlook or Teams, it's just a web app. If it weren't for that I wonder if keyboards on iPads would even still be common at all. That said, there is a heck of a lot more to enterprise apps than things like email still out there. When I was still at a health system we'd try to use tablets for new things whenever possible (they are just physically convenient in many work environments) but we'd inevitably end up with "web stuff" on the tablet and "everything else" on a laptop (sometimes with mobile cart) for this exact reason.
I also worked in B2B health SaaS companies. Even then some health systems used whatever you call the hosted Windows servers and people used their computers as dumb terminals to run apps. There were clients for iPads.
I work in customer facing cloud consulting specializing in app dev. My days are spent:
1. Zoom
2. The AWS console in a web browser
3. The terminal - and I can bring up CloudShell for simple things from the AWS web console
4. Slack/Notion/GSuite apps/Jira
5. Visual Studio Code and using Docker. For that, I would just spin up a Windows based AWS WorkSpace with the iPad client app and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference when using a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Most people don’t need #5
Most “enterprise apps” these days are web based SaaS apps.
The PC games market is really not that large in the grand scheme of things and what serious game player would want to play games on laptop class hardware? Even with the iPad Pro you are talking about MacBook Air level hardware with worse thermals for games.
And the most popular office Apps - Microsoft Office and GSuite are a per seat license - for both home and office. Meaning you can use the apps on your phone, laptop, or mobile devices and sync apps between them.
How many productivity apps don’t “fit in Apple’s guideline”?
You should talk to this person for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399380 since they argue these chips are already ideal for high intensity video games. It doesn't have to be AAA titles though, many games (simple and advance) make it to the "top paid apps" section of the app store once they "make the leap across" so to say. The thing is, not every game/app has made the leap, and when they do they don't all transfer ownership.
I don't mean office apps, I mean enterprise apps. I do see them becoming more web focused with time (which I think is a good thing - it's ultra portable when they are) but we're certainly not ready to claim victory just because most email and document editing can be done from a webview. Hell, there's one app I have to use daily which is still officially only 32 bit Windows (it, thankfully, works in Crossover).
What are these enterprise apps? And how many of them would run on an ARM based Mac? If they don’t port them to Macs, what are the chances they would port them to iPads?
You seem very confident.
Did you come to that conclusion based on the market not using a product that doesn’t exist?
Maybe they came to that conclusion based on the market ignoring a product that did exist and that’s why the product doesn’t exist now.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/canonical-unveils-ub...
> So Apple et all are making a reasonable choice.
Interesting how people rationalize this stuff. My phone can dock to a screen; I've never used the feature, but it doesn't obstruct anything I do. It's a nice-to-have, and it would be kinda appealing if Firefox and Spotify both work like normal. I might even deign to say I could get work done on it (though I've never tried).
Presumably the real reason is that Apple is still afraid to segment their market. A plug-in iPhone would stop people from buying the AppleTV or Mac Mini for home theater applications.
I'll chuck in another rationalisation from just one angle (of many). It's a low in demand feature that if they implement they would have to support. One thing that Apple does incredibly well (I really can't think of any tech company that comes close) is provide front line support for virtually every capability and feature in the Apple ecosystem. This means they have to resource support people to know how the feature works, and troubleshoot it when things have issue, dedicate engineer resources if an issue cannot be fixed and requires escalation, etc.
Just having such a feature involves a cost, and the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
Curious, if your phone supports the feature and it doesn't work, what is your recourse?
Chrome on Android doesn't allow you to use plugins like uBlock Origin.
People manage to rationalize that decision, which makes the web largely unusable for users in the name of protecting Google's bottom line.
Thankfully, there are other options.
Great advice, thanks for sharing! I use Firefox/Gecko with upstream Ublock Origin on Android, like I said one comment ago.
You should try it, but you might need a desktop computer if your smartphone discriminates against browser engines.
Until Google blocks Firefox on Android the way they have already blocked the full version of uBlock Origin from working in desktop Chrome?
