patrick.net

There is no resolution. Flash is simply to inefficient to run on these devices. I have a Nexus S -- far more powerful than an iphone 4 or ipad in terms of processing power, and with the same amount of RAM -- and watching flash video drains the battery faster than playing angry birds.

It also performs like absolute crap. Its a bit better than it was on my droid, but its still atrocious.

Getting an ipad this christmas seems silly given that it's inevitable that a new one will come out in February.

I am holding on to my AAPL as well for now. Probably sell a bit to get myself an iPad ver2 in a few months.
On 2nd thought, I will sell either RIG or TIF instead.

jobcat says

I am holding on to my AAPL as well for now

APPL is definitely still a hold. The debate, I assumed, was whether it was still a strong buy.

Yeah I've been debating doubling down myself. I had some cash back when it was at $250 and thought about it, but it went elswhere.

Early January if it takes a dip.......

Nokia lacks software prowess, and as such they’re either going to switch to android, or die.
The proverbial pee in the pants. Sorry, I couldn't resist.
BTW, this entry was posted using a Nokia N810 tablet (it uses a TI OMAP processor and runs a linux based OS. With Flash support. And it came out in 2008, no less). Any apps on this are free as well (as they are just ports of Linux programs). Okay, I lied, I didn't post from the Nokia but could have (stupid stylus :-)

I also had bought heavy on ARMH which makes the chips used in lots of small devices among other things iPhones. This turned out to be an even more rapid riser than AAPL. I'm guessing the Verizon and MS announcements meant people thought ARM chips would soon be in nearly every crevice not just a bunch more iPhones and it took off. I had a tight trailing stop % on it and ended up selling out of it near the close today at over a 40% profit in 3 months. Still just holding AAPL haven't averaged in for more.

Vicente says

I also had bought heavy on ARMH which makes the chips used in lots of small devices among other things iPhones

Arm doesn't make (and by "make", I mean "sell or manufacture") processors. They design processors and sell the rights to make those processors to companies like Qualcomm ("Snapdragon"), Samsung ("Hummingbird"), NVIDIA ("Tegra" / "Denver"), Apple ("A4") and others.

This is in contrast to the x86 world, where there are basically two manufacturers (Intel and AMD), and one of those companies holds most of the IP.

To understand why ARM is so valuable, consider this:

- 98% of mobile devices sold this year will run on ARM architecture.
- Intel's Sandy Bridge, the thing that was supposed to bring x86 to mobiles, costs 5x as much and uses 10x as much power for equivalent performance. In other words, it's not going to happen.
- ARM licenses are such that you pay once per device. This means that there's very little reason to use any other architecture once you're using ARM. You use ARM cores, ARM FPUs, etc. Anything else would just make the hardware more expensive.
- ARM's only significant expense is R&D. Their profit margins are impossibly high.

The obvious potential downside is that the industry could have a massive shift to another architecture. This is unlikely for several reasons:

1. There is no real competition. IBM and Motorola have mostly abandoned this area. PowerPC is hardly being used anywhere anymore (Wii?), and it's not anywhere near as efficient. x86 will be impossible to scale down in terms of power requirements. Sparc, etc. are about maximizing performance, not performance per watt.

2. It would require a massive porting effort for most apps. All iOS apps would need to be recompiled (think the mac power PC -> intel transition and fat binaries). Most android and symbian apps would be in the same position.

3. Hardware vendors love the current arena. Yes, everyone is beholden to ARM Inc, but they're being benevolent dictators for now. There is healthy competition between chip makers, which keeps prices low.

So, yeah, for the next 5 years at least I wouldn't bet against ARMH.

AMD could possibly compete here with their new processors being sub 1 watt @ 1ghz and fully x86 compatible with a graphics processor to boot. While it might consume more power than the arm processor, it should get the same work done in the same amount of energy via being more efficient. Although AMD booted their CEO and it's looking like it's because he didn't chase their market aggressively enough.

The main issue with arm is that everyone takes their arm licensed tech and makes the chips and adds onto them, such as Tegra, but that knowledge doesn't flow backwards, so it creates fractions in the architecture on a going forward basis. Each Arm processor can thus become something completely different. At some point, one company (possibly nvidia) will hold enough market share, with enough additional hardware added onto the arm processor that coders will have to either write for arm + nvida or just give up the arm market and write code for nvidia combination. ARM only code could work on both, but it would be so inefficient compared with someone who wrote a native nvidia app with all the goodness nvidia added.

It should be an interesting couple of years though. I would personally like to see an x86 chip in the market + android or linux on it!

