“Apple’s next-gen [A11 Bionic] processor is nothing short of a monster,” Yoni Heisler reports for BGR. “In the days leading up to and following Apple’s iPhone media event, the iPhone 8 Geekbench 4 scores from Primate Labs’ Geekbench test were truly jarring.”
“In fact, with Apple’s new flagship iPhone models running more than 50% faster than top of the line Android handsets in some tests, Primate Labs founder John Poole can’t help but wonder why we’re only seeing huge performance improvements emanating from Apple,” Heisler reports. “‘The thing that I don’t fully understand is why performance has seemed to stagnate on the Android side,’ Poole said in an interview with Tom’s Guide. ‘Where you don’t see these big leaps forward. I don’t understand what’s happening there. At this point, [with Apple’s A1 Bionic] you’ve got desktop-class performance in a handset. There’s no way of looking at it any other way.'”
MacDailyNews Take: What happening is that Apple is taking the lion’s share of cellphone profits and has been/is investing wisely while the iPhone knockoff peddlers race to the bottom and, ultimately, oblivion. Good riddance, thieves, liars, and scammers.
“Apple is better positioned than its Android counterparts for the future of mobile computing,” Heisler reports. “Indeed, Apple’s decision to bring chip development in house has turned out to be one of Steve Jobs’ shrewdest decisions.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Thermonuclear.
With each passing year, and especially with iPhone X, it becomes increasingly clear – even to the Android settlers – that the competition has no chance of even remotely keeping up against Apple’s unmatched vertically integrated one-two punch of custom software and custom hardware. The Android to iPhone upgrade train just turned onto a long straightaway, engines stoked, primed to barrel away! — MacDailyNews, September 13, 2017
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s A11 Bionic chip is by far the highest-performing system on the market; totally destroys Android phones – September 19, 2017
Apple’s A11 Bionic chip in iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone X leaves Android phones choking in the dust – September 18, 2017
The inside story of Apple’s amazing A11 Bionic chip – September 18, 2017
Apple’s A11 Bionic obliterates top chips from Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei – September 18, 2017
Apple accelerates mobile processor dominance with A11 Bionic; benchmarks faster than 13-inch MacBook Pro – September 15, 2017
Apple’s A11 Bionic chip in iPhone X and iPhone 8/Plus on par with 2017 MacBook Pro – September 14, 2017
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Wall Street yawns and says the iPhone is no better than any run-of-the-mill Android smartphone. Analysts believe iPhones are nothing but commodities and not worth the extra cost. Since most of the world consumers use Android smartphones, I suppose those consumers feel the same way. Apple certainly won’t be able to turn those higher benchmarks into higher iPhone sales so the extra processing power doesn’t seem very useful at a glance.
It’s really a pity Apple won’t be able to keep up with demand for the iPhone X. They had a decent chance of putting some good sales numbers up for the coming quarters, but I guess that’s done for.
Although MDN believes Android is being beaten by Apple, I haven’t seen any cases where any Android device manufacturer is going out of business. They all seem to be surviving as usual. Android manufacturers are still doing great business in India, China and So. America. Apple definitely isn’t being valued as a destroyer of Android smartphone businesses, so Android device oblivion seems quite a bit premature.
Actually, I’m quite puzzled how Android smartphone manufacturers manage to stay in business year after year with Apple taking most of the profits. There has to be something in it for them or they’d have given up by now. Apple continues to lose ground in market share percentage, so Android keeps pulling in more consumers proving Android isn’t going away.
Truth of time will tell if the iPhone 8 and 8+ have slow sales. The same is true for the iPhone X. But with reports like this and others posted and others to be posted, there’s not gonna be a drought of sales for the iPhone 8/Plus/X. Who doesn’t want to “Monster” in their pocket, as well as a verdant ecosystem, greatest security level, and a long history of innovation (photography alone)? To the press, Apple is the biggest underdog in the world.
They don’t need an increase in sales. Currently almost ALL profits are going to Apple. Profit is where the money is :), so if they continue to sell in the tens of millions per quarter, they’ll still be around for a long time to come.
There will ALWAYS be a market for cheap phones and since Nokia’s not around the only other OS is Android, and a HUGE number of sales will always be for Android purchases… until some other “good enough” OS comes along.
So Apple makes most of the profits and sells as many phones as they can make regardless what idiot and self-serving Anal-cysts think. I fail to see how Apple is losing to Android in any way. Market share, well, there are many who simply can’t afford an iPhone so Android it is for them. The most undesirable class of customer is one with little money and not one Apple has ever courted. Do you think Mercedes or BMV cares about getting the Kia or Hyundai customer? Different niche market, but the premium stuff still handsomely profitable and often more so.
“I haven’t seen any cases where any Android device manufacturer is going out of business”
They don’t HAVE to go out of business, because they’re all making more than just Android phones. Android isn’t making them much of a profit, so they just subsidize the slim profit from the more profitable areas of the companies.