They seem very serious about using every lever at their disposal to prevent YouTube users from having access to adblock that works.
You really think Apple is worried about the sales of the AppleTV and Mac Mini? Two of their lowest selling devices? You can already plug an iPhone into a TV for video with a standard non proprietary HDMI to USB C cable and AirPlay is available on $49 Roku sticks.
Presumably. Is your guess any better?
Only around 10% of Apple’s revenue is the Mac and every estimate is 70% of those are laptops. The AppleTV is far behind in market share for media center devices or whatever you call Roku, Fire sticks etc.
You can already stream from your iPhone via AirPlay to at least Roku sticks/TVs and I assume others. The number of people who want to use an iPhone as a full computer is miniscule.
As someone who loves their laptop, I couldn't disagree more. I would absolutely love a single device with that kind of flexibility.
I'd be happy with a mac tablet running the A19 with a cut to the bone macos, that would be quite something.
MacBook logic board is probably less than 20% of its total cost.
So by the time you put screen, speakers, keyboard, trackpad, battery, ports, case, hinge, charging into your dock you might as well computer there.
Yeah, I totally agree with you but usually people who complain about not being able to plug their phone want a desktop, not a laptop. Even then, sitting down at a desk gives you a thermal envelope that is only limited by the noise of its cooling, so you can put extremely powerful chips on desktops again defeating the purpose.
People are OK with a dictator as long as they think they are acting in their interest.
See Apple, but also US politics.
Speak for yourself.
I stopped using Windows when Microsoft made it obvious that they fully intend to force users to use an online account to log into their own local machine.
Requiring an online account if you want to use optional online features was perfectly acceptable.
Needing an online account to access your own PC?
Absolutely not.
Nobody said that Windows has no problems.
and Linus?
This bodes well for the rumored entry level MacBook with an A-series chip inside. If they can get the price on those down to $500-$600 it’ll run circles around everything else at the price point.
Yeah, several people noticed that the A19 has similar performance to the M2 which is still a great CPU.
The M2 scores 3894 on single core. At 5149, this should be noticeably (~30%) faster in single threaded applications.
Surely the cost to Apple of A-series vs M-series isn't that significant though? I'd think they'd need to cut a lot (or their margin) to get down to that price point on a laptop.
The M1 Air at Wal-Mart has gone on sale for as low as $599 already. The M4 Air goes on sale for $799 pretty regularly.
I would expect to see them use the same sort of game plan for an A series MacBook that they used with the iPhone SE.
Use previous gen parts for items like the screen and body (for cost savings) along with current gen SOCs.
One big difference is volume. They sell way, way more A-series devices than M-series devices and so they may benefit from economy of scale.
With all of Apple's service offerings these days, they could also potentially justify slim margins by positioning the A-series MacBook as both a loss leader and gateway drug.
Mac mini at 600, MacBook Air at 1000
Apple TV 4K at 200, MacBook at 600
Back of the napkin math but it checks out.
The future is going to be a single line of chips that goes into iPhone, iPad and Mac. Pricing doesn't have much to do with it. If Apple wanted to sell a $500 MacBook they would have done it already. The processor isn't what is standing in the way.
What do you mean "future"? This is already the case. M-series chips share the same architecture with A-series CPUs. If you increase the A19 core count you'll end up with something close to M5.
They could technically do it today but I imagine they want differentiation so that the cheap MacBook doesn't cannibalize sales of the Air and Pro too heavily.
It would be nice to have these CPUs benchmarked like for like using the same OS as the M-series. Unsure if that changes anything.
It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.
I'm a backend dev, I've been using a base model m1 air since it was released, I've never felt it slow down, I still have no reason to update. 99% of people who will buy these entry level machines will not hit thermal throttling or if they do they won't care
I’m a backend dev with an m1max and 64gb ram. I run golang, various docker containers and an occasional ollama llm plus a few games. This machine still feels like it has infinite resources.
