Not All iPhone 6s Processors Are Created Equal (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: Apple is splitting the manufacture of the A9 processor for its iPhone 6s between TSMC (~60%) and rival Samsung (~40%) — "and they are not created equal," writes Andy Patrizio. For starters, Chipworks noted that Samsung uses 14nm while TSMC uses 16nm. A Reddit user posted tests of a pair of 6s Plus phones and found the TSMC chip had eight hours of battery life vs. six hours for the Samsung. Meanwhile, benchmark tests from the folks at MyDriver (if Mr. Patrizio's efforts with Google Translate got it right) also found that the Samsung chip is a bigger drain on the phone's battery, while the TSMC chip is slightly faster and runs a bit cooler. So how do you know which chip you got? There's an app for that.

Comments

Too little, too late

[akahige]

More to the point, how can you find out which chip the phone has before buying it?

Re:Too little, too late

[Grishnakh]

Simple: don't buy it at all. If a company is going to play shenanigans like this where products marketed with the exact same name and part number are significantly different and it's just a luck-of-the-draw ass to whether I get the good one or the crappy one, I'm just not going to buy their product at all.

Re:Too little, too late

[soft_guy]

The fact that they ship an improved version every year or so is NOT the issue here. Seriously if the new version is not a big enough improvement over the one you have, you don't need to buy it. You can keep your phone for 2 years, or 3 years, or however long you want. That is hardly "pushing it through the throats of customers". You have to have a major victim mentality to think that. I do agree though that shipping non-equivalent versions of the processor is a big deal. That's not okay.

Re:Too little, too late

[gstoddart]

I'm sorry, but who is pushing a new iPhone "through the throats of customers"??

You are completely free to not fucking buy one.

Did you know that car makers push out a new version, only slightly different, annually? Companies who make golf clubs, also push out new versions at least annually. And companies who make TVs, they also do this.

If customers buy a new expensive phone every year or two, don't blame the vendor. Free will doesn't stop just because you've bought a product.

Re:Too little, too late

[DarkOx]

I don't understand why people freak out when a tech vendor releases a new model, as if they are forced to buy it or the one they have is suddenly going to explode. I do think some large vendors are guilty of abandoning support for their legacy products a bit to quickly. Nobody gets all nuts about the fact the Chrysler/Ford/GM/Honda/VW/Mercedes/etc bring out new models every year; often with slight improvements, usually with other changes you may or might not like.

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

Simple: don't buy it at all. If a company is going to play shenanigans like this where products marketed with the exact same name and part number are significantly different and it's just a luck-of-the-draw ass to whether I get the good one or the crappy one, I'm just not going to buy their product at all.

Play shenanigans? That pre-supposes that somewhere at Apple, Tim Cook and company are laughing at their customers because they fell for their secret, master plan of causing Apple bad PR and headaches. Maybe in the real world, Apple, like many companies, have to source parts from multiple suppliers for practical reasons like: redundancy and demand. Certainly Apple isn't the first and the last company to run into problems when their part which should be identical has differences because of which plant made them.

Re:Too little, too late

[jellomizer]

But who is playing shenanigans Samsung or Apple.
Did Apple Spec out the correct specs to Samsung and they made a cheap knockoff, after sending a batch that seems to meet initial QA, in a very German style. Or did Apple know about/agree to giving different quality products.

Re:Too little, too late

[tripleevenfall]

A vendor making a mid-model year substitution for a better product seems like a benefit to me, not a detriment. Instead of nobody getting the improved version, at least some people do.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anubis IV]

As more data is coming to light, it's sounding like the differences are smaller than first estimated and were likely exaggerated as a result of synthetic benchmarks not accurately modeling real-world performance. Specifically, while it does sound like TSMC's chips are performing far better than Samsung's in the synthetic benchmarks (e.g. Geekbench's battery tests), MacRumors has some followup on the topic, indicating that in the real world tests that are ongoing, the results so far appear to be much closer between the two models.

It sounds like the synthetic benchmarks may be slamming a part of the processor that TSMC has optimized better than Samsung, but that in real-world performance, that part is used far less frequently than in the synthetic benchmark, meaning that the results from the synthetic benchmark may not accurately model real-world performance.

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

Did Apple Spec out the correct specs to Samsung and they made a cheap knockoff, after sending a batch that seems to meet initial QA, in a very German style. Or did Apple know about/agree to giving different quality products.

