Apple “Peek Performance” Event: Pressing Apple’s Silicon Advantage

Apple is pushing its silicon advantage hard. It now has an A15 Bionic smartphone (admittedly with other, lower end specs) for just $429. It sells an M1-powered tablet starting at $599. Its new Mac features extraordinary performance starting at $2000 (though nicely equipped models cost 2x – 4x that, before a display and accessories). Apple even put a smartphone chip in the monitor!

Apple doesn’t sell the chips it designs to anyone else, so its silicon success – and the Mac’s extremely smooth software transition – is pressuring Intel and AMD obliquely. The real challenge is on Apple’s direct device competitors because Apple is gobbling up market share in the most profitable segments of the general purpose and content creation PC market. Those OEMs then demand better performance per watt from their silicon vendors. The PC gaming market will be safe so long as key AAA titles remain bound to Windows. The sub-$800 laptop market is safe as long as the Windows ecosystem remains sticky and Apple targets that market with iPads rather than MacBooks. Apple’s proof that Arm instruction set processors (if not actual Arm designs) is also pushing PC vendors to reconsider Arm investments, especially as Microsoft seems committed to actually making Windows work on Arm this time. Qualcomm is promising future leaps with Nuvia next year, and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 provides strong CPU and GPU performance specs compared to Qualcomm today.

iPhone SE 2022: Ecosystem Expander

iPhone SE 2022 takes a very old physical design and drops in the industry-leading A15 Bionic SoC and a Qualcomm 5G modem to produce a phone that defies easy categorization. The iPhone SE was originally prized both by small phone enthusiasts and price-sensitive consumers alike, but the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini better address those who prefer hand-sized phones. That means that the iPhone SE 2022 primarily serves as entry point into the Apple ecosystem for price-conscious global consumers and for Western teens (especially in the U.S., where messaging bubble colors are a thing). The iPhone SE 2022 still has a small display and home-button, even if the silicon & camera have gotten updates. But 5G will appeal to consumers in China where 5G is a purchase driver, and to carriers in the U.S. who want to speed the transition for their networks.            

About that 5G: it isn’t perfect. Apple compromised the new iPhone SE’s 5G connectivity to keep costs down, and while it is still an upgrade over the old 4G-only iPhone SE, it should give at some buyers pause. The new iPhone SE 2022 has 2x2 MIMO sub-6 5G only and will be available in a single SKU on all national U.S. carriers – including Verizon, which usually mandates mmWave. For complicated standards reasons, it also won’t support AT&T’s upcoming 3.45GHz midband network, either. That leaves slow low-band 5G on all three U.S. carriers, 2.5GHz on T-Mobile, and C-Band on AT&T, Verizon, and, eventually T-Mobile for that, too. Those mid-band networks should provide meaningful speed updates over 4G in areas where they are available, and the loss of mmWave will mostly go unnoticed. However, the 2x2 MIMO means that it may not have as good performance as more robust RF configurations like the iPhone 13 mini or many of Samsung’s 5G phones, including mid-tier models like the Galaxy A52. While competitors should not run ads highlighting the iPhone SE’s 5G limitations - most of Apple’s volumes are in higher end iPhones - Samsung should definitely be working with carrier retail staff at Verizon and AT&T to highlight the issues for consumers who come in looking for a budget phone and are on the fence whether to switch to iOS. T-Mobile staff can confidently say that its iPhone SE will get better 5G coverage than rivals, but they should still upsell the iPhone 13 or other products with more robust modems when possible.

iPad Air 2022: More Productivity Than a Base iPad, Less Expensive than iPad Pro

The iPad Air already had a fairly defensible software and ecosystem moat, so simply adding Pencil 2 and Magic Keyboard support allows it to do double duty as a light workload laptop alternative at a much lower price than iPad Pro. Apple also updated the silicon to an M1 processor, which provides a performance jump, and the branding should make the upgrade from a regular iPad an easier sell. Optional 5G will make the iPad Air a welcome sight on carrier retail shelves.

Mac Studio and Studio Display:

Apple Silicon has really supercharged the company’s oldest product line: M1-based Mac sales have broken sales records each quarter. The Mac Studio is built around Apple’s highest end silicon configuration yet, the M1 Ultra. This new chip is essentially two M1 Max chips joined together over a purpose-built incredibly high speed bus that Apple brands, "Ultra Fusion," because Apple needs names for everything. The combined processor has 114 billion transistors. Apple claims that this architecture is several times faster than anything Intel offers, yet draws a lot less power. By putting the GPU and shared memory on two connected dies, Apple is promising up to 128GB of addressable memory, which is significantly more than even the most expensive dedicated graphics cards. I expect GPU OEM marketing departments to object that Apple's M1 Ultra has a lot of internal addressable memory, but a maximum of “only” 64 cores. For example, an Nvidia 3090 has 10,496 CUDA cores, 328 Tensor cores, and 82 RT Cores. The most comparable numbers there is probably the 82 RT Cores – which still exceeds the M1 Ultra’s 64 GPU cores – but how any of this compares in actual performance will depend on lots of different factors, including software optimization.

The Mac Studio starts at $2000, but most who need this power will want the $4000 version or even more. The top configuration of the Mac Studio costs $8,000, before a display or even a keyboard and a mouse. (The Mac Studio comes with just a bare PC and power cable. For everything else, you need to buy new or bring your own. Apple calls this “modular,” which is not what that word means.)

There is going to be a lot of pearl-clutching around this pricing, but the truth is that it is quite reasonable for the professional workloads the M1 Ultra enables. Consumers do not need this product, and Apple has plenty of M1-powered Macs available that easily handle regular PC tasks at much lower price points. However, Apple took pains to point out that despite the Mac Studio’s impressive performance, a Mac Pro is still on the roadmap.

However, well-heeled consumers may be swayed by the Apple Studio Display, an impressive 27” 5K monitor. The $1600 display features multiple mounting options, a billion colors, 600 nits, an anti-reflective coating or optional nano-texture. Apple builds in an A13 Bionic chip to power the USB hub, 12 MP camera with Center Stage, three microphones, and six speaker array with Dolby Atmos. Any Mac plugging into the Studio Display should see a significant upgrade in video call quality.

What Else Was/Wasn’t Announced

Apple also launched new colors for the iPhone 13 (green!), and promoted upcoming content for AppleTV+. This will include live Major League Baseball games on Friday nights, assuming that there is an MLB season this year.

Apple did not update any of its laptops with the new M1 Ultra.

There were some rumors that Apple would provide a peek at VR products. It did not. “Peek Performance” was just a pun.


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