Man, it's wild how we have such different experiences. I have a base level M1 air, and I feel like it chugs along anytime I ask it to do anything even vaguely computationally expensive. Obviously that's not rigorous, but that's my subjective impression.
This is similar to me, without ollama. I sometimes fantasize about a new MacBook but even my docker containers offload their hard work to apis, so outside of memory, I do not want for much.
My m1max is getting along quite nicely, I love this thing.
"backend dev" does not say much. What language are you using?
I disagree. I’ve used a M1 air as my daily driver at work for the last four years. It only ever truly throttles during periods where I’m running one build after another for ~half an hour plus. If anything, the limit on memory to 16GB is the real killer
Sure, under a heavy sustained multithreaded load it’ll throttle.
But the average user will never encounter this. Typical web browsing and office tasks are bursty and mostly single threaded.
Gaming is the only area where it may be more of a problem. But it’s fine for this to simply not be a great gaming laptop. Most laptops aren’t.
Still, detracts from the glory of "the fastest single-core CPU in the world on PassMark"
Not really. The fact that it came out on top in an iPhone when all the others use large heat sinks and fans makes this result even more impressive.
More interesting, these results are from the base iPhone with the base A19, not the iPhone Pro with a vapor chamber to act as a heat spreader and the A19 Pro.
I've been using an M1 since release date and I never have my fans kick in unless I'm doing something that pegs CPU for minutes on end. The last time I noticed fans spinning was the last time I ran a benchmark.
The A series has been passively cooled for 15 years inside of systems with much less thermal mass.
It will probably have no fan and throttle under real work like the m series air.
Ah but a Chromebook or low end budget PC laptop will? From experience these things fire up like jet engines just to open a text editor.
I use my M4 MBA as my personal laptop. Never once felt I was overloading it an it was being throttled.
Claude Code, some light video and photo editing, YouTube, and Netflix.
Not sure what others using an entry level laptop would expect it to do.
I'm using M3 Air for a zoo of development (from native code compilation, to high level orchestration) and it barely loads the CPU.
Not really a problem with how those usually only throttle with sustained load. Very few people do anything that keeps the CPU tied up for longer than a minute or two.
And even then, my M1 air is still fast under sustained load. As fast as it would be with a fan? Surely not. But fast enough that unless I'm racing compilers or something I really don't care.
It helps that for heavier work I tend to use my desktop I guess.
Yeah these things have margin for days, so they’re still reasonably snappy even when throttled. It’s not like you’re cut back to Intel Atom performance levels or something.
Ehh. A lot of people play games. I can make the fans spin heavy on my m3 pro. Especially when most games on mac today mean running through a translation layer and weren't multithreaded to begin with. Throttling is a nonstarter for games. Might be ok for compiling but for gaming the lag induced by throttling makes it entirely unplayable.
Were you anticipating people playing (probably AAA) games on a budget Macbook?
These aren’t modern AAA games that spool fans. Well they were 10 years ago when they came out I guess.
This is great news for the entire ARM ecosystem. The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.
> The fact that ARM is now exceeding the best x86 CPUs marks a historical turning point, and other manufacturers are sure to follow suit.
Haven't they been playing leap frog for years now? I avoid the ARM ecosystem now because of how non-standardized BIOS is (especially after being burned with several different SoC purchases), and I prefer compatibility over performance, but I think there have been some high performance ARM chips for quite some time
I came to realize by soldering a lot of fast ram on to the board of newer laptops and phones, maybe it's not the instruction set that matters that much.
Modern Apple hardware has so much more memory bandwidth than the x86 systems they're being compared to - I'm not sure it's apples to apples.
I talked to a guy who'd worked at Apple on the chips. He more or less said the same thing, it's the memory that's all the difference.
This makes a lot of sense. If the calculations are fast, they need to be fed quickly. You don't want to spend a bunch of time shuffling various caches.