There are both done on slightly different processes and it seems there is a difference that should not be there. It may be that somewhere in the Samsung process (masking, lithography, etc), a difference is significant enough to cause this battery issue. Or that something about Apple's design (or chip design in general) is affected by the step down to 14nm that isn't noticeable in 16nm. Remember that chip features are starting approaching the limits where problems occur that require design changes like multi-gate which did not occur at larger feature sizes.

Re:Too little, too late

[thoromyr]

a shame I ran out of mod points. This makes rather more sense than the alarmist story...

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

If sourcing substantially different parts from different vendors is necessary to meet production volume, then they need to have different part names and model names for these products.

Let's start with the first thing: These parts are not supposed to be substantially different. They are the same design but at a smaller feature size. The fact that they are is a problem and Apple will have to get with Samsung and TSMC to figure what is the issue. Second, different sources parts are known internally but not externally. After all, does Intel rename a Broadwell Core i7 differently when it comes from Oregon or Arizona or Ireland? No. There is a part number that tells where the chip was made and you as a customer don't know where it came from when you order it from Newegg or Micron or wherever.

This isn't a case of having resistors or capacitors from different manufacturers, something that won't affect performance in any measurable way, this is a case of having two completely different CPUs, with very different performance from the two.

How is an dual core A9 from Apple a "completely different CPU" than an dual core A9 from Apple. They are the exact same design by Apple. If you feel that makes them "completely different", did you lecture Microsoft when they switched Xbox processors? From what I remember IBM Xenon processor was shrink reduced from 90nm to 65nm to 45nm. These are all "different" CPUs to you?

6h vs. 8h in a power-consumption test is a huge, huge difference.

And if it's true, Apple will have to look into why.

Intel sells CPUs all the time which are very similar, but have performance that differs to that extent: they use completely different part numbers to describe these parts.

The problem with this comparison is that a Core i7 is not the same as a Core i5 with actual differences like L3 cache size, TDP, clock speed, etc. and these come from different designs.

Re:Too little, too late

[sg_oneill]

Apple has been generally pretty good with that. Older iPhones will still run newer software, although in some cases its debatable if its actually a good idea to do so, if the software is written under the assumption of a more performant processor. At least with the laptops, my Macbook 2011 is running the latest and greatest OSX at a cracking pace, and my GFs iphone 5 is fully updated and running well.

Re:Too little, too late

[AmiMoJo]

They have a history of doing this too, because like like to have two suppliers competing. Most of the time no-one cares, but for example a few years back they had all those dodgy "retina" LCDs on their laptops. There were two suppliers, LG and Sharp, and all the LG ones were prone to ghosting while the Sharp ones were fine.

The only thing customers could do is keep taking the laptops back when ghosting appeared and hoping that the replacement had a Sharp LCD. I think that's what upset people, the way it was handled. On the other hand I can appreciate that Apple probably didn't want to replace millions of LCD panels if they could avoid it.

This is pretty shitty though, because the lesser of the two CPUs isn't defective and thus the customer can't swap the phone for a better one. They just have to live with reduced battery life and performance on their very expensive new shiny. It will be interesting to see what Apple do. For example, if they ban apps that detect which CPU you have then people will endlessly speculate about why their battery life is crap and keep worrying about it, but if they don't people will demand exchanges. Could affect resale price too.

Re:Too little, too late

[GNious]

I'm sorry, but who is pushing a new iPhone "through the throats of customers"??

You are completely free to not fucking buy one.

You obviously have no clue how society works - if you're using a previous-gen iPhone, you're not cool enough, and you should go jump of a bridge.

Re:Too little, too late

[alvinrod]

How this blew up into such a shitstorm from a single test involving just two devices is beyond me. It's a bit like taking a single person at random from Country A and a single person at random from Country B and then declaring the winner of a single race as proof positive that the entire country is better at running. I realize it's Apple and that means even minor things are fucking magical and revolutionary or complete catastrophes, but this is a new low.

Even if the processors were all from the same company, we would still expect to see variation in performance due to how CPUs are made. Anyone who's done any overclocking knows that there's going to be a noticeable performance difference between CPUs with the same exact model number, simply because of the binning process used by the manufacturers like Intel, TSMC, etc. Maybe the CPU you got barely qualified for a particular bin and you can't get a lot of additional performance out of it or perhaps you're on the other end where the chip you got was barely not good enough for the next bin and you can get a reasonable amount of extra performance out of it.

