Apple iPad Event, M4, and Crush Ad

Apple iPad Event, M4, and Crush Ad

The Six Five team discusses Apple iPad event, M4, and crush ad.

If you are interested in watching the full episode you can check it out here.

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s dive into the Apple iPad event.

Daniel Newman: This is fun.

Patrick Moorhead: It’s a new iPad, new M4 chip and of course, that crush ad.

Stacy Rasgon: The ad, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Newman: How about the uncrush ad, Pat?

Stacy Rasgon: Is there another one I didn’t even see?

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s start the easiest first. Well, actually, let me start. So new iPad Airs, new iPad Pros with a new pencil. I’m going to focus on the M4 chip. Huge, huge claims of performance. They position it against AI PCs, right, which I think-

Stacy Rasgon: 38 tops, I think. So it’s above-

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Stacy Rasgon: … It’s above Meteor Lake and the current Intel AMD offerings, although they’ll get better as we go into next year. It’s below the nominal numbers from Qualcomm, from the Snapdragon X Elite, which I think is 45 tops.

Patrick Moorhead: Exactly, that’s exactly right. So they’re going to have two weeks in the sun. But what I do find interesting is positioning an iPad with an operating system that is better for single tasking. It does a little bit of multitasking, but they will get their two weeks in the sun. One thing that there was a lot of discussion on was with the M4, “Hey, how is it going to do on performance?” So bigger NPU, and that’s basically a function of laying down more transistors and gates, but secondly, what do they do? It’s funny. People forget what IPC actually means. IPC is an architectural measurement, it’s instructions per clock. So when you boost frequency, that doesn’t mean you’re getting an IPC.

Stacy Rasgon: The IPC increases, they are modest, they’re there, but they’re not like groundbreaking, I don’t think.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, well, there’s some debate on it ’cause they boosted frequency, they likely boosted cache, and when you boost cache, you shouldn’t get credit for IPC. Some people give that, but I do think single-threaded performance is going to be better based on something and then there’s this v9 SME for increased performance. And I think they’re going to get blown away on multi-threaded performance. I’m going to call it here. I think they’re going to show up really well on single-threaded. Now, I don’t know if it necessarily matters ’cause in the end, are Apple people going to shift to Windows, are Windows people going to shift to Apple based on all of this? I don’t think so. I think Apple will continue to sell, and by the way, struggle a little to get people to buy new iPads because the differential utility between all of these hasn’t gotten many, I mean I have an iPad-

Stacy Rasgon: Mine is six or seven years old right now.

Patrick Moorhead: … Movies, podcasts, maybe a little bit of music. I pull it out when I need some quick, too much content to be on my smartphone.

Stacy Rasgon: Yeah, I agree. My iPad’s, like I said, six or seven years old. The screen is cracked. I don’t use it enough to need to replace it. I think if it just completely gave up the ghost, I probably would, but until that happens, it’s fine. Now, my smartphone, I live with this, so that’s something that I would upgrade probably much more frequently. And I don’t know how much people… I think if I was to look at frankly one of the new ones versus what I’ve got, I’m sure the performance would be much, much better. I don’t really use it for content create. My daughter, for example, she draws and she does all kinds of stuff like that, so maybe she would benefit, but I watch videos on it at night before I go to sleep. That’s mostly, what I use it for.

Patrick Moorhead: By the way, you just outlined their huge challenge right there. Tablets theoretically break less than iPhones and also people care a lot less about the camera on their tablet. There’s the guy at the soccer game holding the iPad to do this stuff. So a final thing on this crush ad. Dan?

Daniel Newman: No, I know we’re on short time. All I want to say is I won’t talk at all about the tech other than the fact-

Stacy Rasgon: We’ve got somebody joining us by the way.

Patrick Moorhead: Aww.

Daniel Newman: Hey, there. Good-looking pet.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s so cute. Listen, I really appreciate your X game, right? We get a viewpoint into the personal Stacy, whether it’s by your pool overlooking Los Angeles, Chippy, the dog, you also, I know you love bananas, especially bananas that sit for a long time and turn brown.

Stacy Rasgon: So then I can throw them away and my family buys more. Yes.

Daniel Newman: We only have about 10 minutes left for a couple topics. One more we’ll keep you and then we’re going to throw you out of here, Stacy. I’ll give one little comment on Apple, that was the worst. That was absolutely a complete miss on culture and connectivity with its audience. Apple does this about once a decade though where they just totally blow it. And you know what though? I said this yesterday, I’m going to end this little, ’cause you guys did good on the tech stuff. If the goal in PR is to get everyone to talk about you and it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, as George Bush would say, “Mission accomplished.” Like George W would say, “Mission accomplished.” So Apple, job well done, you did a terrible, horrible ad and it worked. Everybody is talking about you.

Author Information

Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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