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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented'. It's in the same category as "I made an unprecedented dietary decision today and decided to drink chamomile tea instead of mint". Yes, it might be unprecedented because I've never done that before, but it's also super boring. Who cares? So they tried to put too much graphics power in the iPhone and it didn't work. And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever.

Sometimes these article titles are ridiculous and I'm quite tired of this hyperbole, especially in tech. What about "iPhone engineers tried a powerful GPU but had to use a less powerful one".

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Seems quite reasonable to me, we've got a world-leading chip team who have been doing great work responsible for a pretty major cock-up. Sounds like they're not used to these kinds of failures in apple silicon development.

> And it's not exactly a setback either. So they had to have a slightly less powerful phone. Whatever.

Having a roadmap with a more powerful GPU with senior management being told its deliverable right up until very close to the end is a pretty major set-back. Yes Apple is so dominant and well respected in their market it's unlikely to have significant impact, but may produce fewer iPhone 14 Pro sales. Also Apple have got to that position specifically because they've been doing a great job executing to ambitious road-maps without things like this. So short-term, looking at this product, yes, maybe not that big a deal, long-term they need to ask themselves how they're ensuring this doesn't happen again. Given they're restructuring the team and getting rid of managers sounds like Apple leadership take this pretty seriously.

Perhaps not with this phone but with other devices, it's not uncommon for a manufacturer to work with other companies to make sure there's something to show off on this device.

For a GPU on an oversized phone, you could have been looking at additional video or picture editing operations that did not get released.

I wish more companies would "cock-up" by shipping functional products.

And prioritise battery life over faster processors.

“Our product can last all day!”

Doing what? Sitting on the counter? I want a phone that can stream data all day (music and maps) while occasionally taking photos and sending messages.

Get an iPad. I made the mistake of buying one a year or so ago and it completely replaced my personal laptop. It’s basically a massive battery, so it lasts all day and then some.

Also pick up an Apple Pencil and download procreate, if only for the “well that’s pretty cool” experience.

Even iPads are shit now. I have two iPad 11 Pros and they can not last a week just sitting there. My Ipad 2 and 4s? I charge them once every 3-4 months on super light duty. Apple is slowly and surely going down the gutter.

The iPhone 14 pro is a pretty sad upgrade too with regression in battery life from the 13. I've owned almost every iphone since 4 and the 14 is the one i skipped because it doesn't even have a SIM slot! Lets see if they can bring it around in 15.

> I have two iPad 11 Pros and they can not last a week just sitting there.

To be fair to Apple I don't think any company is too concerned with features aimed at people who don't use the product.

They will never have a SIM slot again unless you get the China model, and you don’t need one. eSIM is better.

Physical SIM cards don't make me contact my carrier when I get a new device. What does eSIM offer that beats that?

> What does eSIM offer that beats that?

"shareholder value" for the carrier.

You can get a data-only eSIM in a couple of clicks for 4,50usd for example. I will be doing this in a couple of days. Very useful when traveling to a country where crazy roaming charges apply.

You have to contact the carrier every time you use a cell tower.

Or are you saying you have to contact them to transfer eSIMs to new phones? You don’t have to do that anymore.

He’s stating an iPad has replaced his laptop, and you complain about battery going empty if not used for a week?

> Seems quite reasonable to me, we've got a world-leading chip team who have been doing great work responsible for a pretty major cock-up.

You mean had a word beating chip team. I heard that the M1 team pretty much all left.

There is this weired thing, that when mudnane things happen, but Apple or Tesla is involved, they are suddenly unorecedented and newsworthy.

Stories about popular topics will have a natural leg-up in becoming viral. However, while a mundane story could become popular it will be hurt by people wondering why they are seeing it, other than simply because its about a popular topic. So it is common for such stories to also bake-in a facade reason for their popularity. No, no, no. You are not seeing this story on your feed simply because its about Apple. You are seeing it because something 'unprecedented' happened at Apple. And surely the more engagement you see on it, the more unprecedented the thing was! This effect has been weaponized in politics and crypto, where you get a huge base of proponents upvoting anything related to their pet topic.