You'd want to sample dozens of different devices in a controlled setting to get the complete picture and to see how the distributions overlap. It could be that on average TSMC does get a slight advantage over a Samsung chip, but that in this one particular test, we got a Samsung SoC that is poorer than average for a Samsung manufactured chip and a TSMC chip that is better than average for a TSMC manufactured chip.

Re:Too little, too late

[AmiMoJo]

Yep, it's most likely a problem with the design. Shrinking from 16nm to 14nm isn't simply a case of scaling your design files by 87.5%, you have to make separate ones. You can carry over most of the high level design and layout, but the computer has to re-synthesise the detailed transistor structure, you might have to use different cache memory, different power and voltage management devices etc. 14nm is a different process, it's not just a slightly better focus on a lens or something.

So the two were never going to be exactly the same, and chances are it's just that the 16nm design is a bit better optimized. Could be that it makes better use of the materials used, could be that the computer did a better job on synthesis, could be a number of things. I really doubt that Samsung sabotaged it though.

Re:Too little, too late

[AmiMoJo]

The MacRumors tests are less realistic than the Geekbench tests. MacRumors ran videos, which are mostly decided by the GPU and fetched by the WiFi or cellular modems. The CPU does very little when playing YouTube videos.

The Geekbench tests are a mix of different real world activities, like browsing, games and app use. Unless all you do is watch YouTube on a tiny screen for hours on end Geekbench is the more realistic test.

Re:Too little, too late

[DerekLyons]

But who is playing shenanigans Samsung or Apple.
Did Apple Spec out the correct specs to Samsung and they made a cheap knockoff, after sending a batch that seems to meet initial QA, in a very German style. Or did Apple know about/agree to giving different quality products.

There's a third possibility that should not be discounted out of hand - Samsung meets the specification, while TSMC exceeds it. Without access to internal information, it's hard to tell what's going on behind the curtain and all too easy to leap on the 'obvious' conspiracy.

Of course, the various mega corps routinely indulge in behavior that makes conspiracy theories not all that far fetched...

Re:Too little, too late

[Anubis IV]

MacRumors didn't do any testing at all. They're just compiling lists of tests that others are doing, in an effort to get a sense for whether or not there actually are large differences. And the A9 chips being provided by Samsung and TSMC are SoCs, not just CPUs, so it makes perfect sense that they'd be running benchmarks that include video processing and other non-CPU-bound tasks, given that the A9 is responsible for those as well.

Moreover, given the variance in performance that can occur within chips from even a single manufacturer, it's no surprise that there will be variation between the two models. If there weren't, it would be a news story. As such, the important questions to ask are:
1) Is the difference between the two broadly reproducible (i.e. is Samsung consistently behind), or is it this just an anecdotal case involving a single low-performing Samsung chip being compared to a single high-performing TSMC chip?

2) Given the variation, do either of them fall below the specs provided by Apple?

We don't have enough data yet to answer #1, but, again, as more data is coming to light, it's sounding like things are not so lopsided as the initial reports indicated. TSMC may have a slight edge, but it's not anywhere in the ballpark of what was being reported earlier. As for #2, by all indications, the answer is "no, neither of them fall below Apple specs". Which is to say, some people may win out on the luck of the draw and get a phone with a chip that performs better...which was already the case anyway, since chips are never perfectly identical in their performance. All a manufacturer will do is guarantee that the performance falls within a certain range, so some will always perform better than others, even when built using the same process from the same manufacturer.

Re:Too little, too late

[Aaden42]

This isn’t a mid-model-year thing. They’re actively shipping both versions right now. Luck of the draw if you get the better or worse CPU, same price either way. That’s not the same as bought later, got a little better for no extra money.

Re:Too little, too late

[Aaden42]

Apple doesn’t “send down” any updates. You’re free to take or leave any OS update you like. They’re remind you a bit, but nobody is forced to upgrade the OS they have on their phone right now.

And do you *seriously* think Apple releases updates to “actively try to fuck up older but functioning hardware”? Paranoid much? Yes, some updates have made older hardware work less well. Other updates have improved long standing issues on older hardware. That’s the nature of software development. It’s not a good thing, but it’s a far distance between “didn’t test it as much on three-year-old hardware” and “let’s intentionally add this bug to make the old phone flake out.”

Re:Too little, too late

[Sponge Bath]

Really? Which plant made this processor? Can you tell me? At best you can tell it's a 14nm process but you don't know which 14nm plant made it from the information provided. You have to look at the chip when you get it, but you've already bought it at that point.

