The Future of Technology: A Deep Dive into Apple's Materials and Manufacturing

With the latest advancements in technology, it's no surprise that Apple is constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation. From their iconic designs to their cutting-edge materials, Apple has always been at the forefront of shaping the future of technology. In this article, we'll take a closer look at some of the most exciting developments in Apple's materials and manufacturing, including liquid metal, exotic materials, and the rise of CNC machining.

One of the most interesting topics in Apple's latest endeavors is liquid metal. This material has been gaining attention for its unique properties and potential applications in various industries. According to sources, Apple has purchased the rights to use liquid metal, but it remains to be seen how this technology will be utilized in future products. As we continue to explore the possibilities of liquid metal, one thing becomes clear: it's a game-changer. By leveraging this advanced material, Apple can create devices that are not only more efficient but also more durable.

Another area where Apple is making significant strides is in the development of exotic materials. With their latest watches and other products, Apple has been experimenting with innovative materials that push the boundaries of what we thought was possible. From titanium to aluminum, Apple's team of engineers and designers is constantly seeking new ways to improve existing technologies or create entirely new ones. By embracing this approach, Apple can create devices that are not only functional but also visually stunning.

CNC machining, a process that has been used by Apple for years, plays a significant role in their manufacturing processes. This advanced technique allows for the creation of complex components with precision and accuracy, making it an essential tool in the production of high-end electronics. With their massive volumes of production, Apple's CNC machining capabilities are unparalleled, enabling them to meet growing demands while maintaining quality and consistency.

One aspect of Apple's materials development is creating a lure around their watches. While some may view this as a marketing ploy, it's undeniable that Apple has successfully created a sense of excitement and anticipation around their wearable devices. With innovative features and sleek designs, the Apple Watch has become an essential accessory for many users. Moreover, Apple's research into materials for other products, such as cars, could lead to breakthroughs in fields like energy storage and display technology.

The importance of material science cannot be overstated. By continuously pushing the boundaries of what is possible with materials, Apple can create devices that are not only functional but also visually stunning. From MacBooks to iPods, Apple's engineers and designers have been whittling away at traditional materials for years, seeking new ways to improve existing technologies or create entirely new ones.

In recent years, Apple has made significant strides in automotive suppliers, working closely with them to build the Mac Pro, a high-end computer designed for professionals. This collaboration highlights Apple's willingness to partner with experts in other fields to develop innovative solutions that meet growing demands. By leveraging this expertise, Apple can create products that are not only functional but also groundbreaking.

For listeners who have been following our podcast, we're excited to share more insights on liquid metal and material science in future episodes. Stay tuned for upcoming content where we'll delve deeper into these topics and explore the latest advancements in technology.

If you've enjoyed this article and found it informative, please consider leaving a positive review on iTunes. Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we appreciate your support. You can also find us on social media platforms, including Apple Insider's official Instagram account, where we share updates and behind-the-scenes content. Don't forget to follow Dan Aaron on Twitter (@DanielAaronErn) for the latest news and insights from the world of Apple.

By continuing to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with materials and manufacturing, Apple is cementing its position as a leader in the technology industry. With their commitment to excellence and dedication to research, it's clear that the future of technology will be shaped by Apple's vision and expertise.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 90 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me for a very special episode this week is Daniel Aaron dger hey thanks for having me on thank you for joining me yeah I'm so glad you're here so how are things with you pretty good we're um I'm in the Pacific Northwest there's a huge storm coming in this weekend it's supposed to be looks looks quite ominous and dangerous looks like angry angry green smoke coming at us from the radar like there's a big Samsung Galaxy Note coming right at us oh no well I hope you weather that well and I I hope that all of our listeners who were on the east coast and suffered the effects of Hurricane Matthew are doing all right um these these kinds of things are not small and it's easy to to ignore them when they don't happen to you but it's it's important and we uh we think about all of our listeners yeah we're getting hitting from both sides um going to do a quick ad read here have you ever heard of a software called Boom for Mac sounds familiar okay well it's it's interesting um this is a piece of software that addresses the the system volume for the uh the the loudness setting for your Mac and and basically we all use our Macs differently right but everyone has speakers built in and everyone listens through those speakers at sometime have have you ever felt like you needed a little bit more out of your your Mac when you're using it like maybe maybe speakers didn't Co loud enough I didn't know that was an option um you turn it up so basically I I I I've been in some situations where I've been playing music and I've been using just the built-in speakers because that's where I've been that's the context I've had I haven't been able to plug in speakers and you just don't get quite enough out of them right it's they're not quite loud enough sometimes uh depending on the setting so boom 2 is a volume enhancement app by a company called Global delight and what they do is they juice the sound right they they make the system get louder and so they have an offer for all of our listeners you can log on to boom4 maac.com that's B oom f r maac.com the app comes with a 7-Day trial period you can use the entire app and it includes audio effects once convinced you can go ahead and buy it from boomr maac.com so you don't have to keep your ears waiting why don't you log on to Boom for maac.com now that's interesting I'm going to I'm going to use that I'm going to give the trial a chance and we're going to go ahead and listen to it and see how it works you and I were talking before we started recording Dan about all of the different suppliers that are issuing forecasts linked to the iPhone 7 uh well tsmc was one of the most recent ones that we reported on and they I don't know if the company itself mentioned it but um a lot of these are analysts that are talking about what's happening and the results that they posted uh feature guidance were related I Believe by an analyst to uh be closely tied to iPhone 7 because that company's making all of the application processors and most of the um I believe that all of the the Qualcomm chips that apple is using remember Qualcomm shifted away from tsmc and went to Samsung however that was only for um newer products I believe and iPhone 7 is using the original parts from Qualcomm that are made by tsmc if I have that correct so basically tsmc is making all of the you know the biggest chips for iPhone 7 um and most of the new Android phones I believe are either being made by smaller Chinese Fabs or by Samsung now so most of the higher-end phones that are made with Qualcomm chips I believe are made by Samsung there may be some mix that comes from other companies so that kind of all points to uh tsmc is having getting a lot of their good news from the launch of iPhone 7 the uh the co- CEO in in the article we wrote uh he was talking about demand for high-end smartphones is continuing to improve when that's that goes completely opposite of what we've been hearing all year was that no one's going to buy premium smartphones anymore that everyone's kind of comfortable buying a $100 phone all of a sudden and so there was kind of a lot of news about how Apple was going to be bearing the brunt of this backlash where people aren't going to be buying high-end phones anymore so that a year later almost that doesn't appear to be have any of that has been true another thing um related to supply chain orders the further off ones suppliers that that Supply a lot of companies uh one of them is gun which I believe don't they make the plastic lenses for everybody in in the smartphone industry basically I'm I'm not sure I I believe that's the case um so they Supply kind of everybody and remember I did a series of Articles starting kind of last year a year ago where uh kind of the Japanese equivalent to the Wall Street Journal the Niki published kind of strategically timed articles without a by line that came out and said oh the supplier chain looks really bad for apple and a couple of the things that they wrote um some of these reports were saying that Apple cut their supplies by 30% and it's it's very difficult to look at the supply chain and know what's happening because Apple has multiple suppliers and some of these suppliers that that have some you know real impact that they're reporting you can't specifically tell if they're talking about supplies being lower because Apple's ordering less or because Apple's getting from somewhere else or because their other companies that they Supply are dropping their forecast so it's it's very easy to write about things and come up with a convincing story but that isn't really supported any sort of solid truth and so in amidst all of these articles we've been publishing recently talking about iPhone 7 being very positive launch and at this point you know the the strongest competitor to iPhone 7 in terms of premium phones and larger phones is Samsung and Samsung is right now going through one of the biggest crisis we've ever seen in the smartphone industry I mean it's really bad they've stopped production of their phones they a couple times changed production to begin supplying people who already had an effective phone and this is across millions of units and now they've canceled the thing outright so this is like a huge Interruption for Apple's one of Apple's biggest competitors and really the only other thing you can talk about is Google's pixel but Google's pixel is limited to one carrier in the US it's not that it only works on Verizon but you can only buy it through Verizon so if you want if you have a or or buy it directly through Google you know you can have a a plan on T-Mobile that you bring over your pixel and they will let you use it but they won't give you the same plan you know this preferred plan so it is it is a very pretty severe restriction to be on one carrier in the United States at this point and Google has now relaxed all of the things that it said were bad about Apple's iPhone in terms of having one company control how things are done and updates and software and things like that so Google is now doing a straight up iPhone but it's not feature competitive with the iPhone and Google doesn't have nearly the reach that people think that they do mean none of their the the most popular Nexus phone ever was a Nexus 5 and it did not sell in huge quantities I believe it sold like 5 or 6 million so this is you know this is a very small thing that gets a lot of press but Apple's biggest competitor is you know they got a a full face knockout and iPhone 7 has been well received even before that so you know the roads are kind of paved for Apple it's kind of Ideal circumstances and