It was another big week for Apple.

Ben Thompson wrote a great piece titled’ The iPhone Franchise‘ . For those too lazy to read it, Ben sums it up:

That is the iPhone: it is a franchise, the closest thing to a hardware annuity stream tech has ever seen. Some people buy an iPhone every year; some are on a two-year cycle; others wait for screens to crack, batteries to die, or apps to slow. Nearly all, though, buy another iPhone, making the purpose of yesterday’s keynote less an exercise in selling a device and more a matter of informing self-selected segments which device they will ultimately buy, and for what price.

I really enjoyed this explanation from Abacaus as well this week on ‘The Five Ways Apple is Embracing China‘.

My friend Farbood texted me a note explaining the amazing rollout of technology mixed with humanism by Apple:

Because we are starting to butt up against Moore’s law, processing is becoming parallelized.For example, GPUs running alongside CPUs.

Last year Apple added a neural net processor to parallelize further in the A11 chip.The first neural processor in the A11 chip did 600 billion ops/sec. The new A12 chip does 5 trillion ops/sec and went from 2 cores to 8

But computing, like everything at Apple, lives at the intersection of technology and humanism. It’s what we can do with these performance improvements that matters.

Even now, NBA teams are not using real-time video processing with ML to improve a player’s shooting. In one iPhone release, Apple puts that into the hands of a child and 10s of millions of people. This is beautifully demonstrated in the Homecourt demo exactly 1 hour into the Apple keynote from yesterday.

This is a technology that didn’t exist for even the NBA. And now exists in the hands of anyone with a new iPhone. Apple is distributing computation/technology unavailable to anyone in the world, to everyone in the world. This will continue for decades.

I’m with Farbood.

Disclosure – Long Apple