You are very purposefully ignoring what I wrote to rage against something I did not. Intel processors made on different processes have a different part number the customer can see when ordering. Heck, they even have different part numbers for the same processor on the same process that have been binned differently. But if you want to keep talking about a the same processor made on the same process from the same company, go ahead an knock yourself out. It has nothing to do with anything I wrote.

I would guarantee you that every smartphone model including the iPhone has parts from multiple sources. For example the exact same model might have RAM from Samsung in one phone and RAM from Hynix in another. They shouldn't be different in terms of performance or function but if they are, the manufacturer has to trace down why. The point I'm trying to make is that there shouldn't be a difference in performance.

I agree there should not be a difference in performance, but there is. Whether that performance difference is a problem or not should be left to the customer.

Re:Too little, too late

[Khyber]

"Really? Which plant made this processor? [newegg.com] Can you tell me?"

Intel Vietnam made that one.

Learn how to read part numbers.

Re:Too little, too late

[khellendros1984]

And you fail to understand the whole point of using multiple suppliers. The parts ARE NOT supposed to be different in terms of function. They are made by different people/processes.

Well, they are. They vary in a metric that's very important in a mobile device. I'll just wait here while Apple fixes the problems with the inferior version of the CPU that they accidentally released in their hardware, shall I? If Apple sent a design to multiple manufacturers, I'd expect those manufacturers to produce identical parts. As you note, that's the whole point of using multiple suppliers. As everyone else has been trying to point out: these parts aren't identical. Either Apple sent out 2 designs, for the different lithography scales, or one of the suppliers modified Apple's design. Either way, Apple has to know about the difference from internal testing, and implicitly agreed that knowingly releasing two differently-performing pieces of hardware under the same model number was acceptable.

Re: Too little, too late

[macs4all]

cool until the updates make the old versions unusable ( typing on ipad 2 whose browsers are all crashy messes since the iOS9 update)

Have you filed any bug reports with Apple, or just bitched online?

BTW, that Page took all of 1 second of Googling to find.

Re:Too little, too late

[macs4all]

Apple doesn’t “send down” any updates. You’re free to take or leave any OS update you like. They’re remind you a bit, but nobody is forced to upgrade the OS they have on their phone right now.

And do you *seriously* think Apple releases updates to “actively try to fuck up older but functioning hardware”? Paranoid much? Yes, some updates have made older hardware work less well. Other updates have improved long standing issues on older hardware. That’s the nature of software development. It’s not a good thing, but it’s a far distance between “didn’t test it as much on three-year-old hardware” and “let’s intentionally add this bug to make the old phone flake out.”

Take a look at the history of Apple-Hater Posts on Slashdot. They are almost universally from Anonymous Cowards.

Doesn't that tell you something about the veracity of the Complainants?

I stick my Karma on the line with Every. Single. Post. Why don't the Apple-Haters?

And don't EVEN begin to tell me that it's because they fear for their Karma from malicious downmodding from the "hordes of Apple Fanbois" on Slashdot! That dog don't hunt!!!

Re:Too little, too late

[macs4all]

This isn’t a mid-model-year thing. They’re actively shipping both versions right now. Luck of the draw if you get the better or worse CPU, same price either way. That’s not the same as bought later, got a little better for no extra money.

Or, here's a thought:

Instead of buying online, GO TO THE APPLE STORE, like, in MeatSpace, and buy your phone. When they bring it out, ask to see the Product Number, and REJECT IT if it isn't the one with A TSMC SoC in it.

Simple. At least Apple has denoted the two different "models" in a way that a human can tell which is which without having to load an App.

Re:Too little, too late

[macs4all]

I guess it true that Apple users have small penises (ii?), if you can mouth all that while sucking up so hard.

Intel calls an i5@2600Mhz different than the i5@3400Mhz. If you buy the slow one you get it cheaper. End user overclocking is unrelated so don't even try to bring that up.

For a car analogy, this is DIRECTLY comparable to the difference between ordering a v8 and getting a v6 - but the v6 is the one that burns more gas!

To use your car analogy, I guarantee that if you tested 100 different copies of exactly the same year and model car on a dynanometer, equipped the same, with the same engine and transmission options, you would get exactly 100 different horsepower/kW output numbers. And the "spread" might really surprise you.

Sometimes, these differences from different suppliers become part of the fan-folklore surrounding a particular component or product. The best example I can come up with offhand is the venerable Ford 351 V8 Engine of yore. There were 351's that were made in Cleveland, OH, and there were 351's that were made in Windsor, Ontario.