we're hearing from Clear uh suppliers that they're very confident going into the future and all of a sudden here's a a n story published um ironically yesterday at 420 but uh it was published uh I saw it on Barons and they just made sort of negative sounding comments about uh how Taiwanese device uh makers were under pressure and that Apple suppliers are the main culprits I quoted a analy here is saying that iPhone sales could turn out to be slightly better than the extremely pessimistic view 3 months ago but saying that Flagship smartphones are in a downtrend the orders for the supply chain are quite conservative compared with a year ago so grain of salt we'll see if how accurate that is in the future because I've now seen two previous reports that I reported on from this from this news site that were clearly wrong I mean you could argue about whether it's right or right when they did the report but in afterward it's like clearly what they predicted didn't Happ well last year you reported on you reported this at the beginning of the year in January yeah a similar story that was talking about criticizing the iPhone 6s and its Supply right the rumor was that Supply Cuts were going to damage the iPhone and that sales would drop by about you know the reduced output would drop by about 30% and that was supposed to have happened in January or March of this year and it it had no real relevance on overall iPhone demand or unit sales for either of those quarters and it if it had had any relevance at all it pertained only to internal inventory adjustments right yeah there's so many things that are going on it's like it's like looking at somebody on a roller coaster and saying oh they're up now they're down now they're up that doesn't really tell you what how they're going to end up at the end of the course they're going to end up at the station you know they're going to end up where they got off but on the way there they're going up and down and around and you know you can report on all those things but it's it's immaterial if you're really concerned about where they're where they're ending up and the media loves to do that kind of stuff because there's so much Dr involved in it but particularly here when you're talking about like like the the one that you're referencing when you're talking about when when you go out and report that sales are going to drop by a half which is they said in the the earlier the I believe it was like two years ago and then later they said uh orders are going to be dropping by 30% that could be the case they could it could be that Apple's inventory is going up and down and and so at one point they're asking for a third less of a supply than they were previously but that doesn't really tell you very much and the problem is it gets interpreted by people who want to read it a specific way and they came out saying that iPhones are going to be dropping by 30% you know that apple is going to be making and selling 30% fewer iPhones which of course never happened people ought to learn that the supply chain production volume rumors for iPhones are worthless right yeah yeah we've seen that over and over and over again and and yet they keep coming out and we keep having analysts drop news right when they want something to happen that's I mean it's not an accident why they're doing it but it is frustrating to see people pushing out headlines that are not true or even sometimes they're they're factually true but they're presented in a way that's either intentionally false or walking the user to a the reader to a false conclusion you know I I can't believe I'm saying this you know we we're Apple Insider we talk about rumors and we cover these things but really no no one should pay attention to these rumors well there's different kinds of rumors but specifically the supply chain rumors when you're talking about how many things are getting built that's there's a lot of other rumors that we have written about some of which are things like patents you know there's features that get patented that maybe Apple's going to use it maybe they're not and we've seen examples of both but it's kind of a subject of interest to readers I think to see what's being researched and what's being documented in patents because that get does give you an indication of a lot of the work that goes on that you don't necessarily see sometimes you don't necessarily see it right away sometimes it takes a while to become a product um and sometimes it's just there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't ever result in a product but it's still interesting I mean now before we move on to product and and those kinds of rumors that we published a report saying that supply chain reports there we go again claimed that Apple will gain market share in 2016 and 2017 that the smartphone market will expand about 7% uh up to 16% with next year's phone so do we believe this how how are we supposed to take this well it it is interesting in the face of previous sort of consensus even at the beginning of this year was that smartphones were just not only reaching a plateau but were tumbling downhill and particularly high-end smartphones and people are just going to stop using them and I didn't see any factual basis for that when they were saying it and I was refuting it saying that this isn't really does not appear to be uh solidly based it appears to be people saying this because Apple has full control of the high-end so of course you're going to say the high end doesn't matter and we haven't seen any evidence of that we haven't seen people deciding that they don't no longer want to have a smartphone and really you know they talk about smartphones going away or or being commoditized down into nothing but smartphones are a combination of a whole lot of things that we used to carry you know a lot of us carried a PDA we frequently carried cameras and had a phone and a music player and a lot of other devices that you know we didn't carry all the time but are now done on your phone and it even replaces a lot of time that you would spend on your computer a decade or so ago so smartphones are a combination of things and a very convenient package and they're gaining features they're not we're not going to distill them down to a simpler thing and phones aren't primarily about being phones they're mobile computers that we call smartphones but most of what we do today is Computing functions and using a network and it's not primarily for voice calls we're using data calls I mean voice calls are now data calls but um a lot of what we're doing is messaging and FaceTime style messaging and look at all the work that Apple's put into iMessage to to make that a more engaging platform so it's sticky so people stick with iPhones so a lot of the predictions that people are making are just clearly just way off base and they're the reason that they're predicting those things is not because the facts sort of support that it's because that's what they want to have happen the same thing as you know IDC when they come out and say oh it looks like people are really trending towards two inone notebooks that look exactly like a Microsoft Surface and it's like well we kind of understand why you're issue that press release it's not because there's really evidence that people are buying a bunch of services it's because you found a data point that you can turn into a story to say two in one sales are going up but you know that's not actually the where the trajectory of the market is going we're not rushing to Microsoft store to buy their product that this is the pr that's trying to make that happen so there's a difference between rumors and rumors now you're talking about devices and patents and how we can sort of see that patents even though a particular invention may not make it into a product they sort of show us the area that Apple's focusing on and where they're putting their attention into innovating sometimes they also acquire interesting things for example we we've talked a lot about the rumor of a MacBook with a uh a touch capacitive uh function row right right recently they purchased a company I think based in Australia who makes a keyboard with eink keys right did you see that I saw the reports of it I don't I don't know if that was actually true that they had acquired them okay well the report that I read and I'm just pulling it up right now I saw there was a rumor about them talking about being acquired by Apple or in talks and then uh Telegraph UK published an article I think today or last night saying that uh Tim Cook who's traveling in China right now visited these developers okay but it's not clear if that's accurate or not I asked Apple about it but I haven't heard back okay and they don't always say when when they've acquired something but they don't always respond right away either yes you don't necessarily see that technology released just as it exists just as it was um that what you do is is is you you wait a generation of phone and you see that they incorporate it in a different way that they take some base underlying technology and reuse that in a new and interesting way that wasn't there before yeah you know the way that I think about this is going way back to the acquisition of touchworks you remember this you know touchworks years ago they made a keyboard that replaced a G4 powerbooks keyboard and it had a little ribbon cable that went off to the side and plugged it to the USB and it was a touch capactive keyboard that you could do multi-touch on on your laptop and this this thing became what powers the touchcreen in the iPhone and people who saw this didn't realize that okay if you take this solid thing that's meant for a laptop and repurpose it and put it behind a screen and make it transparent which is a lot of work right yeah that you suddenly get a pocket computer that's touchcreen but Apple did I think they were capacitive you know capacitive technology was there before but what was missing was a lot of the analysis in terms of when you put your finger on the screen it's not like a stylus where you where you could triangulate the specific point where the stylus was touching um when you touch a a screen with your finger you're either hitting it with the whole pad so you're you're hitting a whole area and also when you do gestures when you swipe or you a variety of things that you can smear your finger around the screen it's really hard to for a computer to know what you're trying to do and it has to be done really quickly and it has to be done accurately and and predictably or it doesn't feel right and so I think a lot of the work I don't know if they actually acquired that what touch works that company or I think they kind of Aqua hired the people they bought they they bought touchworks and bought the IP and and acquired the people as well yeah some control over the technology but anyway that the technology that they were acquiring wasn't necessarily capacity to touch screens but it was the gestures of how to translate sloppy human fingers with you know um kind of a design language of how it's going to work well and it was also the the multiple fingers at a time kind of thing to be able to handle touch typing was a was a feat that had not been done before that's why Android for many years didn't do that because they were afraid of they knew it was patented technology and then after a while it got to the point where you know Samsung was getting away with being able to do whatever they wanted to do and the courts were just not responding for so many years it took them years to get the to go to court and then Apple brought all these Pat and the court said oh we can only hear about four of those and we're going to allow Samsung to go out and buy patents so that it's an equal fight so that you both look like you're infringing technology so it's just such a clown show in the courts that they basically gave Apple's technology to everybody else to to to have that that's when Google really embraced it an Android and made Android much more like the iPhone than it was originally originally it had like a little track ball on it and a keyboard yeah was a Blackberry but it wasn't just a shift in hey we should copy Apple not Blackberry it