As a side note, Apple (as previously mentioned) bought Intrinsity. The folks at Intrinsity take standard ARM cores and optimize them for speed and performance. Guess who's going to have the fastest, lowest power mobile chips? YMMV as some people don't think much of Intrinsity's technology and the Apple purchase.
It's also important to note that most ARM based SoCs contain multiple processors - that is, not multiple ARM cores (coming soon, though - see OMAP4), but special purpose processors like DSPs and hardware accelerators. This adds a bit more programming complexity, but the tradeoff it that workloads get farmed out to the most appropriate subsystem. This translates into a more power efficient solution and is why x86 will have a hard time in the mobile space. Their best bet is in the tablet arena where they can bring their apps with them.

EBGuy says

Their best bet is in the tablet arena where they can bring their apps with them.

? Windows and tablets Do Not Mix.

The power of the 30-year PC-DOS/Win32 legacy is finally coming to an end.

Apple threw a Tabula Rasa bomb into the market last year.

pkennedy says

AMD could possibly compete here with their new processors being sub 1 watt @ 1ghz and fully x86 compatible with a graphics processor to boo

x86 is NOT a benefit in the mobile world. No mobile OS today is running native code on x86. iOS, android, symbian, all have the majority of their software on ARM cores. x86 requires a recompile, and possibly code changes to run.

The only reason to run x86 on mobile is so that you can run windows on mobile, but windows was never designed for mobile devices, and that is why it continually fails to work on these systems.

pkennedy says

Each Arm processor can thus become something completely different. At some point, one company (possibly nvidia) will hold enough market share, with enough additional hardware added onto the arm processor that coders will have to either write for arm + nvida or just give up the arm market and write code for nvidia combination.

Unlikely. I was very disappointed that A9 allows vendors to choose an FPU implementation, but you still don't need to modify code generally.

There is some room for divergence at the GPU level, since not all GPUs support the same extensions, but if you stick strictly with openGL ES, you won't have this issue either.

pkennedy says

It should be an interesting couple of years though. I would personally like to see an x86 chip in the market + android or linux on it!

Why? There are no real advantages of x86 over ARM other than compatibility with code compiled for x86. Since none of that code is useful on mobile, why would you want inherently less efficient processors?

A real RISC competitor would be nice, of course. But for now I think the situation with ARM is infinitely better than the x86 situation ever was.

EBGuy says

Guess who’s going to have the fastest, lowest power mobile chips?

Samsung. The proof is in the benchmarks. NVIDIA has a chance here, but that depends entirely on what happens with Denver. The Tegra2 is a piece of shit compared to the orion or OMAP4 because of the lack of NEON, but NVIDIA does still make the best GPUs. My understanding is that the GPU guys are in charge now, and the Tegra3/4 will be Cortex-A15 based, so I have high hopes

Now, the thing is, Apple still doesn't make their chips. They take ARM designs, tweak them a bit, and hand them off to LG or Samsung to make them. That's why those companies will likely always have the edge.

EBGuy says

Their best bet is in the tablet arena where they can bring their apps with them.

Again, no. You can not take an app designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse and try to use it with fingers and a virtual keyboard. It just doesn't work. Microsoft has been trying it for 15 years, and nobody cares.

The tablet market will belong to the same companies that the smartphone market belongs to. As we're seeing with some of the recently demoed tablet apps from Apple and Google, the trend is very much towards full productivity software on these devices. I won't be at all surprised if ten or twenty years from now every personal computer is a tablet, with a small niche market of docking solutions for creative industries (design, programming, journalism) that need larger screens and/or physical keyboards to do their work.

Kevin said:I won’t be at all surprised if ten or twenty years from now every personal computer is a tablet, with a small niche market of docking solutions for creative industries (design, programming, journalism) that need larger screens and/or physical keyboards to do their work.
And that is the one area where I could see x86 having a chance. I'm not sure x86 has really made a ago at the tablet market at the price points it demands. Clayton Christensen has argued that the licensed IP model for processing cores,etc. is disruptive; it looks like the market may be proving him right. They certainly are scaring the heck out of the x86 camp. As I noted on another thread, there are companies that think low power ARMs can make in roads in the server market. Did anyone notice that Microsoft announced that it will support Windows 8 on ARM chips? That, I did not expect.

Kevin said:Samsung. The proof is in the benchmarks.
And might that be because of the Intrinsity optimizations applied to the ARM core? I'm being somewhat rhetorical, but I truly don't know if there might be other reasons. In my very limited understanding of this business, it's the foundry that has the ARM license (in this case, Samsung). Now that Apple owns Intrinsity, it will be interesting to see if others (whoever manufactures the Apple chips) also have access to the optimized core for their own use. This is in reference to the next gen of ARM based products.