Memory bandwidth/latency is helpful in certain scenarios, but it can be easily oversold in the performance portion of the story. E.g. the 9950X and 9950X3D are within less than 1/20th of a percentage point of each other in PassMark Single thread (feeding a single core is dead easy) but have a spread of ~6.4% (in favor of the 9950X3D) in the multi-thread (where the cache is starting to help on the one CCD). It could just as easily have been in the other direction or 10 times as much depending on what the benchmark was trying to do. For most day to day user workloads the performance difference from memory bandwidth/latency is the "nil to some" though.
Meanwhile the AI Max+ 395 has at least twice the bandwidth + same number of cores and comes to more like a ~15% loss on single and ~30% loss on multithread due to other "traditional" reasons for performance difference. I still like my 395 though, but more for the following reason.
The more practical advantage of soldered memory on mobile devices is the power/heat reductions, same with increasing the cache on e-cores to get something out of every possible cycle you power rather than try to increase the overall computation with more wattage (i.e. transistors or clocks). Better bandwidth/latency is a cool bonus though.
For a hard number the iPhone 17 Pro Max is supposed to be around 76 GB/s, yet my iPhone 17 Pro Max has a higher PassMark single core performance score than my 9800X3D with larger L3 cache and RAM operating at >100 GB/s. The iPhone does have a TSMC node advantage to consider as well, but I still think it just comes out ahead due to "better overall engineering".
It's very possible I am misinterpreting, but the A19 seems to have less total memory bandwidth than, say, a 9800x (but not by much). And far less than the Max and Ultra chips that go into MacBooks.
So I think there's more to it than memory bandwidth.
A19 has WAY less bandwidth on its 64-bit bus than desktop chips with 128-bit busses . AMD’s strix halo is also slower despite a 256-bit bus.
Pushing this point further, x86 chips are also slower when the entire task fits in cache.
The real observation is how this isn’t some Apple black magic. All three of the big ARM core designers (Apple, ARM, and Qualcomm) are now beating x86 in raw performance and stomping them in performance per watt (and in performance per watt per area).
It’s not just apples deep pockets either. AMD spent more in R&D than ARM’s entire gross profit margin last I checked. Either AMD sucks or x86 has more technical roadblocks than some people like to believe.
X86 compete based on clock speed for the longest time so they use cell libraries designed for higher that. This means the transistors are larger and less dense. Arm cores are targeted at energy efficiency first so they use denser cells that doesn’t clock as fast. The trade off is they can have larger reorder buffers and larger scheduling windows to squeeze better ipc. As frequency scaling slows but not so much density scaling you get better results going the slower route.
If only it were open to other operating systems.
I can’t wait to see the numbers from the next M-series chip that integrates these core designs.
I don’t know if that will be the M5 or M6 series but with active cooling and wall/big battery power I bet it will be impressive.
And a pro/ultra variant with lots of cores might post some very nice multi core numbers.
Way to go Apple. That’s a great accomplishment.
This is cool but it’s just one benchmark. It’s not clear to me what exactly PassMark even measures. That doesn’t mean the result is “wrong” but take it with a grain of salt
Apple chips are fastest in single core in most benchmarks, not just passmark.
PassMark single threaded test is a very simple synthetic benchmark according to their docs:
> The single threaded test is an aggregate of the floating point, string sorting and data compression tests.
It’s an impressive score, but there’s more to performance in real apps than these three simple tests. This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip and the great job they did keeping it fed, but PassMark single threaded is about the simplest measurement you can do.
Modern CPUs aren’t really optimized for peak floating point throughput because any GPU will do a much better job at that. It’s also not clear if they actually use SIMD features of the chips, where desktop and server class parts should be able to walk away from the Apple phone chip due to their higher power limit alone.
> This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip
Apple's in house silicon strategy has long been to create wide cores that perform more instructions per clock cycle and then run the cores at a conservative clock speed for power savings.