was a shift in I think we can just steal their technology because nothing's going to happen and we're giving it away so they can't sue us for money we're we're seeing sort of the uh this play out in the courts now right there's a there's Samsung and Apple before The Supreme Court and the the courts expected to hand down a decision sometime in in June of next year but it it looks as if the court is focusing around the issue of creating and instating rules to adjudicate future litigation they're they're a little less concerned in how designed patent laws impact the case even though that's what this case has been about Samsung is is arguing that damage should damages should be assigned based on just the part or portion of profits that can be attributed to the infringing part so they're saying that the the design of the phone is the only thing that should be assessed for the damages and it shouldn't be the against to the whole phone and the opposite I mean the kind of things that they're arguing was you know these were so these cases were so old I believe it was from 2011 I mean that's like 5 years old now it's kind of ancient stuff I mean one of them was a swipe unlock which Apple's not even using anymore on iOS 10 but the fact that my that Samsung very clearly copied it and they documented that they were copying it because it worked better than what they were trying to do on their own their whole argument that they didn't copy was clearly not true and so now they have to say oh well sure we copied it but shouldn't be able to first of all they first of all they wanted to stop any sales ban on on ongoing phones until they were they didn't matter anymore and they successfully basically didn't they successfully ran around wasting time until the injunctions wouldn't matter anymore so they got they did that successfully and now they're saying well we shouldn't even have to pay for lost profits because this was one feature on the phone and it wasn't the only reason people bought her copy got phones and you know the fact that Apple can only bring like four or five patents at a time means that it's just impossible to sue a company like Samsung who's just stealing dozens and dozens and dozens of your of everything every feature on your phone and then they say oh well you only won one of these after four or five years and it doesn't represent the whole phone I mean it's just such a a bizarre clown show that this is still going on but yeah that's where they're at right now because it is a big and conversely Samsung did the opposite so Samsung has some technology that they have patents on related to uh mobile technology or mobile wireless and they licensed it to in infinion which is now part of Intel Apple bought ships from that company for the mobile broadband up to iPhone 4 something like that 4S uh when they switched over to Qualcomm and Samsung was suing for for patents that that already licensed to the company that sold the chips to Apple so it was already technology that they didn't yeah there was no infringement there and they were trying to create this thing where how some somehow Apple was responsible for technology that was already licensed in the products that they were buying these off the-shelf components and Samsung was saying you know basically we want to apply this significant uh penalty that's much more than the cost of the chip was and so they're they're extremely hypocritical in what they're arguing I mean they're just they're just arguing any Direction they possibly can yeah and as I'm looking at this it it seems like they're arguing any way they can that basically they should pay less that that even if they still have to pay that they should pay a fraction of what's been assessed for them so far the interesting thing is that if you read the transcripts that the justices are not specifically focused on the details of this case as much as what preceden should be for the future what jury instructions should be because they're they're trying to come up with a way that they don't have to hear this kind of case again that when it comes up to the courts again that a juror is going to understand how to determine what's going on properly and they're struggling with this right they're you know in in the transcripts the justices are trying to because it's a design-based case they're they're talking about instead of phones they're talking about about you know a distinctive designed product like the Volkswagen Beetle so they're saying if the beetle was a stroke of Genius a design that was done on from from pen to completion in 3 days should they only be assessed 3 days worth of Damages for infringing or or should it be you know more than that because the engine took 100,000 days and it's an interesting question that they're reaching at right what is what is attributable to the the successful product is it the design and if it is the design should just charge for that one component or is it the total thing because Samsung is kind of like the and they come in and Apple's of course not the first company they've done this to they did it to Panasonic they did it to I mean everyone in the industry they've come in and just swarmed with a copycat product and stolen their stuff and disregarded patents and they have a lot of support at home in the government because they are such a huge it's not like a big company it's like a network of companies and there's a tremendous amount of um corruption between them and the government well they're so large that it's it's a s Korean version of too big to fail right they they have all of their heavy industry tied up with Samsung they're they're not just a maker of phones and appliances and white goods that we see here in the US they also make automobiles they make military equipment they make pretty much everything and so if you damage that company first of all you're damaging cultural honor right because it's so closely tied and associated with with being so large there it's it's a national interest and you're you're also stand to harm the whole South D Samsung and Samsung is more than just making products too they I think they sell insurance and you it's just they just do everything and specifically I mean smartphones were back in 2 between like 2010 when they started copying to around 2014 uh smartphones were a big part of Samsung's profit Center and increasingly that's I mean iPhone 6 did the most damage more than any lawsuits but and then also there's just kind of like this negging competition from China to where Samsung used to sell quite a bit to China and now it's like there's just no market for it because there's there's plenty of commodity phones that you can get for cheaper whereas Apple had a very different product and sold it very differently in China and it was you know Apple Apple only sells premium phones Samsung sell a lot of things and you know part of that is the premium phones where they get the most money but to have a decrease in the premium phones tremendous decrease from iPhone 6 that continued for 3 years now and then to be hit with the Note 7 thing even before the Note 7 blew up uh there was a pretty significant problem happening within profitability in phones because they give away so much to sell a phone and their their average selling price are going down so a lot of Samsung's profitability actually comes outside of phones it comes from selling parts to other phone makers and from selling displays and a variety of other things that are doing better than smartphones have so I don't think the government is like backing up the South Korean government is backing up Samsung's smartphones as much as they are just allowing the company to do kind of whatever it wants to do and the same thing happens in China where um intellectual property doesn't really have the same there's not the same culture of protecting that but that's now happening in the United States where you know intellectual property has always been kind of a big part of the United States ability to be a world leader and to stay a world leader because we're developing technology and building into products and there's protection under law so somebody else can't just come out and copy it and there are some problems with that I mean if you look at you know drug companies and stuff it's very difficult to come up with a new drug it's very expensive and then once they do you have this life-saving drug that solves a problem that nobody else knows how to do and they want to charge money for it and so people look at that and like oh that's an ethical dilemma we should allow all these other companies to copy this drug that they spent so much money working on but what what happens is that there are tons of research and tons of work on making new drugs let's continue the example that are not successful right they they pour huge amounts of into money into things that don't go anywhere and so the one time they do have something that works they have to recover cost not just for the um the one that's successful but also to have paid for all of the work that was that was essentially useless not only subsidize their things that didn't work out like you're talking about they also need to have money left over to be able to come up with the next new drug to keep the thing going so Apple is very Apple's business model is very much like a drug company in terms of that they're constantly doing research some of it doesn't pan out but they're very focused in the research that they're doing to come up with new products in the future that people are going to want to buy and other companies in the tech industry particularly are like uh pill Pharm or pill makers that are looking at what Apple does and trying to just copy it and there's there's some efforts to do kind of innovative things but a lot of what we've seen outside of apple has not been successful for years and years and years so it's like things like you know they're making such a big deal about 3D screens on cell phones a few years ago and then it was curv screens everybody needed a curve screen I didn't really understand why that was important but they convinced every in the media to be talking about curve screens all these they have curve screens and when is Apple going to come out with a curve screen it's like what is the benefit so you can lay it down and it doesn't lay flat on the table I don't get it but there's there's so many examples of that and and right now there's the um the VR thing which I think VR is going to be interesting at some point but right now I don't I think it's kind of like 3D television where it's kind of thing where you put on glasses and it's kind of cool for 15 minutes and then you want to not do it anymore that's my experience with 3D television and everyone has come over to my house it's like hey check out these 3D glasses and they're like 15 minutes it's like okay let's let's just watch it regular the the issue with the television right and this is something I I go to CES every year and at CES you always see all the new televisions and what happens is television used to be a product that you know they they made a new one every year but the new one every year was largely a lot like the one from the previous year right when we had two televisions analog TV before we had the HDTV switch over a TV was pretty much a TV he had fancy features you had like the Trin on and like the sometimes they were bigger yeah sometimes they were smaller they were Trinitron there was differentiation but largely you bought a TV you kept it for 10 years or more right in in those days you bought a television you kept it until it broke at least yeah so there's something tremendously better and there wasn't tremendously better things coming out so yeah and and there frequently wasn't anything tremendously better and and so the the life cycle of buying a TV was that you bought one and kept it for a substantial amount of time and that if you bought a new one you bought it because your old one broke and it wasn't cost-effective to repair or because you wanted something significantly larger you wanted these new features but it wasn't uh every you know there was not a buying cycle where everyone went out and bought a fresh new TV every year or every two years