Actually, interesting question, is there ANYone that is ONLY making Android phones? I’m sure there is, but am not in a googling mood 🙂
It is all about psychological guys, if there is choice, consumers tend to settle with the products that don’t break the banks, even it is less quality. Between expensive Chanel lipstick versus CoverGirl, of course, people would choose CoverGirl which don’t break the banks, pure and simple. LOL
Yes I think everyone has quite rationally and easily destroyed the faulty rationale of macnificentseven48’s original post, one we have long heard use in the computer world which has long lost its remaining legs.
I will only add that Motorola as good as went out of business peddling Android which in itself tells us that the only companies that can even stay in the business are those based in China/Asia where they can just about survive (at least in the short term) on paper thin profits but only on very large volume which Apple of course does not need to mimic. Even then a company like HTC is struggling to survive in particular when they tried to bridge the ‘quality’ gap suffered by such manufacturers. Japanese companies can only nominally stay in the business by setting up Chinese subsidiaries.
Most of these companies use phones to try to raise their profile and as related elsewhere usually make most of their money on less public products so even a slight profit makes it worthwhile. Finally some of these companies are very likely to fail in time or be taken over rather like what is happening in Japan in the once uber powerful electronics sector. There will always be new bottom feeders grow up to replace them and try their hand but in what World does that have anything to do with Apple in which the only relevant market share is where it can make money and that sector as stated it is almost totally dominant. It lives on a sense of exclusivity the moment it becomes a commodity like the others will be its death knell, but as we see many still don’t get it.
HTC is not doing great and got bailed out by Google.
LG doesn’t make profits from handset division, it’s all from Appliences and other divisions.
Sony lost money, adjusted their strategy and just started making a marginal profit. Company is supported by other divisions.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/25/lg-wont-share-its-disappointing-mobile-sales-figures/
http://www.androidauthority.com/sonys-mobile-division-made-money-768091/
Samsung is one of the only large Android makers making money due to sales volume.
Most other Android manufacturers are churning out cheap devices with large sales in China or developing countries.
“There has to be something in it for [Android manufacturers] or they’d have given up by now.”
We saw this in the PC market. Hundreds of manufacturers and assemblers churning out thousands of models. Hundreds of millions of units made of stamped tin and cheap components — earning paper-thin profits. Why do they do it? Paper-thin profits. Better than making dollar store clock radios, I suppose.
A threat to Apple? No.
The streets and subways of China are filled with people carrying gleaming rose gold smartphones. Look carefully and most are not Apple or Samsung, or any name you’d recognize. Screens are dim and low-resolution. Cameras are muddy and slow. I can only guess at the processor. These are not iPhone killers, they’re paper-thin products. This is a huge pool ready for up-selling to a better phone as financial circumstances allow.
Wall Street analysts don’t care about product specs or performance. They care about cash flow. You can brag all day and night about how your Ferrari can pass anything on the road. Unfortunately for you, Toyota blows away Ferrari in profitability. Apple knows this and that’s why it doesn’t advertise speed as a reason to buy an iPhone.
If you want real performance you still need a personal computer, Ford and Chevy trucks have been the best selling vehicles for decades and if Apple has a clue, it would keep its trucks up to date too.
On the World stage Ford and Chevy are as good as irrelevant.
What fool believes anything Wall St vomits up?
Sadnificent748 does, sadviously.
With the high speed and lower power consumption of the A11, I have to wonder if these beasties can be clustered. And if not this generation, when the A-series processors beat desktops (next year? Year after?) they may well be a viable route to a supercomputer.
Parallel processing with multi-A11 chips? That would be interesting.
Very true, imagine an iPhone XX from 2027 in your pocket as true supercomputer. Screw the cloud in that case.
Screw the cloud now. Subscription computing sucks.
Fred,
Interesting!
Is there an app for that yet?
Dogadoga
Sigh. Probably not, but I’ll bet there are plenty of folks out there who have the programming/engineering chops to take it on. The real issue is getting Apple to buy into the idea. They have the say-so over who gets the chips. Mac ParallelPro, anyone?
God no. Just putting current Intel chips in Macs and making them user upgradeable would give users more bang for the buck.
Apple has to fire “thin and sealed is all i can do” Ive and with the money saved, hire 100 competent hardware designers to completely revamp the pathetic Mac lineup. Then it would still take two generations of solid continued Mac focus before businesses would be willing to trust Apple again.
Attempting parallel processing would require convincing all your big time software makers to invest thousands of hours. I’m all for Apple pioneering this for internal use and then they can finally replace Google and Amazon to run their own business. Nobody trusts Apple now for server or desktop computing because Apple has abandoned them. An A-chip monster would flop in the market today because no software would be ready to fun on it.