They were NOT the same. Not even close. In fact, IIRC, they were even designed slightly differently.

But if you went to the Ford Dealer back in the day and bought yourself an F-150 pickup truck, LTD or Galaxy 500 with that engine (the Pickup might have had a 360 in it, though, I'm not an expert), I'm pretty sure it was the luck of the draw which version of "351" you got, and I am sure that you, as an average consumer, could not specify, nor tell which one was which, without examining the Engine Identification Number on the Block (or maybe the Engine itself if you were an expert), or the VIN.

But if you cruise the old-timey Ford forums, you will find no end to the posts regarding which "351" (C or W) is the one to have...

Re:Too little, too late

[mysidia]

Different model #'s detectable in software, but not listed on the package.

Tell the employee, you need to get an iPhone with the Samsung 14nm version of the A9 processor.

As soon as you get it, inspect it, and if it is found to have the 16nm TSMC chip, then promptly return the unit at the store for a refund, or keep exchanging, until you get a 14nm one.

Only seen in specific benchmarks

[hattig]

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/...

As suspected from early results yesterday, the takeaway from Morrison and Evans' videos today seems to be that while intense cases like synthetic Geekbench tests designed to push devices to their limits can reveal significant differences in battery life between devices using the two chips, real-world impacts are much smaller and are likely to be unnoticeable to many users.

Samsung Trojan Horse :)

[Hougaard]

If we can't beat them, at least we can loose our semiconductor business ?

That explains a few things...

[__aaclcg7560]

My friend and I both got iPhone 6s. His run hot, mine run cool. Go figure.

Re:That explains a few things...

[Sqr(twg)]

Or they have the same chip, but his friend has an app that uses a lot of cpu cycles in the background.

Re:Battery Life

[TWX]

I've found that battery life on standby is very much dependent on carrier accessibility. My employer's campus has a power distribution station on the East side and is ringed on the North, South, and West sides by power lines that reach the station. We get very poor signal strength and my old Galaxy SII is lucky to survive the eight hour shift on battery if I'm at the office all day, even on standby.

Contrast to at home, where that city mandated all infrastructure be buried, and the power lines are only for neighborhood final distribution as opposed to regional distribution, and my phone can go a whole weekend on standby.

One no sim??

[Anonymous Coward]

How come

On the chinese test, the Samsung has an extra app installed on it (see the screen of the doc).
And on the Reddit users test, the TSMC has a sim card installed, the Samsung not.

Really would it have killed them to keep the same spec for each?

16 nm vs 14 nm

[chris200x9]

It's kind of interesting the CPU built on a larger process is faster, cooler, and has less power draw.

Re:16 nm vs 14 nm

[TheRaven64]

I'm not particularly familiar with either company's process, but it's been a couple of generations since you could actually make meaningful comparisons based on the quoted nm size, because everyone has different smallest features that they measure when deciding that they are Xnm. That said, we passed the end of Dennard scaling a long time ago. You'd expect the same chip to be consuming about as much power, be slightly more able to dissipate the heat. It may also have less leakage, though that depends on a number of other factors.

Re:16 nm vs 14 nm

[UnknowingFool]

At increasingly smaller sizes, there's something called the short-channel effect or leakage because the size of each gate is starting to be affected by atomic forces not shown in larger gates. It's why chip companies are employing multi-gate devices like FinFET.

Planar transistors have been the core of integrated circuits for several decades, during which the size of the individual transistors has steadily decreased. As the size decreases, planar transistors increasingly suffer from the undesirable short-channel effect, especially "off-state" leakage current, which increases the idle power required by the device.

The reason companies are pushing for smaller size is economics. Reducing the feature size allows for more chips to be made from a single wafer. The move from 20nm to 16nm is about 15% more from what I remember.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Power lines cause very little interference to cell phones. It is very likely your office has eco-friendly windows. They have a very thin metal coating which greatly attenuates the signal. It is the same at my company. A part of our bulding recently had new windows (and some other eco-tweaks) installed and the signal there is almost gone, returning to almost full strength when the window is opened.

Re:Battery Life

[ledow]

I charged my Samsung (non-i) phone once this week.

And that was only because it dipped below 30%.

Admittedly it's not calling 24 hours a day, but it's on 4G all the time and has modern smartphone capabilities.

16 hours battery life? That's pathetic. Really?

The one thing I have to hand to iPads is that they last a long time on battery. But 16 hours? That's just the perfectly ANNOYING level of battery life. Not enough to survive a day.

