Produced | Tiger Sniff Technology Group
Author | Marutsune-san
Edit | Liao Ying
Head figure | Apple
In the early morning of September 13, Beijing time, Apple's autumn conference arrived as scheduled.
The focus of this conference naturally falls on the configuration and price of the new iPhone. The good news is that the iPhone 15 series did not increase in price as expected; The bad news is that the upgrades also seem to be "less obvious."
Image source: Apple's official website
Devices and functions such as type-C interface, reverse charging, periscope cameras and other devices and functions are usually not mentioned by Android manufacturers; Even with hardware-level ray tracing that was best rendered at the conference, Qualcomm and MediaTek have long been one step ahead of Apple.
So this generation of iPhone, is there any merit?
The biggest highlight is the credit of foreign aid
The iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max two models are equipped with the A17 Pro chip, which is the world's first 3nm process chip to achieve mass production in the field of consumer electronics, and it is also the first time that Apple has named the chip "Pro" on the mobile phone, which seems to be deliberately emphasizing the performance leap of this chip.
Image source: Apple's official website
First of all, a conclusion, this chip can afford the suffix of "Pro", which once again proves that Apple is still a horse in the chip field.
In terms of CPU, it is still the familiar "2+4 architecture", thanks to the improvement of chip manufacturing process, the number of transistors in A17 Pro has increased by 18% compared with the previous generation A16, but the core performance has only increased by 10%.
Of course, Apple did not waste the advantages of the 3nm process. This generation of the A17 Pro's neural engine doubles the speed of running machine learning models, performing 35 trillion operations per second.
But what is confusing is that Apple's AI scene of the A17 Pro at the press conference described functions such as automatic system error correction on the local side and extracting the subject from the background of the photo. This can't help but sigh, a chip with a computing power of 35TOPS, just do this work?
You know, the "Qualcomm 8295", which enjoys the treatment of chasing stars and holding the moon in car companies, has a computing power of only 30TOPS, and that chip integrates computer vision, passenger detection and vehicle information security.
This feeling of "killing chickens with a knife" is similar to the WWDC conference three months ago, when Apple's Vision Pro shocked XR practitioners around the world with its hardware-level faulty lead, but during the product demonstration, its ability was almost only around home and light office scenarios.
The only surprise is Apple's efforts on the GPU this time, in addition to the peak performance increase of 20%, Apple has also focused on polishing gaming capabilities, such as designing a new shader architecture and introducing hardware-based ray tracing.
Ray tracing effect display on the A17 Pro, image source: Apple conference
Although MediaTek and Qualcomm have announced support for hardware-level ray tracing last year, after all, there is a gap between the two products and Apple's A series chips in computing power and energy consumption, so there is more reason to believe that this generation of iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max has the ability to push the mobile game industry to a new height.
For example, play 3A masterpieces directly on your phone?
At the press conference, Apple also made it clear that several 3A games such as "Resident Evil 4: Remake", "Resident Evil 8: The Village", "Death Stranding - Director's Cut" will be launched this year, and the demonstration animation of related games will be displayed on the spot.
Here, we have to mention the publisher of the first two games, Capcom, and its "RE engine".
As a Japanese game company founded in the 70s, Capcom has maintained an enduring reputation in the industry with games such as Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, and Monster Hunter, and the RE engine has changed the ecology of the game industry to a certain extent.
Compared to Unreal Engine, RE Engine is much inferior in terms of texture of game graphics, but its strength lies in its "sky-defying" optimization capabilities and cross-platform portability.
Even people who don't play games much, when mentioning 3A games, the first reaction may be "these games are very testing hardware configuration", and Capcom once successfully ported the triple-A game "Monster Hunter: Rise" to the Switch platform in 2021 with the RE engine, which as a representative of weak hardware performance, its chip GPU level is only equivalent to the Snapdragon 845 processor on the mobile phone.
Speaking of which, I believe everyone also understands why Apple chose the "Resident Evil" series as the first game to land on the mobile App Store.
The iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max's gaming capabilities were described at the press conference, and in the end, it was still impossible to suspect that the "3A game on the phone" was essentially the credit of the Capcom RE engine.
Continue to be as steady as Tarzan?
When talking about Apple's conference, you can often see a very fragmented phenomenon: on the one hand, the disappointment that Apple cannot come up with "One More Thing", on the other hand, the user's unthinking "buy, buy, buy".
If it is based on results-oriented, any discussion of Apple is meaningless, because the global market in recent quarters, especially the top three in the Chinese mainland high-end machine market, have basically been monopolized by Apple's "medium cup", "large cup" and "super large cup".
But just as far as the domestic market is concerned, Apple may find it difficult to maintain the fault lead in the fourth quarter of this year and the first half of next year.
The reason is also obvious, Huawei is officially back.
Unlike other Android brands, there is direct competition between Huawei and Apple, the former had surpassed Apple in the first half of 2020 with a 0.1% advantage (44.1% market share above $600, IDC data) to become the first brand of high-end machines in the domestic market at that time, but for well-known reasons, Huawei then became "others" in various lists.
Not long ago, after the launch of the Mate 60 Pro, it was sought after by consumers. Some industry chain practitioners told Tiger Sniff that the day after the launch of the Mate 60 Pro (August 30), Huawei added orders with some suppliers, and the market performance far exceeded the previous stocking plan.
Objectively speaking, the Mate 60 Pro is not as stunning as the Mate 20 series and Mate 30 series, but its brand appeal is more than that of previous years. It is foreseeable that the Mate 60 series will definitely weaken Apple's domestic market shipments.
In addition to Huawei's external factors, the current generation of iPhones also has internal concerns.
In order to reduce the weight of the huge fuselage, Apple changed the "ancestral" stainless steel middle frame this time, and innovatively used titanium alloy materials on the middle frame material, from the perspective of metal properties, titanium alloy materials have higher hardness, stronger corrosion resistance and lighter weight.
Apple once used titanium alloy materials on the Watch series 5, image source: Apple's official website
But for a long time, few consumer electronics products have used this material as a housing. On the one hand, it is because titanium alloy materials are expensive, and on the other hand, because of its poor thermal conductivity.
Apple's solution to this is to use aluminum alloy material inside the middle frame and titanium alloy material on the outside. However, as we all know, there is an interface gap between solid surfaces, and the thermal conductivity between the two metals is not the same, so it is not ruled out that this titanium alloy frame will affect the heat dissipation performance of the iPhone 15.
After talking about internal worries and external troubles, does the new iPhone 15 series still have advantages in the domestic market? Of course there is, and it's big.
In fact, except for some loyal fruit fans and digital enthusiasts, most users do not care about the configuration when buying an iPhone, compared to whether they are "recognizable" in terms of appearance and product experience.
On the iPhone 15 series, the biggest change in appearance is that the "Spirit Island" on the previous generation of Pro/Pro Max models has been delegated to the full series, and this happens to be a feature that can bring users an upgrade of the experience.
In my personal opinion, this function of "old bottles of new wine" may be the key winner of Apple's sales in China this year.
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