the way people buy phones right and so at CES the push has been TV manufacturers trying to figure out a model where they can get people to throw out their TV every couple years and buy a fresh new one and so it was um first it was everyone moving from 720p to 1080p then it was thin screen frames then it was 3D TV then it was the refresh rate moving from 60 HZ to 120 HZ or even 240 Herz right and then it was everyone trying to move to curv screens and 4K and next next year it's going to be 8K probably right they're they're keep chasing what's it going to take to get people to buy TVs more frequently yeah I mean I think the the pace of technology and the productization of things because the market is much larger now um I think the pace is faster I don't know how much difference there is in how long people keep their televisions I mean do you buy a television every year hell no I haven't bought a television I mean I know television isn't Central to my existence but I haven't bought a television since 2010 now Dan I want to talk to you a little bit about some uh some patents and things about the 17 iPhone so Mikey wrote a story on our site about Apple patenting a method for embedding light sensors directly into device displays and what he's suggesting is that embedding light sensors directly into the display is a step towards getting rid of the chin and forehead bezel yeah we talked about that last week too we we did although he wrote about the patent this week this is just one of more thing in on the march to getting a phone that doesn't have the forehead bezel right um I don't I don't I'm not pulling up the article immediately in my head but was it talking about integrating a camera or a fingerprint sensor or kind of both this one is about light generating layers that are a part of the substrate of the display and by having light sensors integrated directly into the display they can sense proximity sense the the light Ambience around it and have it be built in so you don't have to have the chin and forehead separately um they're also talking about the idea that you could have a TFT layer in which sensors are embedded directly into the TFT layer of the screen uh but basically in in any scenario within the patent and of course patents address a couple scenarios more because they want to try and cover as widely as possible uh the the sensors are placed within the display itself not above it as it is the case currently in the iPhone and the iPad and Mac yeah that's interesting they still have a earpiece you're going to have to put somewhere that is true there's some um this is all about sensors and it doesn't mention anything about the earpiece there is some interesting ideas about you know without having any specialized knowledge of how any of this works on a really low level it's very easy to say oh you could take the fingerprint sensor and put it into the display and the camera also and what's sort of interesting I mean part of that is like when I first read about integrating basically camera sensors within the display part of sensor it's kind of one of those things where you're like oh I wouldn't have thought to do that but that's kind of an interesting idea wonder how that actually work and in actual uh production um but another example that we've already seeing is on the camera within the camera there's Focus pixels so it's it's pixels that instead of um creating an image they are helping to focus what the camera is interpreting and seeing so there's a lot of a lot of technical directions that can happen that aren't necessarily easy to predict and it's not like a an vious thing of we have to get this we have to get this we have to get this and now we're done to where we don't have a chin and vessel could also be that the the phone starts taking on a different shape where we don't use it the same way um one sort of example of that is not exactly changing the shape of the phone but the idea of having a watch where you get some of your most important things with a glance of your wrist instead of pulling out a phone and putting it up to your ear or looking at it and then also so with coming with airpods being able to sort of talk and interact with a phone even if you're not looking at it so in addition to the changing of the phone itself it may be that the role of the phone is changing where it's becoming almost like a server in the background that you stow away on your person somewhere and then you you know you have a conversation with Siri or a conversation with whoever you're talking to and um you're looking at status reports some things on your wrist that you don't have to fully pull out your phone to check on so there's a whole lot of kind of interesting directions that phone is going in right now one of the other patents that Mikey wrote about is the idea of a super resolution multi-sensor camera using Cube prisms and the diagram that I'm looking at is that like the Periscope kind of idea where it splits up the it is the Periscope idea it's it's exactly the Periscope where what they've got is um is is is what you say a periscope but because there are now more sides as opposed to just focusing on a sensor placed at the end you can add the additional sensor coverage on the sides of the thing as well and their goal is to capture more information for the camera in the same amount of physical space yeah that's an interesting idea and then it's also kind of I saw a previous one where they were showing sort of a similar arrangement to basically create a tunnel of mirrors so that you could have um more larger longer optics for shaping the light before it hits the sensor because there's there's only so many things you can do in a very slim assortment of lens covers in a phone that's that thin right and photography is based upon light so yeah so if you can bend around a corner and send it down the hallway and that's an interesting idea as well and also this the idea of having multiple sensors we already seeing that with the iPhone 7 plus having two cameras that kind of work in conjunction with each other but having having even more more sensors that do specific things there's a bunch of Android phones most of the Android phones that I've seen that that use two camera sensors one is color and the other is high resolution black and white and the idea is to that uh the luminance information the the structure the black and white detail is more important than the resolution of color because color you know it's kind of like taking a a really sharp so so they'll capture all the detail information with black and white and then use the color map from the the color camera to colorize the black and white photo that's kind of the idea I think um I haven't I haven't seen the actual results of it and it sounded like it wasn't as good of a thing I mean in in practice but it's you know like an interesting idea and of course there's a lot of other ways you could uh use multiple cameras to do interesting things there's that um it's a low resolution I believe an IR camera that you can plug into your phone and take heat map pictures of things and so the resolution isn't very high but it's a different kind of that's the FL one what's that yeah that's called the Fleer one fli1 yeah yeah I have one of those and and what they're doing is is they capture the infrared information with the cameras on its device and then overlay that on top of the camera information used from the the camera that's built into the phone yeah so if you had multiple sensors looking at different parts of the spectrum and putting them together you could do some really cool stuff now last week you and I talked about the idea of the phone being made out of ceramic zerone right and I was really hot on the idea I thought it sounded like a great thing and and in the interviewing week I've had a thought and I want to to hear you tell me I mean I I was thinking about this and I was thinking about how much Apple's invested in aluminum right they have tons and tons and tons of CNC machines going turning out iPhone enclosures by the hour and to change away from that to a what is a slower process to make the the ceramic cases doesn't make as much sense to me as it did last week yeah that would be a huge shift and and with with what benefit I mean the most obvious detriment is that it's taking longer and it's heavier um on the watch it sort of is interesting and sort of makes sense to say here's a you know a high performance kind of product for for you to wear on your wrist it's sort of luxurious but for a phone that everyone's carrying a phone a mass market phone seems to make less sense to me I could see other wearables and I could see even you know having like part you know perhaps a high-end phone I think Apple's sort of experimenting with the idea of luxury Electronics because especially when they first came out with the iPhone 6 and there was the six and the 6 Plus and the six plus was selling I think it was around 10% of sales it was a a minority purchase and with the success it was bigger and now with a six with a seven and the seven plus I think it's close to tide I mean I saw some information it looked like it was I mean the 7s plus is a real big draw I mean in large part because of the camera um but Apple could um in the future I don't know if it's going to be next year but I mean they could come out with a there was sort of a rumor about a pro phone Pro you know um but if there's a market for that you could sell a higher-end device that had even more you know capabilities that cost more because it's more difficult to make and so I could see using exotic materials on something like that but for for the phone that they're making 70 million of in certain quarters that would be a tall order to jump to some exotic material just kind of for breaking rates it would have to be some offer some huge uh leap over what aluminum is doing right now and and and just you know having built up all that infrastructure and all of that equipment in order to make this manufacturing seems like it doesn't make sense to to discard it quickly right they they are probably the biggest CNC Machining user on the planet it's I'm just I'm having a harder time figuring out how they would go to the longer process that doesn't really take advantage of that infrastructure they built yeah they have been installing billions of dollars worth of equipment in in their suppliers I kind of wish they'd get back to liquid metal a lot of the contracts that's that's what it involves is Apple is buying robots and devices for them so they're like helping them with the capital cost of building out production capacity cuz it's difficult and dangerous to just rely on other suppliers to build things because if somebody else comes up and wants you know a ton of around for something then that impacts your costs but if you're building your parts on your own then you have much more control over the supply I I need to look at the liquid metal I I remember that they purchased the rights to use Liquid Metal we haven't really seen a whole lot come to fruition from that but I I like to think that it still holds promise my other idea that we're talking about materials Apple's been working with a lot of different materials especially with the watch and it's kind of you know it's what are they doing all that for I think part of it is sort of creating a lure around the watch but could also be that they're they're monetizing uh the research into materials for other things that they plan to build in the future like say cars you know using a lot of the same materials so having the ability to machine and develop different um different kinds of Parts uh that's that's kind of a core thing you need to know how to do and Apple's been spending many years figuring how to do this kind of stuff it's not like they just come up with a design and send it to Taiwan to get mass produced which is you know that's basically what Blackberry did for their tablet it's what Amazon did they reused the Blackberry it's what um Google and Microsoft have been doing for their stuff so they don't really on their own have a lot of of Material Science where Apple does and they've been you they've been whittling out titanium and aluminum MacBooks