Why should a business pay the Apple premium when Apple refused to update half its Mac lineup for years? Trashcan buyers are legitimately pissed, and many have moved on to Dell or HP to get the best software.
Apple no longer offers a competent modern Server OS or truly leading class professional software. The partnership with IBM appears intended only for marrying nerd Watson to trailer trash Siri. Apple uses HP servers running Linux for its own business, in addition to service from its direct competition. With competent leadership, Apple would stop attempting to please Wall Street and would spend real cash putting its own IT capability in order.
I think 8/X sales will be just fine.
The poof in the pudding, for the benchmark results, is when they did real life rendering tests. In some cases the A11 was 4X faster than Android.
Qualcomm has to design chips, each year for many tiers of phone manufacturing. While Apple puts out 1 to two a year. A?? And A??X. Apple does work on multiple designs, but only markets one.
Apple cloud have had two CPU designed for the 8 and the X, but in all fairness they gave the best to all models. This helps in echonomy of scale, and it shows that focus on the feature of the iPhone and OS, not power.
‘poof’? Sometimes typos can be hilarious!
I realize I have tons of typos. I am not saying I am a decent writer by any means, but this is why actual writers use simple text editors to write. They know they screw up their output, but don’t want to be distracted by autocorrect. I treat forums – as if I am in a room chatting. I try to cover my output, but don’t fret too much, because it’s not a white paper I’m writing. We are simply chit chatting about what we care about.
It made me giggle. So +1 for you. At least you didn’t use ‘loosers’ for ‘losers’. That one makes me hurl!
I am guilty.
I wish typos would go “poof!”
Then we would all be homogeneous homo-geniuses.
And the biggest difference was for video processing. Exactly where you want all the speed you can get, to go with the new iPhone cameras.
If this is the case, Apple was right to dump their GPU vendor. They had a better GPU, in house. Now it will take years for everyone else to catch up.
We will see whether Apple doing good or poorly with iPhone 8 and 8 Plus on earning reports for the fourth quarter on Oct 31, 2017.
Apple gave strong guidance for next earning reports 4Q is:
October 31,2017.
Apple (AAPL) is providing the following guidance for its fiscal 2017 fourth quarter: $1.81.
• revenue between $49 billion and $52 billion
• gross margin between 37.5 percent and 38 percent
• operating expenses between $6.7 billion and $6.8 billion
• other income/(expense) of $500 million
• tax rate of 25.5 percent
CASH now is $261.5 Billions.
Good luck to all investors.
From the linked tomsguide interview:
“Today’s top-tier Android phones use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor. We reached out to Qualcomm to comment about the performance gap between its chip and Apple’s A11 Bionic, and we will update this story when we hear back.”
Don’t hold your breath…..
Android: Who in the f**k cares about that worthless SH*TTY OS. Only the losers.
It is a puzzle that the Snapdragon is so far behind. It is hard in this business to develop such a huge lead. Everyone uses more or less the same silicon so it is not clock rate. It has to be structure. There are 4.3 billion transistors on this chip. That is enormous. They must have worked hard at doing things with more transistors and fewer clock cycles. Better pipelining? I’ve heard in the past that Apple does a lot of hand optimization. This is expensive but it can pay off dramatically.
Apple will crush it of course. The difference is that the iPhone is Apple’s crown jewel, it better dominate with it. Google’s ace is search, which is the thing more vulnerable to disruption, Android is more of an Apple-TV-like hobby project in comparison.
iPhoneX is not only the fast phone, its the first glimpse of the new era in personal computing. New direction, new philosophy. Multiple A-chip powered devices will be your next Mac. Now we can move quickly to the end of laptops / desktops as we know it now. Form factor may no longer decide how powerful is your computer.
Future personal computer by Apple may be cross between multiple A-chip “brain” and GPU/memory “body”. RAM and storage will be merged into one universal memory.
I’m sure there are A-chip powered Macs running on the next generation OS in Cupertino, because next transition from Intel to A-chip is inevitable.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/09/video-galaxy-note-8-beats-iphone-8-plus-in-a-speed-test.html
That’s very deceptively edited… every other speed test shows the exact opposite, so I’m not sure why his was different. Marques Brownlee made a mistake last week by using an iPhone 7plus in a speed comparison, and had to fix the video later. I find it odd that he didn’t do a second pass or any video exporting like most speed tests do.
Apple have been investing in ARM chips for decades. They have acquired companies with chip design expertise.
They have a huge advantage in that plus software integration.
I don’t need Apple to destroy Samsung on some benchmarks. I don’t need a better camera. I don’t need a whole lot of what Apple has introduced lately. What I need is for Apple to tighten things up on iOS. There is slop…
Its clear that the power will be used for things that are barely or at all relavent on the smartphone at the moment. AR/VR are probably one of the former that will become increasingly benefited by it but I guess you need the overkill before you can truly exercise the purpose of it.