Running up the clock speed for performance no matter what effect that has on power consumption and heat has been what we've seen from Qualcomm/Intel/AMD/Nvidia.
In Geekbench multicore:
> the A19 Pro delivered a powerful multi-core score of 11,054... while using a remarkably low 12.1W of power... To put that into perspective, other flagship chips from the Android camp had to push their power consumption much higher to even come close to its scores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite, for instance, had to use 17W of power to complete the same benchmark. Meanwhile, the Dimensity 9400 consumed a staggering 18.4W.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/09/apple-a19-pro-chip-...
A19 = 5177 A19 Pro = 5123 A18 Pro = 4130 A18 chip = 3928 A17 Pro = 4528 A16 = 4011
Not sure why the A18 passmark scores are quite a bit lower than A17
Because the A18 had its L2 and LLC caches slashed in half. Frequency and uarch improvements don’t matter if you can’t keep the ports fed.
https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
We need modern open source CPU benchmarks.
PassMark and Geekbench are closed source. I don't know why I should trust them to e.g. treat fundamentally different kinds of devices in a sane and fair way. They have vastly different cooling mechanisms, for one. It matters if they can sustain a certain load for 5 minutes or for 5 hours.
If you have a specific use case in mind you might as well just test that use case directly. E.g. PTS (Phoronix Test Suite) is not a traditional benchmark, it's a workload tester, and it's right up that alley (though you then run into the problem of "the workload I care to compare doesn't run on an iPhone at all", at which point you either compare generalities again or don't care anymore).
I suppose what I really mean is for the industry to agree on some benchmark or two. Like the 80s PC mag benchmarks.
It obviously doesn't scale well if every potential end user has to benchmark every device.
In some other context I'd be inclined to agree, but I swear the moment there's an open benchmark, it's going to get gamed by someone. So long as there's money to be made, the incentives don't align, look at Volkswagen for some inspiration.
Is it really harder for CPU designers to game closed source benchmarks?
And they can also be gamed with money.
SPEC exists. Apparently reviewers who speak English can't afford it.
Pour one out for Anandtech.
SPEC has been the industry standard performance benchmark for comparing between different CPU architectures for decades.
It takes all freaking day to run, but Anandtech published the benchmarks as soon as they got their grubby little hands on a new core design for every well known architecture.
Is GeekerWan on YouTube the only outlet still doing this today, albeit in Chinese with English subtitles?
You would think that Chips and Cheese, at least, would take up the gauntlet.
Not really open source, no.
https://www.spec.org/sources/
Another reason why Apple should allow the UTM project to use the JIT API in their iOS app. I want to virtualize ARM64 Linux VMs on the fastest CPU in the world. Apple could put Android's Termux to shame, but they don't want to do that, and therefore I have no use for them. What great things are iPhone users going to do with a fast locked down phone? Play Roblox at 120 FPS? Doom scroll at 2x speed? Not know how to use their phone (but faster)?
Why is the pro scoring less?
Because error bars and p-values don't make for exciting headlines with well-defined "rankings"
“Both the A19 and A19 Pro benchmarked within the margin of error of each other”
Too bad it only runs ios or you could do something with it.
If anyone else knows of product ideas that can sell 3 billion units of useless bricks please let me know.
I recommend the clay based brick market. I'm not certain how I'd find statistics but I'm pretty sure they've sold more than 3 billion units.
> clay based brick
The original ceramic shield. So durable that it lasts centuries. You can even use it for housing.
What's wrong with running iOS apps with it?
You can't play 99.99% of games ever made for example.
> You can't play 99.99% of games ever made for example.
I expect it's the other way around with mobile being a larger platform than PC or console.
How many games are available in the iOS app store vs. Steam?
Does income or number of apps matter for anything here? Like, if given the choice, would you rather only play games from App Store or only games from Steam?