since before they were called MacBooks and the tremendous volumes of iPods that were built using kind of innovative new ways to to build cases and install electronics and things and I think Apple watch I've written before about Apple watch is kind of a continuation of the iPod being the sort of small device sort of practical application for a computer that you carry along with you and of course with the iPhone and iPads and new Macs the the Mac Pro that they haven't done anything with for several years now they originally worked with Automotive suppliers to build that like because people who built parts for car makers knew how to build the kind of case that they wanted to build well Dan let's go ahead and wrap this up for our listeners is there anything else we should discuss I can't think of anything all right well we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the apple and seter podcast uh Dan where can people find you on the internet I'm writing an apple Insider and I tweet from Daniel Aaron e r n and I'm also uh doing the Apple Insider official Instagram you can check us out there excellent well if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and and you found that you took advantage of the deals and found that they were useful please consider leaving this a positive review on iTunes we do appreciate it and thank you for listening this far all the way through uh if if I do my homework on liquid metal and Dan starts posting at ruly drafted. comom we'll tell you all about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast Cyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 90 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me for a very special episode this week is Daniel Aaron dger hey thanks for having me on thank you for joining me yeah I'm so glad you're here so how are things with you pretty good we're um I'm in the Pacific Northwest there's a huge storm coming in this weekend it's supposed to be looks looks quite ominous and dangerous looks like angry angry green smoke coming at us from the radar like there's a big Samsung Galaxy Note coming right at us oh no well I hope you weather that well and I I hope that all of our listeners who were on the east coast and suffered the effects of Hurricane Matthew are doing all right um these these kinds of things are not small and it's easy to to ignore them when they don't happen to you but it's it's important and we uh we think about all of our listeners yeah we're getting hitting from both sides um going to do a quick ad read here have you ever heard of a software called Boom for Mac sounds familiar okay well it's it's interesting um this is a piece of software that addresses the the system volume for the uh the the loudness setting for your Mac and and basically we all use our Macs differently right but everyone has speakers built in and everyone listens through those speakers at sometime have have you ever felt like you needed a little bit more out of your your Mac when you're using it like maybe maybe speakers didn't Co loud enough I didn't know that was an option um you turn it up so basically I I I I've been in some situations where I've been playing music and I've been using just the built-in speakers because that's where I've been that's the context I've had I haven't been able to plug in speakers and you just don't get quite enough out of them right it's they're not quite loud enough sometimes uh depending on the setting so boom 2 is a volume enhancement app by a company called Global delight and what they do is they juice the sound right they they make the system get louder and so they have an offer for all of our listeners you can log on to boom4 maac.com that's B oom f r maac.com the app comes with a 7-Day trial period you can use the entire app and it includes audio effects once convinced you can go ahead and buy it from boomr maac.com so you don't have to keep your ears waiting why don't you log on to Boom for maac.com now that's interesting I'm going to I'm going to use that I'm going to give the trial a chance and we're going to go ahead and listen to it and see how it works you and I were talking before we started recording Dan about all of the different suppliers that are issuing forecasts linked to the iPhone 7 uh well tsmc was one of the most recent ones that we reported on and they I don't know if the company itself mentioned it but um a lot of these are analysts that are talking about what's happening and the results that they posted uh feature guidance were related I Believe by an analyst to uh be closely tied to iPhone 7 because that company's making all of the application processors and most of the um I believe that all of the the Qualcomm chips that apple is using remember Qualcomm shifted away from tsmc and went to Samsung however that was only for um newer products I believe and iPhone 7 is using the original parts from Qualcomm that are made by tsmc if I have that correct so basically tsmc is making all of the you know the biggest chips for iPhone 7 um and most of the new Android phones I believe are either being made by smaller Chinese Fabs or by Samsung now so most of the higher-end phones that are made with Qualcomm chips I believe are made by Samsung there may be some mix that comes from other companies so that kind of all points to uh tsmc is having getting a lot of their good news from the launch of iPhone 7 the uh the co- CEO in in the article we wrote uh he was talking about demand for high-end smartphones is continuing to improve when that's that goes completely opposite of what we've been hearing all year was that no one's going to buy premium smartphones anymore that everyone's kind of comfortable buying a $100 phone all of a sudden and so there was kind of a lot of news about how Apple was going to be bearing the brunt of this backlash where people aren't going to be buying high-end phones anymore so that a year later almost that doesn't appear to be have any of that has been true another thing um related to supply chain orders the further off ones suppliers that that Supply a lot of companies uh one of them is gun which I believe don't they make the plastic lenses for everybody in in the smartphone industry basically I'm I'm not sure I I believe that's the case um so they Supply kind of everybody and remember I did a series of Articles starting kind of last year a year ago where uh kind of the Japanese equivalent to the Wall Street Journal the Niki published kind of strategically timed articles without a by line that came out and said oh the supplier chain looks really bad for apple and a couple of the things that they wrote um some of these reports were saying that Apple cut their supplies by 30% and it's it's very difficult to look at the supply chain and know what's happening because Apple has multiple suppliers and some of these suppliers that that have some you know real impact that they're reporting you can't specifically tell if they're talking about supplies being lower because Apple's ordering less or because Apple's getting from somewhere else or because their other companies that they Supply are dropping their forecast so it's it's very easy to write about things and come up with a convincing story but that isn't really supported any sort of solid truth and so in amidst all of these articles we've been publishing recently talking about iPhone 7 being very positive launch and at this point you know the the strongest competitor to iPhone 7 in terms of premium phones and larger phones is Samsung and Samsung is right now going through one of the biggest crisis we've ever seen in the smartphone industry I mean it's really bad they've stopped production of their phones they a couple times changed production to begin supplying people who already had an effective phone and this is across millions of units and now they've canceled the thing outright so this is like a huge Interruption for Apple's one of Apple's biggest competitors and really the only other thing you can talk about is Google's pixel but Google's pixel is limited to one carrier in the US it's not that it only works on Verizon but you can only buy it through Verizon so if you want if you have a or or buy it directly through Google you know you can have a a plan on T-Mobile that you bring over your pixel and they will let you use it but they won't give you the same plan you know this preferred plan so it is it is a very pretty severe restriction to be on one carrier in the United States at this point and Google has now relaxed all of the things that it said were bad about Apple's iPhone in terms of having one company control how things are done and updates and software and things like that so Google is now doing a straight up iPhone but it's not feature competitive with the iPhone and Google doesn't have nearly the reach that people think that they do mean none of their the the most popular Nexus phone ever was a Nexus 5 and it did not sell in huge quantities I believe it sold like 5 or 6 million so this is you know this is a very small thing that gets a lot of press but Apple's biggest competitor is you know they got a a full face knockout and iPhone 7 has been well received even before that so you know the roads are kind of paved for Apple it's kind of Ideal circumstances and we're hearing from Clear uh suppliers that they're very confident going into the future and all of a sudden here's a a n story published um ironically yesterday at 420 but uh it was published uh I saw it on Barons and they just made sort of negative sounding comments about uh how Taiwanese device uh makers were under pressure and that Apple suppliers are the main culprits I quoted a analy here is saying that iPhone sales could turn out to be slightly better than the extremely pessimistic view 3 months ago but saying that Flagship smartphones are in a downtrend the orders for the supply chain are quite conservative compared with a year ago so grain of salt we'll see if how accurate that is in the future because I've now seen two previous reports that I reported on from this from this news site that were clearly wrong I mean you could argue about whether it's right or right when they did the report but in afterward it's like clearly what they predicted didn't Happ well last year you reported on you reported this at the beginning of the year in January yeah a similar story that was talking about criticizing the iPhone 6s and its Supply right the rumor was that Supply Cuts were going to damage the iPhone and that sales would drop by about you know the reduced output would drop by about 30% and that was supposed to have happened in January or March of this year and it it had no real relevance on overall iPhone demand or unit sales for either of those quarters and it if it had had any relevance at all it pertained only to internal inventory adjustments right yeah there's so many things that are going on it's like it's like looking at somebody on a roller coaster and saying oh they're up now they're down now they're up that doesn't really tell you what how they're going to end up at the end of the course they're going to end up at the station you know they're going to end up where they got off but on the way there they're going up and down and around and you know you can report on all those things but it's it's immaterial if you're really concerned about where they're where they're ending up and the media loves to do that kind of stuff because there's so much Dr involved in it but particularly here when you're talking about like like the the one that you're referencing when you're talking about when when you go out and report that sales are going to drop by a half which is they said in the the earlier the I believe it was like two years ago and then later they said uh orders are going to be dropping by 30% that could be the case they could it could be that Apple's inventory is going up and down and and so at one point they're asking for a third less of a supply than they were previously but that doesn't really tell you very much and the problem is it gets interpreted by people who want to read it a specific way and they came out saying that iPhones are going to be dropping by 30% you know that apple is going to be making and selling 30% fewer