Exactly. “Engineer Blows Budget” is also known as a day that ends in “y”.

Any hardware product company has to be atleast one cycle/model ahead in prototyping and development. If the 13 is launched today, then 14 should have already finished prototyping and development.

The "unprecedented" is because they found this after the 13 launch, and it's not an integration issue – it's a core issue. It's not possible to go back to architectural drawing boards in the current product iteration. So they had to do a hail mary and revert back to the previous launch's GPU.

That does count as a major goof up (if it happened ofc). We have many popular YouTube reviewers saying there is no reason to buy the 14 series, the 13 series are equally as good _(except the Pro Max's dynamic island)_. Apple just happens to be in a comfortable position. These kind of things could kill smaller hardware product companies.

HN should run all headlines through the following GPT prompt: "please rewrite the following headline without hyperbole: $HEADLINE"

The key thing being that they apparently had a fallback plan, which I assume is always the case for every generation of iPhone. That means that while it might be unprecedented, it apparently wasn't unanticipated.

It wasn't clear from the article that there was a fallback plan, or that they decided to use a lightly modified previous gen GPU because that was the only way to get working silicon in the timeframe?

I suppose you’re right, although I find it hard to believe that wasn’t the explicit backup plan long before they even started investigating the new stuff that ended up not working out.

They discovered the flaw late in their process. Since they discovered it so late, the had to base the iPhone 14’s GPU on the iPhone 13’s. Because of that, the 14 only delivered small graphical improvements. According to benchmarking firms, prior generations showed major leaps over their predecessor.

That’s the unprecedented part - the 14 only showed small gains whereas previous generations all showed big leaps.

In a case like that, unprecedented fits. It’s not hyperbole.

The iPhone is the best smartphone in the world. Its mobile CPU is the best mobile CPU in the world. People are used to Apple pushing the envelope with its mobile SoCs. If they step back and decide to include last gen's GPU on this gen's chip, that is unprecedented and it is significant.

    The incident is reportedly unprecedented in Apple's chip design history

Did ya read the article?

Yes this is the engineering equivalent of putting too much ham on your plate at Christmas dinner. Unprecedented amounts of ham go uneaten!

Early specs of engineering project don’t match final specs, oh the humanity!, more at 11.

News content is frequently very stupid.

I would rather hear headlines about Apple failing at a stretch goal than them just falling behind.

Agreed. When they wrote “missteps”, I figured that there were errors found in the GPU design. Instead, it seems like the design was fine, but had an unexpectedly high power draw. The GPU worked, it just needed more power than they expected.

That doesn’t seem “unprecedented” to me.

Unless they had previously perfectly modeled and predicted power, until this moment. (But that seems unlikely)

Attention to power should be given importantance in the design process, especially in mobile devices.

Apparently, every post we write here is unprecedented too.

...except if writing two consecutive identical posts, the second one being then not unprecedented, but making that pair unprecedented.

Ok, I'll stop now:)

Also, am I wrong, or are Apple products suffering more hardware flaws?

When was "It Just Works" abandoned as a guiding principle?

How did you end up in this thread?

How did you end up replying?

How did any of us come to be?

Lynn Margulis knows the answer.

I was interested in the topic.

You think nobody should care, but you cared enough to comment so I was just curious. If I'm not interested in bananas I don't visit threads about them. HN seems mostly rational, so I'm legit interested what has driven you to click and comment.

>This seems like an odd use of 'unprecedented'

so then, what was the precedent in an earlier generation of iPhones where a new set of chips was designed and developed which could be marketed as a leap in performance, but shortly before committing to manufacture they were forced to abandon the plan and roll back to the chips of a previous iPhone generation, leaving marketing with no performance boost to trumpet, especially in the context where the previous generation was also considered a disappointingly marginal improvement over its predecessor?

Odd, not false.

Odd, meaning literal, you mean. Odd use of odd.

I disagree. It is not odd to say that an overly literal use of a word is odd.

You're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

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