My “Upfront Bias”
I know you’re all shocked, but I talk Apple when I blog. Of course, I talk a bunch of other things online, there unfortunately being so many worrisome things to talk about. But for my more formal, humble home game writings, it’s mostly earnings, sometimes tech, almost always Apple-focused.
I guess I still like it, so it’s what I do. But even if I’m a “fan”, “partisan”, whatever you want to call me (I think “Apple blogger/amateur commentator” sounds fine), I’m all about being clear-eyed, without pretense. Oh, and, uh, trying to be accurate about the things I’ve seen and heard from Apple.
Sure, you don’t just take everything Apple says for granted. But c’mon, does anyone with this tech hobby think Apple gets a pass on anything?[FN1] Being Apple-skeptical is so counterculture (and for so long), it’s practically culture.
And it’s kind of a different category of “skepticism” when you don’t even pay attention to what Apple has or hasn’t done only one year ago.
Whatever the case, accuracy matters (at least, it should). I’ll provide two examples of the recent inaccuracy I keep seeing.
The A15 Bionic Performance Tempest in a Teapot
A few examples from well-known social media and tech journopunditry-land, semi-paraphrased to protect the “innocent”:
• “It’s really uncharacteristic that Apple didn’t talk much about the silicon this year”
• “Funny thing, Apple didn’t compare the performance of A15 to the A14”
• “Usually Apple compares to its own silicon, it only compared against ‘the competition’. That just isn’t normal from Apple.”
Um, except for: “Hi, Speed.”
I mean, Hi, October 2020 Apple Event.
(Source: Apple October 2020 Event stream – around 29 minutes in)
And of course, iPhone 12 product pages were still up right until the Fall 2021 Event. Here’s the iPhone 12 Pro product page, courtesy Wayback Machine:
Notice a lack of specifics and comparison to the rest of the (let’s face it, it’s just Android-running) smartphone competition? Well, in case some big names in tech media forgot, there’s your reminder.
Covering the Big Annual iPhone Event with selective amnesia? Why would you forget something “so shocking” from a year ago? Worse yet, are some of these journopundits so subconsciously scared of “seeming biased” that they ADD things to criticize that aren’t even there? Apple may be an incredibly powerful, popular company, but somewhat like powerful and ubiquitous company Microsoft (or Google or Amazon or…pick a name), it has its fair share of flaws to report on and keep track of, same as everyone else.
Oh, and would you look at that? A bunch of Geekbench 5 mystery benchmarks surfaced a day or two later, with more corroboration streaming in…likely because of review unit testing. Seems there are still decent A15 CPU and GPU speedups to be found here and there, particularly with the 13 Pro GPU and quite possibly the unheralded CPU efficiency cores.
iPad mini 5G “Isn’t Fast”
Same format as last time, paraphrasing of tech journopundits to “protect” the “innocent”:
• “If you were hoping for gigabit 5G, iPad mini A15 isn’t the one for you.” (Waitttttt for ittttttttt…)
• “We will say that iPad mini A15 has more non-mmWave 5G bands, same as iPhone 13’s new non-mmWave band support, so it has at least one tiny advantage over other cellular-enabled iPads currently out there.” (yes, aside from the italics emphasis I added, “tiny advantage” is a direct quote)
• “iPad mini A15 supports 5G, but not the super-ultra-mega faster 5G due to lack of mmWave…with iPad mini’s version of 5G, data can be faster than LTE. But it’s not the multiple Gbps possible with mmWave” (“super-ultra-mega” and “multiple GigaBytes per second” are direct quotes)
I’ll give a little benefit of the doubt to those tech journopundits who might have missed it (they had maybe less than 10 seconds to catch it)…or…
maybe…didn’t…follow…the…event…
but…are…reporting…on…it…anyway? (spoiler alert: two of these sources are Apple-focused sites that most likely did watch the whole event)
Moving on. Here’s Apple’s now-signature “take it anywhere” giant presentation backdrop slide, with a very notable claim:
(Source: Apple September 2021 Event stream, around 16 minutes in)
Three. Point. Five. Gigabits. Per. Second. The top-speed 3.5 Gbps claim is also repeated in Apple’s iPad mini 5G press release.
Look, I get it. 5G is confusing. Thanks to industry hype and precious little detail from 5G OEMs like Qualcomm, no one quite knows what to realistically expect from 5G. 10Gbps peak mmWave downlink from the latest modem chipset? Yeah, we all dismiss everyday multi-Gbps speeds as vaporware, unless we’re right underneath the 5G node of a Major City Professional Sportsball Stadium 5 hours before the game, at the same time a Major Celco Carrier and Qualcomm execs are doing a tech demo for press. We generally grok that mmWave is fast but extremely distance-limited plus country-limited (for now), and that “sub-6 is meh”.
A subset of us further “understand” that “mid-band 5G” is in the middle ground of coverage and speed, and “low-band” is more or less “LTE+”. Beyond that, it’s fuzzyAF for most people.
Someone at the supermarket thought mid-band 5G can do max theoretical downlink of around 1Gbps (the laughable never-seen theoretical max downlink of LTE-Advanced)?
Or maybe mid-band 5G on its best day can hit the once-hyped 300Mbps unicorn download speed hardly anyone has ever seen with any LTE carrier?
Whatever the case, 3.5 Gbps is 3.5 Gbps. That speed claim is out there, and Apple’s expected to have an actual 5G modem chip rated for that max theoretical speed.
Sure, you can assume Apple was lying, if you have a roll of aluminum foil handy. Or that it made a giant mistake, which seems impossibly unlikely given how Apple has taken scripting and production values to new heights in Event Films. But it would be good of tech journopundits to ask Apple what enables 3.5 Gbps 5G download speeds on the iPad mini A15 (about the same as iPhone 12 w/ mmWave max theoretical downlink from last year, btw).
If there’s no mmWave (which they can verify beyond pointing at a lack of mention in the tech specs), is it mid-band 5G improvements? Advanced aggregation (simultaneous data streams from multi-band 5G to kinda sorta multiprocess data download)? These are things they know about, and things they most definitely are able to get an answer to from Apple PR or an Apple exec interview.
Some tech perspectives are valuable, don’t get me wrong. If you ask me, I could generally recommend a few tech social media types. And tech media is a good source of objective testing when review units ship to them. I look forward to Device Review Time™, myself.
But honest brokering in tech coverage seems more exception than rule, unfortunately. I guess in this hits-driven world, sound and low-key fury fuels the neverending SEO-rotonin addiction. “Made you click”, for now, has decisively won over sober, accurate, tell-it-like-it-is tech coverage…to say nothing about media coverage in other contexts.
Sure, these in-the-end-rather-harmless omissions are nothing new. But they’re every bit as much not trendy, and don’t even do their perhaps-“intended” job of keeping Apple honest…because these tiny little oversights might not be entirely honest (mistakes), either.
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Footnote:
[FN1] I’ve heard about “blinkered Apple fan sites” or whatever. I’m aware they exist, though I don’t think they’re that common when it comes to having the sheer SEO Power of the big players. I pay even less attention to them than perhaps you do, and besides, false positivity and false negativity are both sides of the same coin – twin enemies of just telling it like it is.
The AAPL Tree 