iPhones which of course never happened people ought to learn that the supply chain production volume rumors for iPhones are worthless right yeah yeah we've seen that over and over and over again and and yet they keep coming out and we keep having analysts drop news right when they want something to happen that's I mean it's not an accident why they're doing it but it is frustrating to see people pushing out headlines that are not true or even sometimes they're they're factually true but they're presented in a way that's either intentionally false or walking the user to a the reader to a false conclusion you know I I can't believe I'm saying this you know we we're Apple Insider we talk about rumors and we cover these things but really no no one should pay attention to these rumors well there's different kinds of rumors but specifically the supply chain rumors when you're talking about how many things are getting built that's there's a lot of other rumors that we have written about some of which are things like patents you know there's features that get patented that maybe Apple's going to use it maybe they're not and we've seen examples of both but it's kind of a subject of interest to readers I think to see what's being researched and what's being documented in patents because that get does give you an indication of a lot of the work that goes on that you don't necessarily see sometimes you don't necessarily see it right away sometimes it takes a while to become a product um and sometimes it's just there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't ever result in a product but it's still interesting I mean now before we move on to product and and those kinds of rumors that we published a report saying that supply chain reports there we go again claimed that Apple will gain market share in 2016 and 2017 that the smartphone market will expand about 7% uh up to 16% with next year's phone so do we believe this how how are we supposed to take this well it it is interesting in the face of previous sort of consensus even at the beginning of this year was that smartphones were just not only reaching a plateau but were tumbling downhill and particularly high-end smartphones and people are just going to stop using them and I didn't see any factual basis for that when they were saying it and I was refuting it saying that this isn't really does not appear to be uh solidly based it appears to be people saying this because Apple has full control of the high-end so of course you're going to say the high end doesn't matter and we haven't seen any evidence of that we haven't seen people deciding that they don't no longer want to have a smartphone and really you know they talk about smartphones going away or or being commoditized down into nothing but smartphones are a combination of a whole lot of things that we used to carry you know a lot of us carried a PDA we frequently carried cameras and had a phone and a music player and a lot of other devices that you know we didn't carry all the time but are now done on your phone and it even replaces a lot of time that you would spend on your computer a decade or so ago so smartphones are a combination of things and a very convenient package and they're gaining features they're not we're not going to distill them down to a simpler thing and phones aren't primarily about being phones they're mobile computers that we call smartphones but most of what we do today is Computing functions and using a network and it's not primarily for voice calls we're using data calls I mean voice calls are now data calls but um a lot of what we're doing is messaging and FaceTime style messaging and look at all the work that Apple's put into iMessage to to make that a more engaging platform so it's sticky so people stick with iPhones so a lot of the predictions that people are making are just clearly just way off base and they're the reason that they're predicting those things is not because the facts sort of support that it's because that's what they want to have happen the same thing as you know IDC when they come out and say oh it looks like people are really trending towards two inone notebooks that look exactly like a Microsoft Surface and it's like well we kind of understand why you're issue that press release it's not because there's really evidence that people are buying a bunch of services it's because you found a data point that you can turn into a story to say two in one sales are going up but you know that's not actually the where the trajectory of the market is going we're not rushing to Microsoft store to buy their product that this is the pr that's trying to make that happen so there's a difference between rumors and rumors now you're talking about devices and patents and how we can sort of see that patents even though a particular invention may not make it into a product they sort of show us the area that Apple's focusing on and where they're putting their attention into innovating sometimes they also acquire interesting things for example we we've talked a lot about the rumor of a MacBook with a uh a touch capacitive uh function row right right recently they purchased a company I think based in Australia who makes a keyboard with eink keys right did you see that I saw the reports of it I don't I don't know if that was actually true that they had acquired them okay well the report that I read and I'm just pulling it up right now I saw there was a rumor about them talking about being acquired by Apple or in talks and then uh Telegraph UK published an article I think today or last night saying that uh Tim Cook who's traveling in China right now visited these developers okay but it's not clear if that's accurate or not I asked Apple about it but I haven't heard back okay and they don't always say when when they've acquired something but they don't always respond right away either yes you don't necessarily see that technology released just as it exists just as it was um that what you do is is is you you wait a generation of phone and you see that they incorporate it in a different way that they take some base underlying technology and reuse that in a new and interesting way that wasn't there before yeah you know the way that I think about this is going way back to the acquisition of touchworks you remember this you know touchworks years ago they made a keyboard that replaced a G4 powerbooks keyboard and it had a little ribbon cable that went off to the side and plugged it to the USB and it was a touch capactive keyboard that you could do multi-touch on on your laptop and this this thing became what powers the touchcreen in the iPhone and people who saw this didn't realize that okay if you take this solid thing that's meant for a laptop and repurpose it and put it behind a screen and make it transparent which is a lot of work right yeah that you suddenly get a pocket computer that's touchcreen but Apple did I think they were capacitive you know capacitive technology was there before but what was missing was a lot of the analysis in terms of when you put your finger on the screen it's not like a stylus where you where you could triangulate the specific point where the stylus was touching um when you touch a a screen with your finger you're either hitting it with the whole pad so you're you're hitting a whole area and also when you do gestures when you swipe or you a variety of things that you can smear your finger around the screen it's really hard to for a computer to know what you're trying to do and it has to be done really quickly and it has to be done accurately and and predictably or it doesn't feel right and so I think a lot of the work I don't know if they actually acquired that what touch works that company or I think they kind of Aqua hired the people they bought they they bought touchworks and bought the IP and and acquired the people as well yeah some control over the technology but anyway that the technology that they were acquiring wasn't necessarily capacity to touch screens but it was the gestures of how to translate sloppy human fingers with you know um kind of a design language of how it's going to work well and it was also the the multiple fingers at a time kind of thing to be able to handle touch typing was a was a feat that had not been done before that's why Android for many years didn't do that because they were afraid of they knew it was patented technology and then after a while it got to the point where you know Samsung was getting away with being able to do whatever they wanted to do and the courts were just not responding for so many years it took them years to get the to go to court and then Apple brought all these Pat and the court said oh we can only hear about four of those and we're going to allow Samsung to go out and buy patents so that it's an equal fight so that you both look like you're infringing technology so it's just such a clown show in the courts that they basically gave Apple's technology to everybody else to to to have that that's when Google really embraced it an Android and made Android much more like the iPhone than it was originally originally it had like a little track ball on it and a keyboard yeah was a Blackberry but it wasn't just a shift in hey we should copy Apple not Blackberry it was a shift in I think we can just steal their technology because nothing's going to happen and we're giving it away so they can't sue us for money we're we're seeing sort of the uh this play out in the courts now right there's a there's Samsung and Apple before The Supreme Court and the the courts expected to hand down a decision sometime in in June of next year but it it looks as if the court is focusing around the issue of creating and instating rules to adjudicate future litigation they're they're a little less concerned in how designed patent laws impact the case even though that's what this case has been about Samsung is is arguing that damage should damages should be assigned based on just the part or portion of profits that can be attributed to the infringing part so they're saying that the the design of the phone is the only thing that should be assessed for the damages and it shouldn't be the against to the whole phone and the opposite I mean the kind of things that they're arguing was you know these were so these cases were so old I believe it was from 2011 I mean that's like 5 years old now it's kind of ancient stuff I mean one of them was a swipe unlock which Apple's not even using anymore on iOS 10 but the fact that my that Samsung very clearly copied it and they documented that they were copying it because it worked better than what they were trying to do on their own their whole argument that they didn't copy was clearly not true and so now they have to say oh well sure we copied it but shouldn't be able to first of all they first of all they wanted to stop any sales ban on on ongoing phones until they were they didn't matter anymore and they successfully basically didn't they successfully ran around wasting time until the injunctions wouldn't matter anymore so they got they did that successfully and now they're saying well we shouldn't even have to pay for lost profits because this was one feature on the phone and it wasn't the only reason people bought her copy got phones and you know the fact that Apple can only bring like four or five patents at a time means that it's just impossible to sue a company like Samsung who's just stealing dozens and dozens and dozens of your of everything every feature on your phone and then they say oh well you only won one of these after four or five years and it doesn't represent the whole phone I mean it's just such a a bizarre clown show that this is still going on but yeah that's where they're at right now because it is a big and conversely Samsung did the opposite so Samsung has some technology that they have patents on related to uh mobile technology or mobile wireless and they licensed it to in infinion which is now part of Intel Apple bought ships from that company for the mobile broadband up to iPhone 4 something like that 4S uh when they switched over to Qualcomm and Samsung was suing for for patents that that already licensed to the company that sold the chips to Apple so it was