<story><title>Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model</title><url>https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322120-apples-m1-positioning-mocks-every-x86-cpu-amd-and-intel-have-ever-launched</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dehrmann</author><text>&amp;gt; Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning.&lt;p&gt;This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple&amp;#x27;s margins are already so high they don&amp;#x27;t care?</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad Pro gets you an M1.&lt;p&gt;This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business right now because they&amp;#x27;re just trying to get M1 silicon into as many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don&amp;#x27;t actually have an M2 (or even M1X) to sell high-end products with yet, which is why they&amp;#x27;re starting with low-end products first. When they release upgraded chips, they will almost be used to transition the high end models with lower-end product getting it later.</text></item><item><author>monkmartinez</author><text>You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn&amp;#x27;t thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?&lt;p&gt;I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back either. If anything, I am more focused on AMD Ryzen and Nvidia 30 series chips in MSI, Lenovo Legion and Asus offerings. There is nothing I can&amp;#x27;t do with one of those machines. Going Apple is a backward move for me as I like to program, design in CAD, play steam VR, and run blender sims. Can&amp;#x27;t do any of those well with Apple hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmeisthax</author><text>So, there are a few instances where Apple &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; bin their products:&lt;p&gt;1. &amp;quot;7-core GPU&amp;quot; M1 Macs, which have one of the eight GPU cores disabled for yield&lt;p&gt;2. The A12X, which also had one GPU core disabled (which was later shipped in an 8-core GPU configuration for the A12Z)&lt;p&gt;3. iPod Touch, which uses lower-clocked A10 chips&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not like Apple is massively overbuilding their chips or has a zero defect rate. It&amp;#x27;s more that Intel is massively overbinning their chips for product segmentation purposes. Defect rates rarely, if &lt;i&gt;ever&lt;/i&gt;, fit a nice product demand curve. You&amp;#x27;ll wind up producing too many good chips and not enough bad ones, and this will get worse as your yields improve. Meanwhile, the actual demand curve means that you&amp;#x27;ll sell far more cheap CPUs than expensive ones. So in order to meet demand you have to start turning off or limiting perfectly working hardware in order to make a worse product.&lt;p&gt;Apple doesn&amp;#x27;t have to do this because they&amp;#x27;re vertically integrated. The chip design part of the business doesn&amp;#x27;t have to worry about maximizing profit on individual designs - they just have to make the best chip they can within the cost budget of the business units they serve. So the company as a whole can afford to differentiate products by what CPU design you&amp;#x27;re getting, rather than what hardware has been turned off. Again, they aren&amp;#x27;t generating &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; many defects to begin with, and old chips are going to have better yields and cost less to make anyway. It makes more sense for Apple to leave a bit of money on the table at the middle of the product stack and charge more for other, more obviously understandable upgrades (e.g. more RAM or storage) at the high end instead.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model</title><url>https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322120-apples-m1-positioning-mocks-every-x86-cpu-amd-and-intel-have-ever-launched</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dehrmann</author><text>&amp;gt; Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning.&lt;p&gt;This simplifies things for consumers, but how do you make chips without binning? Are they all just that reliable? Do they all have extra cores? Maybe Intel bins more because they can squeeze out a significantly better price for more core and cache, but Apple&amp;#x27;s margins are already so high they don&amp;#x27;t care?</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>Apple differentiates the majority of their products by generation rather than binning. If you buy a low-end iPad, you get an A12; the iPad Air steps you up to an A14; and the iPad Pro gets you an M1.&lt;p&gt;This is less evident on the Macintosh side of the business right now because they&amp;#x27;re just trying to get M1 silicon into as many product lines as their fab capacity will allow. They don&amp;#x27;t actually have an M2 (or even M1X) to sell high-end products with yet, which is why they&amp;#x27;re starting with low-end products first. When they release upgraded chips, they will almost be used to transition the high end models with lower-end product getting it later.</text></item><item><author>monkmartinez</author><text>You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn&amp;#x27;t thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS?&lt;p&gt;I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back either. If anything, I am more focused on AMD Ryzen and Nvidia 30 series chips in MSI, Lenovo Legion and Asus offerings. There is nothing I can&amp;#x27;t do with one of those machines. Going Apple is a backward move for me as I like to program, design in CAD, play steam VR, and run blender sims. Can&amp;#x27;t do any of those well with Apple hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>londons_explore</author><text>Binning requires more design work for the chip.   I would guess the M1 was designed rapidly and probably they decided that hundreds of different bins for different types of defects wasn&amp;#x27;t worth the complexity if it meant delaying tape out for a few weeks.  It also leads to extra product complexity (customers would be upset if some macbooks had hardware AES and others didn&amp;#x27;t, leading to some software being unusably slow seemingly at random).</text></comment>