The point they're making is obvious. iOS was and still is a platform for mobile applications and mobile games. Despite how much processing power is crammed into those devices, you can't use similarly for "serious work". All that power will never be used to run actual games (like games from a PC or a console), or render a 3D model in Blender, or do CAD work, or run "full" versions of any software that has a cut-down mobile variant. Which begs the question - why mimic the power of a full computer while having no way of doing the work that full computers need all that power for?
> The point they're making is obvious. iOS was and still is a platform for ... mobile games
It is, and mobile games are certainly part of "games ever made".
This is correct. What I'm pointing out is that the point they were making wasn't just about pure quantity, even though that's what they said directly. Obviously, the implication is that they're talking about "real" games, as in fully-produced games that are published on PCs and consoles. You may disagree over this point, but I thought this implied subtext was very obvious.
Mobile games are 99% shovelware
And that is being generous.
Can you name some of those good games you play on IOS?
Btw Steam is not the only place to buy games. In fact I was playing games on PC for 20 years before Steam was released.
Anyway, I will start with just a few amazing PC games:
Sim City 2000, Tomb Raider, Doom, Doom2, Duke Nuken, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Half Life 2, LoL, Dota, Flight Simulator, Deus Ex, The Witcher 3, Counter Strike, Hades, Factorio, Minecraft, Opus Magnus, Disco Elysium, Crusader Kings, Overwatch, Diablo 2, Civilization III, Baldurs Gate 3, Bioshock, Rimworld, Brogue, Drawf Fortres, Tarkov, Arma...
And the list goes on and on and on...
Clearly the market doesn’t value that enough to require it.
"the market", I preffer to say consumers, becuase I am not a fucking beancouter MBA, demand videogames, is the bigest entertaiment industry in the world, bigger than movies and music combined.
By your own logic because Apple does not sell spread sheet software, databases or porn, "the market" does not demand it.
- spreadsheet software - the Numbers app
- database software - FileMaker Pro
There have been many games released for iOS. In fact iOS makes up about a third of all revenue for video games. Also just because it can't play some old game for PCs, it doesn't mean that it's useless. It just means that people may have to do work to port those old workloads to iOS if they want legacy software to use new, powerful hardware.
they need to get past apple
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Imagine if they would just sell those CPUs for other use cases. Put 2x price tag if they fear losing other hardware sales.
There are already CPUs from companies like Qualcomm that come close in performance and are available to anyone with a large bank account.
The iPhone chips are great but even if they were 2X as fast as the competition it’s not going to open up an entire new world of use cases that don’t already exist
What do you think goes into the M series chips in their computers?
It’s the same core designs.
There are more of ‘em (and GPU), not restricted by battery power, and other useful things for computers that aren’t as constrained as a phone.
But they’re the same cores.
Qualcomm & Samsung kind of fill the market for high end mobile CPU though. I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.
> I don't know what Apple brings to the table if their CPUs are used outside of their designs.
Sounds like Apple brings the fastest single-core CPU in the world, so if you're looking for that, it would have been nice.
Fair, to entertain the thought though, it'd make little sense if it was COTS due to either a loss or razor thin margins due to low demand. However nobody is stopping a hardware integrator approaching Apple to use it, but it'd probably be stupid expensive and shrouded in secrecy as Apple would not want to cede full control of its deployment due to things like Secure Enclave.
I think it's less about what hardware integrators want more what Apple doesn't want. Apple tries to be as soup to nuts about their solution as possible, they don't want to piece that out to give some of the margin of the best pieces to a 3rd party trying to compete with them instead. Anything they could pay is just from revenue Apple could already target directly and keep all of to themselves.
Everything has a price though. If you offered half of Apple's market cap, I'm sure they'd be changing their tune. (Yes it is an exaggeration, but my point is that there are exceptions.)
The problem lies in that Apple already gets 100% of the profit from being vertically integrated today (so the offer would not only need to be large, but more than what one could reasonably hope to make in return). If it were just that Apple had a really good CPU then both Apple and the 3rd party(ies) would be able to come to the table with a net positive deal, but vertical integration makes it so only 1 party (Apple, in this case) can come out ahead until they are dethroned for other reasons completely.
