Walt French
Nov 4 · 1 min read

The U1 chip is a head-scratcher for me. I can see it providing incremental benefit for AirDrop (IMO, a less-than-major feature) and enabling functionality for tiles, which have the potential to … do just as poorly as beacons, for people who want tiles further cluttering up their pockets.

Seems not unlike the iPhoneX’s Neural Engine, a chunk of silicon dedicated to…processes that apps can’t directly use, that would seem to accelerate CoreML benchmarks to merely 2X what the iPhone6 can do. Although there is the suggestion the A11 chip’s extra circuitry enhance picture-taking, the iPhoneX is unable to perform all the iPhone11’s gee-whizzery.

Hundreds of millions of people paid for that dedicated “ML” silicon in the last couple of years’ iPhones, and I’m damned if I can figure out what Apple was thinking in terms of real-world user benefits for stuffing it with a chip that devs wouldn't—couldn’t—exploit.

Which brings us back to the U1 radios.

    Walt French

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    Retired Investment Manager; student of Disruptive Innovations, Math/Stat/Econ & (more casually) Epistemology