11–20 of 682 posts
The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is…
The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagsh…
First, the iPhone 17 Pro is a huge improvement. Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
But aren't there plenty of used expensive phones from the last 5-7 years that are more or less equivalent replacements for new cheap phones? Apple alone sells 250 million phones a year.
Presumably the supply of 5+ year old used phones that fully work is not enough to meet that demand, which is why these frankenstein Android companies exist.
> So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.
Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other.
Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.
Pics:https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website...
Two other underappreciated handset brands are Doogee and Blackview. Gorgeous devices and solidly built. From what I recall they're friendly to root.
The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagsh…
Ever since I started working from home I barely use my phone, I just buy a mid range phone, and it seems just as capable as high range phone in most every practical way. The only real thing that seems a bit better is the camera, but I don't actually use it that often. The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple, but more for dev fun that normal practical purposes.
Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel meter. Same for light sensors. Phones used to have IR emitters, why not add those back in?
Also the iPhone still only has 240fps slow motion, I've found samsung's 960fps really useful in capturing transient phenomenon or even measuring mundane things like LED flicker.
Conversely the Pixel seems to be the only one shipping with an IR thermometer, and they'll probably remove it given most people don't seem to care. That's something I would've found useful in ad-hoc situations where I've had to make do with the back of my hand.
Air quality detection (especially pm2.5, CO2, and CO levels) would be great but I don't know if those sensors can be miniaturized enough to fit.
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...
Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in