Wouldn't it be so cool if you could actually do anything with it? Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH, because of course you're never going to take it to a track.
It was only intended for highway travel at best.
But hey, you can scroll at 120hz now, right? Think different!
All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with.
Edit: Fixed last sentence.
I'm not sure about the Intel thing, but I agree that it would be nice to be able to use it the way you want.
You're talking about a company that limits you from having a comma on the front of the iPhone keyboard. Why?
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Bicycle for the mind! /s
Upvoted because 90% of your comment is great so doesn't deserve to be grayed out, but the Intel bit is wrong. I would definitely recommend checking out AMDs offerings and then backpedaling on the Intel claim because even my four year old AMD chip absolutely screams
I use AMD chips, so I’m not terribly swayed by these numbers. I fixed the sentence to reflect my sentiments.
Good man, much appreciated!
I agree with what you said but...
> Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips
lol wat
> All this tells me is that Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips that you can do anything with.
From context you seem to be talking about overclocking. In which case only a handful of Intel chips are unlocked per generation. By contrast, most of AMD chips are unlocked.
I sad that in a place with hacker on its name people are contrarian when somebody wants to use the computer they bougth for whatever they want.
It’s definitely sad and weird. Times and people have changed.
For whatever reason the community now is filled with a weird mix of corporate bootlickers who want to give the largest corporations money while they take away our freedoms and they simultaneously want to make known their entitled behavior by claiming individual developers and small businesses should only ever give away their software for free.
It was bad enough people here chime in technical conversations that they have no experience with loudly contesting the points of actual experts and practitioners, but now they also want to tell us that we don’t have a right to use our property how we want.
It’s definitely sad and weird. Times and people have changed.
Yeah, I grew up tinkering with Linux since 1994; was good times. I've changed.
For whatever reason the community now is filled with a weird mix of corporate bootlickers who want to give the largest corporations money while they take away our freedoms and they simultaneously want to make known their entitled behavior by claiming individual developers and small businesses should only ever give away their software for free.
A bit after the turn of the millennium I became legally blind and I also needed to eat. Apple was able to serve my needs with their accessibility tools and keep me fully functional without additional costs beyond the hardware and base software, and still to this day. Nothing had come close back then nor now. While I appreciate Stallman's ideals and how he wouldn't use assistive technology if it isn't free software, I can't succumb to those artificial restrictions. The reality is that I would have been much worse off financially, being self-sufficient, going through studies, progressing in my career, etc. if it wasn't for Apple's accessibility tech. So yeah I'll own the whole corporate bootlicker nonsense, and it's why in later years of my life I now invest in Apple, because they deliver usable solutions to real problems to the vast population rather than cater to an insignificant population with piddly ideals.
It must be nice if your only issue with tech is that you need it to go brrrrrrrr.
Even if times have changed I will keep being anoying about this.
The hacker culture is something that fascinated me as teenager and the reason I am able to pay the bills today. I don't really know what would be of me without it.
It's the Apple bias
I upvoted you, but I am I not so sure. I have seen this rethoric in many HN posts.
As another commenter said, the part with Intel is the only manufacturer making leading chips, doesn't really makes sense.
Right now Intel is losing a lot, lucky to them Nvidia invested. So far I would only use AMD. In my desktop is an AMD, because it is just the fastest desktop CPU und the threadrippers are absolute multicore beasts for servers.
I've been super impressed with AMD chips as well. I have actually had to try to find CPU bound use cases because the damn thing is so fast it makes you question if it actually worked
What is the thing you are trying to do?
These phones record 4K video at 120 frames a second.
They play high intensity video games.
They run on device language models.
People keep their iPhones for years — this power will ensure these phones can run iOS versions 5, 6, even 7 years from now.
And the uArch you’re seeing here will end up re-purposed for big brother M series chips in laptops and desktops.
