Well, it has been confirmed, Apple is having an event announcement on 14 September – could it be like last year where the September event launches a set of products then a month later (October) they launch the next iPhone then a month after (November) that there is a Mac refresh with the much rumoured M1X. It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out. Btw, no, I’m not going to say “this year has hit peak iPhone” because every time some commentator says that it ends up being completely and utterly wrong.
On the topic of Android vs. iPhone sales figures, there was in IDC report that came out Apple outpacing Android in terms of 5G phones (link). One thing to keep in mind is that there are many phones still being sold that are solely 4G because the first generation of SoCs had the 5G modem as an external chip which raised costs for handset vendors not to mention the fact that they consumed more power (new technology tends not to be as optimised in terms of battery life when compared to the previous generation which had years of refinement in terms of hardware, firmware and driver maturity). As a result of that many held off from deploying 5G with the only ones being shipped being flag ship models but even then much of the 5G has been just that – hype.
What will happen in the next year? Well, the original Qualcomm 865 SoC was dependent on an external 5G modem where as the Qualcomm 888 which started to shipped in phones this year was the first that included the X50 integrated modem not to mention the extra complexity of 5G mmWave antennas. Then add to that when it comes to raw units shipped Android dominates the low to mid range so I wouldn’t be surprised that Android will dominate the market once 5G scales down to the low to mid level phones.
The interesting rumour has it that Google is pushing to use their custom SoC into more devices with a Chromebook being scheduled for a release in 2023 based on an article (link). That along with the work being done around Wear OS and other join ventures will hopefully put to rest the never ending rumours that the relationship between Google and Samsung is ‘rocky’. No matter how much Google tries they’ll never have the distribution reach that Samsung has and as much as Samsung would love to have their own platform the reality is that developing and maintaining ones own platform is expensive with very limited benefits beyond “hey, we have our own platform! yay for us!”.
Samsung has its own SoC with an AMD GPU with rumours that we’re going to also see a Exynos laptop running Windows 11 in the near future. It is interesting how for years 1-2 players can dominate a market then in a short period of time that dominance is gradually undermined. Reminds me of how Internet Explorer absolutely dominated the market then it was undermined by Firefox because it stripped off all the bloat from Mozilla so it was purely a web browser then that was slowly usurped by Google embracing Webkit then later forking it (Blink) for their own browser where Chrome these days is almost like a run time engine that much of the internet relies on these days (it appears that Chrome has delivered on what Java was meant to do and that is to ‘write once, run everywhere’).
Tonight had had some burritos from a local store but tomorrow I might just have an easy meal of some ramen noodles with semi-soft boiled eggs. Oh and on a side note I started taking flax seed oil again an I feel so much better even after a long day at work. I don’t know what I stopped but I think I need to make it a more regular thing – the benefits of Omega 3 along with the iron tablet will set me up for a winner of a day.
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