already technology that they didn't yeah there was no infringement there and they were trying to create this thing where how some somehow Apple was responsible for technology that was already licensed in the products that they were buying these off the-shelf components and Samsung was saying you know basically we want to apply this significant uh penalty that's much more than the cost of the chip was and so they're they're extremely hypocritical in what they're arguing I mean they're just they're just arguing any Direction they possibly can yeah and as I'm looking at this it it seems like they're arguing any way they can that basically they should pay less that that even if they still have to pay that they should pay a fraction of what's been assessed for them so far the interesting thing is that if you read the transcripts that the justices are not specifically focused on the details of this case as much as what preceden should be for the future what jury instructions should be because they're they're trying to come up with a way that they don't have to hear this kind of case again that when it comes up to the courts again that a juror is going to understand how to determine what's going on properly and they're struggling with this right they're you know in in the transcripts the justices are trying to because it's a design-based case they're they're talking about instead of phones they're talking about about you know a distinctive designed product like the Volkswagen Beetle so they're saying if the beetle was a stroke of Genius a design that was done on from from pen to completion in 3 days should they only be assessed 3 days worth of Damages for infringing or or should it be you know more than that because the engine took 100,000 days and it's an interesting question that they're reaching at right what is what is attributable to the the successful product is it the design and if it is the design should just charge for that one component or is it the total thing because Samsung is kind of like the and they come in and Apple's of course not the first company they've done this to they did it to Panasonic they did it to I mean everyone in the industry they've come in and just swarmed with a copycat product and stolen their stuff and disregarded patents and they have a lot of support at home in the government because they are such a huge it's not like a big company it's like a network of companies and there's a tremendous amount of um corruption between them and the government well they're so large that it's it's a s Korean version of too big to fail right they they have all of their heavy industry tied up with Samsung they're they're not just a maker of phones and appliances and white goods that we see here in the US they also make automobiles they make military equipment they make pretty much everything and so if you damage that company first of all you're damaging cultural honor right because it's so closely tied and associated with with being so large there it's it's a national interest and you're you're also stand to harm the whole South D Samsung and Samsung is more than just making products too they I think they sell insurance and you it's just they just do everything and specifically I mean smartphones were back in 2 between like 2010 when they started copying to around 2014 uh smartphones were a big part of Samsung's profit Center and increasingly that's I mean iPhone 6 did the most damage more than any lawsuits but and then also there's just kind of like this negging competition from China to where Samsung used to sell quite a bit to China and now it's like there's just no market for it because there's there's plenty of commodity phones that you can get for cheaper whereas Apple had a very different product and sold it very differently in China and it was you know Apple Apple only sells premium phones Samsung sell a lot of things and you know part of that is the premium phones where they get the most money but to have a decrease in the premium phones tremendous decrease from iPhone 6 that continued for 3 years now and then to be hit with the Note 7 thing even before the Note 7 blew up uh there was a pretty significant problem happening within profitability in phones because they give away so much to sell a phone and their their average selling price are going down so a lot of Samsung's profitability actually comes outside of phones it comes from selling parts to other phone makers and from selling displays and a variety of other things that are doing better than smartphones have so I don't think the government is like backing up the South Korean government is backing up Samsung's smartphones as much as they are just allowing the company to do kind of whatever it wants to do and the same thing happens in China where um intellectual property doesn't really have the same there's not the same culture of protecting that but that's now happening in the United States where you know intellectual property has always been kind of a big part of the United States ability to be a world leader and to stay a world leader because we're developing technology and building into products and there's protection under law so somebody else can't just come out and copy it and there are some problems with that I mean if you look at you know drug companies and stuff it's very difficult to come up with a new drug it's very expensive and then once they do you have this life-saving drug that solves a problem that nobody else knows how to do and they want to charge money for it and so people look at that and like oh that's an ethical dilemma we should allow all these other companies to copy this drug that they spent so much money working on but what what happens is that there are tons of research and tons of work on making new drugs let's continue the example that are not successful right they they pour huge amounts of into money into things that don't go anywhere and so the one time they do have something that works they have to recover cost not just for the um the one that's successful but also to have paid for all of the work that was that was essentially useless not only subsidize their things that didn't work out like you're talking about they also need to have money left over to be able to come up with the next new drug to keep the thing going so Apple is very Apple's business model is very much like a drug company in terms of that they're constantly doing research some of it doesn't pan out but they're very focused in the research that they're doing to come up with new products in the future that people are going to want to buy and other companies in the tech industry particularly are like uh pill Pharm or pill makers that are looking at what Apple does and trying to just copy it and there's there's some efforts to do kind of innovative things but a lot of what we've seen outside of apple has not been successful for years and years and years so it's like things like you know they're making such a big deal about 3D screens on cell phones a few years ago and then it was curv screens everybody needed a curve screen I didn't really understand why that was important but they convinced every in the media to be talking about curve screens all these they have curve screens and when is Apple going to come out with a curve screen it's like what is the benefit so you can lay it down and it doesn't lay flat on the table I don't get it but there's there's so many examples of that and and right now there's the um the VR thing which I think VR is going to be interesting at some point but right now I don't I think it's kind of like 3D television where it's kind of thing where you put on glasses and it's kind of cool for 15 minutes and then you want to not do it anymore that's my experience with 3D television and everyone has come over to my house it's like hey check out these 3D glasses and they're like 15 minutes it's like okay let's let's just watch it regular the the issue with the television right and this is something I I go to CES every year and at CES you always see all the new televisions and what happens is television used to be a product that you know they they made a new one every year but the new one every year was largely a lot like the one from the previous year right when we had two televisions analog TV before we had the HDTV switch over a TV was pretty much a TV he had fancy features you had like the Trin on and like the sometimes they were bigger yeah sometimes they were smaller they were Trinitron there was differentiation but largely you bought a TV you kept it for 10 years or more right in in those days you bought a television you kept it until it broke at least yeah so there's something tremendously better and there wasn't tremendously better things coming out so yeah and and there frequently wasn't anything tremendously better and and so the the life cycle of buying a TV was that you bought one and kept it for a substantial amount of time and that if you bought a new one you bought it because your old one broke and it wasn't cost-effective to repair or because you wanted something significantly larger you wanted these new features but it wasn't uh every you know there was not a buying cycle where everyone went out and bought a fresh new TV every year or every two years the way people buy phones right and so at CES the push has been TV manufacturers trying to figure out a model where they can get people to throw out their TV every couple years and buy a fresh new one and so it was um first it was everyone moving from 720p to 1080p then it was thin screen frames then it was 3D TV then it was the refresh rate moving from 60 HZ to 120 HZ or even 240 Herz right and then it was everyone trying to move to curv screens and 4K and next next year it's going to be 8K probably right they're they're keep chasing what's it going to take to get people to buy TVs more frequently yeah I mean I think the the pace of technology and the productization of things because the market is much larger now um I think the pace is faster I don't know how much difference there is in how long people keep their televisions I mean do you buy a television every year hell no I haven't bought a television I mean I know television isn't Central to my existence but I haven't bought a television since 2010 now Dan I want to talk to you a little bit about some uh some patents and things about the 17 iPhone so Mikey wrote a story on our site about Apple patenting a method for embedding light sensors directly into device displays and what he's suggesting is that embedding light sensors directly into the display is a step towards getting rid of the chin and forehead bezel yeah we talked about that last week too we we did although he wrote about the patent this week this is just one of more thing in on the march to getting a phone that doesn't have the forehead bezel right um I don't I don't I'm not pulling up the article immediately in my head but was it talking about integrating a camera or a fingerprint sensor or kind of both this one is about light generating layers that are a part of the substrate of the display and by having light sensors integrated directly into the display they can sense proximity sense the the light Ambience around it and have it be built in so you don't have to have the chin and forehead separately um they're also talking about the idea that you could have a TFT layer in which sensors are embedded directly into the TFT layer of the screen uh but basically in in any scenario within the patent and of course patents address a couple scenarios more because they want to try and cover as widely as possible uh the the sensors are placed within the display itself not above it as it is the case currently in the iPhone and the iPad and Mac yeah that's interesting they still have a earpiece you're going to have to put somewhere that is true there's some um this is all about sensors and it doesn't mention anything about the earpiece there is some interesting ideas about you know without having any specialized knowledge of how any of this works on a really low level it's very easy to say oh you could take the fingerprint sensor and put it into the display and the camera also and what's sort of interesting I mean part of that is like