So what exactly do you want?
This is what they are saying - the power is there, but iOS severely gets in the way of interacting with it properly any time you step out of the box of "touch first Apple approved mobile experiences". It'd be awesome if one device could be my phone and laptop instead of trying to make do with the screen share on two completely separate systems.
The iPads even more so, as some literally have the same kinds of hardware as a MacBook already (minus the keyboard detaches).
This is such a niche ask. Even Android doesn’t let you do this. Samsung has Dex and most people report it as subpar novelty.
Buy a laptop you’ll be ok.
Android and ChromeOS are merging for these kinds of experiences https://chromeunboxed.com/its-official-google-says-the-andro... and both have already opened up to running anything you'd like in Linux on the side. That said, Android wasn't exactly my first pick of flexibility either.
> Buy a laptop you’ll be ok.
This kind of comment is uncalled for. Anyways, as mentioned, I do the screenshare to a MacBook today. The advantage of having both is clearly for Apple though, not me.
> All this tells me is that Intel and AMD are the only manufacturers making leading chips that you can do anything with.
I've heard that Nvidia makes some GPUs that you can do things with.
You can’t do anything with AMD chips?
Imagine building a Bugatti and installing an unremovable speed limiter that forced you to top out at 75 MPH
What workload are you envisaging to be run on an iPhone where this even matters? Hyperbole aside, what target population of iPhone users even care about overclocking, and specifically what tangible benefit will they get out of it?
You are completely missing his point. It's not about the mhz, it's about making a super high performence product but refusing to let you use it for things that actually benefit from that performance.
I actually really don’t see the point. Yea, in this consumer smart phone, there are limits on what you can do with this chip because the operating system is tuned for phone stuff, not workstation stuff.
But there’s good news — this architecture will end up in MacBooks, Mac minis, Mac Studios etc.
It’s like complaining that they put a good engine in a civic when you can also buy that good engine in other configurations that will let you do more with it.
So why insist on doing it on a phone?
Are they?
The guy you are replying to. They are the target population. Or myself.
If I pay for hardware, I want to use it however I want. I know that is a fucking crazy idea for them corporation bootlickers.
I was asking in quantity rather than identifying those users; tacitly implying that there is a negligible amount of users that actually care or want this as top priority. I know some people, especially on a site like this, might find offence in this, but I'm just stating the reality of the situation.
The focus on profit instead of hacker culture is the cancer of this site.
To me feels like you have a paratistic relationship with the brand of your phone maker. And you will fight other individuals to defend their monopolistic actions.
I mean my relationship with the brand or phone maker is immaterial, even though I have a significant investment and appreciate their direction in general.
But to address your concern, Apple is clearly not for you and that is fine, you have choices, like the premium value and control you get with PinePhone. No corporate bootlicking required!
Apple makes the best chips on the market and Linux is the best SO for servers on the market.
The choices are to run a worst OS or a worst CPU. How did not I see how many choices I have, I must be blind! Thanks for opening my eyes mate.
or a worst CPU
So a market already exists for those that want full control over hardware and embrace hacker culture and don't subject you to corporate bootlicking, yet this is still not enough? I actually meant what I said when I say Apple is not for you, because this is a segment of the market they're not interested in.
If it matters to you, put your money where your mouth is, and support the markets and initiatives that embodies your values; you never know, you could contribute to efforts in creating a CPU that surpasses Apple or whoever is the incumbent.
You think the 100k I will move buying computers in my life will make a difference?
Don't make me laugh.
You are just not only a bootlicker, because you defend corportations monopolistic practices, but a troll.
Cars are often artificially detuned to the trim level that’s inscribed on the boot.
What can't you do that 99% of customers actually want to do with it?
what? Intel chips are the worst out of all of them. AMD is steadily gaining % in supercomputers.
M silicon is very efficient on workstations for dev work.
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Microsoft outlook and PowerPoint will still take 15 seconds to open your document.