Re: Apple tacitly admits their CPUs and new Modem are merely a marketing gimmick

On 2/22/25 19:26, Your Name wrote:

On 2025-02-22 23:05:27 +0000, -hh said:

On 2/22/25 15:57, Your Name wrote:

On 2025-02-22 11:38:58 +0000, -hh said:

On 2/21/25 18:24, Alan wrote:

On 2025-02-21 13:08, Your Name wrote:

On 2025-02-21 15:15:28 +0000, Rick said:

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There is an easy solution here.  If you don't like the product, don't buy it.

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Bingo.
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The fact is that nobody in the real world gives a damn nor will ever notice any supposed slowness. It's only the tech geeks and the odd extreme high end user that might be bothered at all. Computers and devices reached peak speed and efficiency for 90%+ of users years ago and it's now become little more than annual updates for the sake of the companies making more money.

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Especially when one of the features Apple's modem doesn't have isn't anywhere NEAR universal yet.

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Pretty much my thoughts as well.  I looked at that design trade-off as being a reasonably good one:  the modem in question lacks the one niche cellular band that's shortest range & has limited deployment, so it might connectivity when at a stadium concert 1x/ year, but it being ~1% more power efficient helps me every day when I leave my home's WiFi.
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In any event, there's more things than just geekery to criticize the new iPhone 16E about.  Since the Apple modem is to not pay Qualcomm's high chip licensing costs, then why did the price jump up by so much? For the $170 increase from $429 to $599 is a whopping +40%.  Tariffs?
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-hh

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Trump the Chump's idiotic tarriffs may well be one reason, as is the on- going general price rises of almost everything, including shipping and raw materials, but there are also a few updated specs compared to the out-going iPhone SE:
  - newer / faster CPU

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Silicone wafers are cheap, so once the new mask is done for the flagship phone, the question of the manufacturing cost of the (A14 vs A15 vs) is pragmatically close to zero...or even negative, once you've done the manufacturing technology to improve yields (I was on one just one such project a few years ago ... we dropped cost from just under $50/unit to $8.xx).

 The actual cost is mostly irrelevant. Anything newer is usually priced more than the old one if the old one is still being sold. That's partly due to the necessity of recouping the R&D costs and manufacturing set-up involved, but also partly due to the perceived "worth more".

Sure, there's the step up in customer expectations which can demand asking a higher price, but that can also be because the legacy product far outlived its expected lifespan such that the allocation for paying down capital investments had paid for itself, plus some.  Sometimes these are taken as higher profits, sometimes as opportunities to pass along as price cuts.  Inflation doesn't usually play much of a factor here because its offset by classical 'learning curve' economies.

 - more RAM (needed for the useless Apple Intelligence gimmick)

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The material's cheap and the long term trend is down.  A quick Google suggests a manufacturer cost of $4 per GB, so the increase from 4GB to 8GB is all of a ~$16 manufacturing increase.

 Manfacturing for normal RAM, yes. The price to upgrade the RAM and storage when building-to-order Apple devices has always been rather horrendous (although not as bad as getting simple wheels for a Mac Pro!), not helped now that the RAM is on the CPU itself.

About the best that one can claim is that integration onto the CPU results in a larger dice claim, which then reduces yield per wafer.  But as I said, silicone is dirt cheap ... its not like we're talking GaAs or GaN wafers here where it actually makes a measurable difference.

You can't build-to-order the RAM on the iPhone (any model), but to upgrade the storage jumps considerably. Doubling the storage from 128GB to 256GB jumps the price by US$100. Quadruple the storage from 128GB to 512GB bumps the price by US$300.

Yes, the storage is also an illustration of pretty outrageous profit margins for Apple.

 - higher resolution rear camera

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Still is just a single aperture camera.

 Yes, but higher resolution. Again, newer equals higher price.

I've not bothered to look to see if it was stolen from the parts bin too.  In any event, the physical constraints are such that its unlikely to have a chip that's materially different in area than its predecessor, so it again comes down to the very basic fixed costs amortization across N million units expected to be sold, and if its a parts bin recycle, that's already been paid for.

 - larger / OLED display

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 From the existing parts bin, right?

 Newer (and this case also sligthly bigger) equals higher price.

Larger than the prior SE, but from what I've casually seen of it, its lifted from the iPhone 14's parts bin:  a 6.1" Super Retina XDR display.

(There are of course also a few small things now missing, such as the home button.)

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Sure.
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It may also be partly due to where the new model is being made - India for example may be a little more expensive than China (which of course is becoming more and more of a "no-no" for the conspiracy nutters in some governments).

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Sure, but of what magnitude of cost per unit?  Some years ago, I had a conversation on manufacturing offshoring with a Dell executive while at a funeral; TL;DR they admitted that when Dell sent PC assembly from the USA to China, their cost savings was around just $20/unit.  A decade ago, epi.org reported the [iPhone] assembly cost was ~$15 (2%),  so assuming that this cost doubled due to India, +2% on a $500 iPhone  is +$10. That's not nothing, but its also not a big smoking gun for a $140 price increase.
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-hh

 The actual manufacturing costs aren't really relevant in that sense. > Simply adding up the wholesale cost (usually guessed) of the parts for
anything from any company will always be far less than the consumer pays in the shop. The iPhone 15 was price at US$1199 in store, but reportedly only costs US$502 in parts. It will be similar for devices from Samsung, Google, Sony, Mazda, Toyota, etc., etc. (I recently had to get a new part for my car, a tiny little rubber stopper which cost me about US$7 and probably only costs pennies to make.
 As above, there will be lots of things that combine to cause the price increase - manufacturing costs, shipping costs, material costs, advertising costs, simple inflation, currency exchange rates, salary increases (especially for managers), etc., etc.

True .. but none of which effectively matter when doing a comparative analysis:  the only datapoints needed is the relative net contribution of the China labor costs, and then what likely delta exists for India. I assumed a doubling, which is almost outrageously conservative.

No doubt the price increase was also part of the reason they decided to no longer use the "iPhone SE" branding.

I've seen some comments that this is expected to replace the SE as the next Corporate smartphone for employees ... probably because its still the cheapest, and most employees loathe Android corporate phones. That's a steady source of repeat business for Apple, so the point makes sense .. and from a Corporate perspective, they're more reluctant to cut phones from workers entirely, so they're going to have to suck up the big cost increase that Apple's asking for.
Of course, there are some elements of Corporate economizing available; my employer's IT policy originally was a free smartphone every 3 years like clockwork (if you liked your existing, this was hard to avoid), but evolved to "keep it until it dies" .. and if that was <3 years, then your local workgroup had to pay for it.
-hh