EBGuy says

And that is the one area where I could see x86 having a chance. I’m not sure x86 has really made a ago at the tablet market at the price points it demands.

Why? A9 is outperforming Oak Trail on most benchmarks already, and early tests of A15 are outperforming Sandy Bridge, at half the power and less than a quarter of the cost. Why would you want x86 when the alternative is superior in every possible dimension? It makes no sense whatsoever, unless you have a bunch of hand tuned assembly that you just can't port.

EBGuy says

And might that be because of the Intrinsity optimizations applied to the ARM core?

Intrinsity can not be given sole credit for the optimizations. It was a joint venture between Samsung and Intrinsity. The A4 (Apple / Intrinsity's design) is a weaker processor than Hummingbird (Samsung's design).

The primary advantage that Apple got by buying Intrinsity and PA semi was leverage over Samsung to continue to make its processors at reasonable prices. Notice how Samsung is conspicuously absent in the matrix of who's suing who in the mobile industry?

Samsung makes the A4, and will likely make the A5, because it will be difficult for Apple to go to another manufacturer without Samsung's side of the hummingbird IP. That might change when Apple switches to a cortex A-15 based chip, but that won't be until the iphone 6 at the earliest.

Tomorrow should be interesting.... Apple will probably crash in the AM on the Steve Jobs health worries... Just how bad? 10-20% haircut possible.. Then if earnings aren't absolutely AMAZING... Then look out, another 10% haircut is possible.. total 20-30% loss! I was really considering selling some of my position soon... oh well, guess I'll hold on now.

I don't think AAPL will crash at all.

Though this exact event is why I advised a friend who wanted to lighten his AAPL position to just sell with a market limit order instead of a trailing stop (which is the normal way to get out of a position).

Thanks to Steve's stupid pancreas, it was always possible that one could wake up with AAPL cut in half, running your stops and then having the damn thing bounce back.

Futes are going to be fun to watch tonight. I miss firing up TOS and watching zillions of dollars change hands overnight.

Hmmm yes, I'm sitting here this evening waffling on what to do with my stops. Previously set at a simple trailing stop $335. Hmmm, adjust down for more room to bounce, or just let it bail? Decisions, decisions.

I think they'll have soiid earnings, which will offset the impact of the Jobs news.

Long term, though, I'm skeptical about Apple's prospects without Jobs. I would say that 75% of their value is derived from his leadership.

And.... I'm out. Stops were tripped at the open.

Seems rising just fine after the initial reaction. Now I'm bummed. Oh well, on to the next trade.

Los Angeles Renter says

Tomorrow should be interesting…. Apple will probably crash in the AM on the Steve Jobs health worries… Just how bad? 10-20% haircut possible.. Then if earnings aren’t absolutely AMAZING… Then look out, another 10% haircut is possible.. total 20-30% loss! I was really considering selling some of my position soon… oh well, guess I’ll hold on now.

Well, i'm glad I was wrong.. I guess jobs departure from Apple is already priced in... Good to know!

SF ace says

file this under why you should never set up stops. I knew Apple is good when my freakin nanny bought an Ipad. Incredible.
I had a chance to visit Hong Kong and Singapore last month and Apple products are absolute hits. It’s just incredible everyone that had a Nokia two years ago are all converted to Iphone 4, for $799 no less.
I don’t know the technical details like Kevin, but Apple just passes the eye test. Samsung is a distant second.

I'm not sure I follow. My comments about Samsung was with regards to their components, not their finished products. Their finished products are pretty mediocre in most fields, and I honestly wouldn't pick them out of a crowd. I certainly wouldn't call them a 'distant second'. In the smartphone (and soon, tablet) space, in terms of overall quality, I would put Nokia as second best in terms of design, but their software is garbage. Motorola would be my vote for third.

Where Samsung shines is in their semiconductor (SoC's, DRAM, NAND) and display panel businesses. Where do you think Apple gets their parts from? Samsung desperately wants to move up the value chain, and they're having modest success with it, but if they keep fucking with their customers the way that they've done with the Galaxy S line, or jumping the gun and producing mediocre products like the Galaxy Tab, their chances are slim.

I am still in AAPL. Wanted to buy more on the dip, but missed my limit order by $1.
On to the next one, indeed.

Now I see AAPL has been slumping a bit the last few days. Hmmm, the excitement is gone I guess. Now I don't feel so bad about bouncing out.

Options expiration tomorrow. Market maker conspiracies? I'm a believer; I finally started writing covered calls (on another tech, not Apple). Don't fight The Man. Tomorrow should be fun as I haven't closed out my position yet...