Gaming focused Apple TV may be announced next month
All that performance for what though?
Future proofing, mostly. Google and Samsung have been promising seven years of updates, but they’re doing it because Apple has done it always, only Apple never promised longevity.
The issue here is that Apple designs its own silicon, so Apple decides when to stop supporting a device. With Android phones, Qualcomm and others make the silicon, and they are hard coded to specific Android versions. They release patches that allow new versions of Android to be used (this is in layman’s terms, it’s much more complicated than all that) and after a year or two, they stop releasing these patches. No new version of Android can run on that hardware and you have to buy a new phone or keep using unpatchable code. Well, at some point the Android side got this shit figured out and now they can logistically do seven years of updates. But the processors are still not as fast. Android guys are going nuts over the fact that the Pixel 10 benchmarks similar to the iPhone 11 in performance (Tensor 5 by Google in the Pixel 10, vs A13 Bionic by Apple in the iPhone 11). And while the iPhone 11 is still supported today (it’s getting iOS 26 on Monday), no one’s imagining an iPhone 11 is competitive with the current generation. So if you think a Tensor 5-powered Pixel 10 will be usable in 7 years, while it may be still getting updates… I got oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you.
The A19 Pro is also going to be awesome for gaming, but nobody buys Apple tech for gaming. It’s more creative stuff. Like making video/audio. Artists have always flocked to Apple, but I don’t think the power of the A19 Pro is necessarily catering to them. Or the platform it’s on. Artists want the iPad Pro, which currently runs on the M3 or M4 (Mac silicon).
So if you think a Tensor 5-powered Pixel 10 will be usable in 7 years, while it may be still getting updates… I got oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you.
The only reason I’m on a Pixel 5 (which I bought last year - 2024) is because I couldn’t run a recent enough version of Android on my 2017 phone.
Phone hardware has been pretty good since at least then. If I’m happy with this performance, the only reason it would get reduced is by bloat in the OS and apps.
Apple has always been selective as to how they compare their newest chips. You’ve always been able to get the equivalent performance for about half to a third of the price, or between 2 and 10 times the performance for the same price, depending on the type of computationally intensive task.
And by performance, I don’t mean single thread, as that hasn’t been a limiting factor for quite som time.
Don’t get me wrong. For traveling, and doing software development, it’s the only manufacturer that has managed to make laptops that need to be connected to an outlet within an hour or two. I don’t know any better, at least.
Not fan of Apple (the company), but their single thread CPU performance has been industry leading for quiet some time.
