Lately the base model is usually last year’s old pro processors and micro controllers. Next year the base 16 will probably have the faster IO if the trend continues.
This is Apple at it again, do bare minimum and charge premium. They left USB2 because it required no work, but they had to put type C because EU regulation. Since USB is backwards compatible, solution is just solder half of the connector, charge premium price and fuck you customers. And they are right, people don’t care. Instead they go defending it like “I don’t need it anyway”, “Am not a pro, I don’t need it”, etc.
Did you watch the presentation? They literally showed and said the usb controller was part of the A17 Pro SoC
Ah, yes last year. Usb 2.0 was invented in, like what, 2001? A shitty phone cpu from 2 years ago is probably at least as powerful as the pentium 4 I had back in the day. Come the fuck on.
Just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were reusing some boards or controllers with limited throughput that their manufacturing plants and fabs were already pumping out. Cook got famous for being an operational efficiency nerd that made sure Apple had very little spare parts and inventory on the books.
But yeah, iPhone physical IO speeds have been slow for a looong time. My guess is that so much of Apple’s install base is syncing over the cloud that it hasn’t been a priority.
The biggest applause at the in-person event was, no lie, for the larger cloud storage plans.
I suspect next year’s base will have a revised version of this year’s processor. The iPhone 15 Pro has an A17 Pro. This is the first A Series chip with a “Pro” label. I don’t expect something “Pro” to make it into the base model.
What will change between the A17 Pro and the A17? Who knows. It might include the upgraded USB controller though.
Completely agree. No company redesigns all of their products each year. They redesign the top tier and then its shifts downward the next year. GPU, CPU, Motherboard, hell even cars do this. Not all models included Carplay and Android Auto when it launched, just the high end cars did, but now all of them do.
USB IO speed aside, Apple’s phones have gotten to the point where 3 and 4 year old chipsets are still VERY performant. They now have the wiggle room to put more bleeding edge silicon in top tier phones, be ok with smaller yields at first, and scale fabrication over the year.
That all being said, given that everyone was going to been eyeing this USB port, they probably should’ve taken one on the chin and changed the stupid IO speed. Although, the people complaining about this probably aren’t Apple’s core market anyway. So maybe they were right.