Re:Battery Life

[Anubis IV]

Correct, they were being run through a variety of synthetic benchmarks and taxing real-world scenarios (e.g. streaming online video for hours at full brightness). From what I've heard, there was a pretty significant jump in the battery life for the 6-series phones and beyond, though I'm still using an older 5s model that can get through 2-3 days without a charge under typical (admittedly light, in my case) use.

In fact a new version often is how it should be

[Sycraft-fu]

Companies should regularly update their products to use the latest tech. There is no reason to freeze a product and not update it for a long time just to make owners feel like they still have the "latest". Rather they should update as often as changes in available technology/manufacturing/etc dictate. Customers then buy new ones as often as they feel it useful.

That's how it has been with desktop computers, excluding Apple, forever. Few, if any, people upgrade every time something new comes out because the changes are usually minor. They buy something, stick with it for a few years, then buy something new when they feel like they want or need it.

The problem is that Apple devices seem to be something that some people wrap their ego in. They feel a need to have the newest device to be "cool" or some such and thus get mad when a newer device comes out that they cannot or do not wish to purchase since they feel it somehow lessens what they do have.

Samples sizes of 1

[radarskiy]

"tests of a pair of 6s Plus phones"

You can't argue with the statistical validity of that analysis... because there isn't any.

Re:Figuring

[SuperKendall]

So he has 3000+ apps, some of which are in background, and it's a mystery why his runs hotter?

Come on.

Re:in a previous article about the new chips.....

[UnknowingFool]

For the following post, the sarcasm flag is assumed to be active.

1. has to rely on 3rd parties to integrate their hardware into an existing enterprise..

Yes because Apple's primary focus is enterprise. It's not like Dell or HP ever rely on 3rd parties for consumer or enterprise. Ever.

2. Srir was a huge failure even with 3rd party support

That's why they removed and banished it from all iPhones and iPads and they didn't include it in the new AppleTV.

3. Newton (even with the greatest minds it still could nto get off the ground)

Yes because 20 years ago, mobile hardware was much superior than it is today. Also at the time, Apple was a tightly focused machine.

4. Deperciation of the equipment as compared to its "PC" equiv. is way out of whack.

That's why whenever I go to buy used Apple machines, they are 1/2 of what the comparable Dell or HP is. They are so cheap, people are begging me to take their Macs.

5. They have to reply on 3rd parties for any and all laptop/desktop hardware (intel)

Yes because Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, etc have all started to make their own processors now. Every single one of them even have their own GPUs and make their machines by hand. I've seen the farms where they grow their cases from the soil. It's all organic.

6. they bastardized a variant of BSD and "made it their own" also a 3rd party reliance.

Instead of every other OS out there that magically one day was born. Linux isn't based on Unix at all. And Windows was created completely by Gates and Co one night and didn't rely on design cues from VMS or DOS or anything prior.

7. They tried to tout a turnkey infrastructure (X system [xserv, etc]) which lasted 2-4 years and resembled SUN equipment..

Because every time a company makes a product they should sell that product FOREVER even if it isn't very profitable or core to their strategy. That's why Microsoft and Dell still make MP3 players. IBM still makes PCs right?

8. the cost of the equiv. equipment (PC) is a 3rd of the cost.

In every single case this is true. That's why people still buy Macs; suckers!

9. For any credible attempt at repair, a device must be taken to a service center, no way to "HOME-FIX"

Yes, the internet and websites dedicated to fixing computers don't exist. Also all other manufacturers will honor your warranty when you try to fix things yourself. Warranty, schmwarranty, they say.

10. when people in my env. request a mac. after about a week or so they request a windows 7 vm poped on the "DESKTOP" so they can remain productive and still have the nice SHiny..

This has nothing to do with the fact that some companies rely and insist on Windows only things. I mean, IE is famous for being completely compatible with every other browser known in existence. This is the opposite of those PCs where they have only 1 option: Windows or die. That's fine. Less choice is so much better.

So now we are on the 6th gen of the Iphone, and.......... Samsung the #1 Iphone competitor is varying their production of chips to Apple, like thats a suprise.. It actually seems so friggin lame..

Yes because chip fabs are everywhere. You can't go down the street without some homeless bum offering to move me to a 10nm process. Especially companies like NVidia who didn't decide to use Samsung to fab the Tegra X1. And Apple didn't do a responsible thing by using 2 different fabs for redundancy. Not at all

With so Much Apple has going for itself.. Why can't it just produce their own products and why with all the brilliant pe