when I first read about integrating basically camera sensors within the display part of sensor it's kind of one of those things where you're like oh I wouldn't have thought to do that but that's kind of an interesting idea wonder how that actually work and in actual uh production um but another example that we've already seeing is on the camera within the camera there's Focus pixels so it's it's pixels that instead of um creating an image they are helping to focus what the camera is interpreting and seeing so there's a lot of a lot of technical directions that can happen that aren't necessarily easy to predict and it's not like a an vious thing of we have to get this we have to get this we have to get this and now we're done to where we don't have a chin and vessel could also be that the the phone starts taking on a different shape where we don't use it the same way um one sort of example of that is not exactly changing the shape of the phone but the idea of having a watch where you get some of your most important things with a glance of your wrist instead of pulling out a phone and putting it up to your ear or looking at it and then also so with coming with airpods being able to sort of talk and interact with a phone even if you're not looking at it so in addition to the changing of the phone itself it may be that the role of the phone is changing where it's becoming almost like a server in the background that you stow away on your person somewhere and then you you know you have a conversation with Siri or a conversation with whoever you're talking to and um you're looking at status reports some things on your wrist that you don't have to fully pull out your phone to check on so there's a whole lot of kind of interesting directions that phone is going in right now one of the other patents that Mikey wrote about is the idea of a super resolution multi-sensor camera using Cube prisms and the diagram that I'm looking at is that like the Periscope kind of idea where it splits up the it is the Periscope idea it's it's exactly the Periscope where what they've got is um is is is what you say a periscope but because there are now more sides as opposed to just focusing on a sensor placed at the end you can add the additional sensor coverage on the sides of the thing as well and their goal is to capture more information for the camera in the same amount of physical space yeah that's an interesting idea and then it's also kind of I saw a previous one where they were showing sort of a similar arrangement to basically create a tunnel of mirrors so that you could have um more larger longer optics for shaping the light before it hits the sensor because there's there's only so many things you can do in a very slim assortment of lens covers in a phone that's that thin right and photography is based upon light so yeah so if you can bend around a corner and send it down the hallway and that's an interesting idea as well and also this the idea of having multiple sensors we already seeing that with the iPhone 7 plus having two cameras that kind of work in conjunction with each other but having having even more more sensors that do specific things there's a bunch of Android phones most of the Android phones that I've seen that that use two camera sensors one is color and the other is high resolution black and white and the idea is to that uh the luminance information the the structure the black and white detail is more important than the resolution of color because color you know it's kind of like taking a a really sharp so so they'll capture all the detail information with black and white and then use the color map from the the color camera to colorize the black and white photo that's kind of the idea I think um I haven't I haven't seen the actual results of it and it sounded like it wasn't as good of a thing I mean in in practice but it's you know like an interesting idea and of course there's a lot of other ways you could uh use multiple cameras to do interesting things there's that um it's a low resolution I believe an IR camera that you can plug into your phone and take heat map pictures of things and so the resolution isn't very high but it's a different kind of that's the FL one what's that yeah that's called the Fleer one fli1 yeah yeah I have one of those and and what they're doing is is they capture the infrared information with the cameras on its device and then overlay that on top of the camera information used from the the camera that's built into the phone yeah so if you had multiple sensors looking at different parts of the spectrum and putting them together you could do some really cool stuff now last week you and I talked about the idea of the phone being made out of ceramic zerone right and I was really hot on the idea I thought it sounded like a great thing and and in the interviewing week I've had a thought and I want to to hear you tell me I mean I I was thinking about this and I was thinking about how much Apple's invested in aluminum right they have tons and tons and tons of CNC machines going turning out iPhone enclosures by the hour and to change away from that to a what is a slower process to make the the ceramic cases doesn't make as much sense to me as it did last week yeah that would be a huge shift and and with with what benefit I mean the most obvious detriment is that it's taking longer and it's heavier um on the watch it sort of is interesting and sort of makes sense to say here's a you know a high performance kind of product for for you to wear on your wrist it's sort of luxurious but for a phone that everyone's carrying a phone a mass market phone seems to make less sense to me I could see other wearables and I could see even you know having like part you know perhaps a high-end phone I think Apple's sort of experimenting with the idea of luxury Electronics because especially when they first came out with the iPhone 6 and there was the six and the 6 Plus and the six plus was selling I think it was around 10% of sales it was a a minority purchase and with the success it was bigger and now with a six with a seven and the seven plus I think it's close to tide I mean I saw some information it looked like it was I mean the 7s plus is a real big draw I mean in large part because of the camera um but Apple could um in the future I don't know if it's going to be next year but I mean they could come out with a there was sort of a rumor about a pro phone Pro you know um but if there's a market for that you could sell a higher-end device that had even more you know capabilities that cost more because it's more difficult to make and so I could see using exotic materials on something like that but for for the phone that they're making 70 million of in certain quarters that would be a tall order to jump to some exotic material just kind of for breaking rates it would have to be some offer some huge uh leap over what aluminum is doing right now and and and just you know having built up all that infrastructure and all of that equipment in order to make this manufacturing seems like it doesn't make sense to to discard it quickly right they they are probably the biggest CNC Machining user on the planet it's I'm just I'm having a harder time figuring out how they would go to the longer process that doesn't really take advantage of that infrastructure they built yeah they have been installing billions of dollars worth of equipment in in their suppliers I kind of wish they'd get back to liquid metal a lot of the contracts that's that's what it involves is Apple is buying robots and devices for them so they're like helping them with the capital cost of building out production capacity cuz it's difficult and dangerous to just rely on other suppliers to build things because if somebody else comes up and wants you know a ton of around for something then that impacts your costs but if you're building your parts on your own then you have much more control over the supply I I need to look at the liquid metal I I remember that they purchased the rights to use Liquid Metal we haven't really seen a whole lot come to fruition from that but I I like to think that it still holds promise my other idea that we're talking about materials Apple's been working with a lot of different materials especially with the watch and it's kind of you know it's what are they doing all that for I think part of it is sort of creating a lure around the watch but could also be that they're they're monetizing uh the research into materials for other things that they plan to build in the future like say cars you know using a lot of the same materials so having the ability to machine and develop different um different kinds of Parts uh that's that's kind of a core thing you need to know how to do and Apple's been spending many years figuring how to do this kind of stuff it's not like they just come up with a design and send it to Taiwan to get mass produced which is you know that's basically what Blackberry did for their tablet it's what Amazon did they reused the Blackberry it's what um Google and Microsoft have been doing for their stuff so they don't really on their own have a lot of of Material Science where Apple does and they've been you they've been whittling out titanium and aluminum MacBooks since before they were called MacBooks and the tremendous volumes of iPods that were built using kind of innovative new ways to to build cases and install electronics and things and I think Apple watch I've written before about Apple watch is kind of a continuation of the iPod being the sort of small device sort of practical application for a computer that you carry along with you and of course with the iPhone and iPads and new Macs the the Mac Pro that they haven't done anything with for several years now they originally worked with Automotive suppliers to build that like because people who built parts for car makers knew how to build the kind of case that they wanted to build well Dan let's go ahead and wrap this up for our listeners is there anything else we should discuss I can't think of anything all right well we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the apple and seter podcast uh Dan where can people find you on the internet I'm writing an apple Insider and I tweet from Daniel Aaron e r n and I'm also uh doing the Apple Insider official Instagram you can check us out there excellent well if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and and you found that you took advantage of the deals and found that they were useful please consider leaving this a positive review on iTunes we do appreciate it and thank you for listening this far all the way through uh if if I do my homework on liquid metal and Dan starts posting at ruly drafted. comom we'll tell you all about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast Cyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 90 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me for a very special episode this week is Daniel Aaron dger hey thanks for having me on thank you for joining me yeah I'm so glad you're here so how are things with you pretty good we're um I'm in the Pacific Northwest there's a huge storm coming in this weekend it's supposed to be looks looks quite ominous and dangerous looks like angry angry green smoke coming at us from the radar like there's a big Samsung Galaxy Note coming right at us oh no well I hope you weather that well and I I hope that all of our listeners who were on the east coast and suffered the effects of Hurricane Matthew are doing all right um these these kinds of things are not small and it's easy to to ignore them when they don't happen to you but it's it's important and we uh we think about all of our listeners yeah we're getting hitting from both sides um going to do a quick ad read here have you ever heard of a software called Boom for Mac sounds familiar okay well it's it's interesting um this is a piece of software that addresses the the system volume for the uh the the loudness setting for your Mac and and basically we all use our Macs differently right but everyone has speakers built in and everyone listens through those speakers at sometime have have you ever felt like you needed a little bit more out of your your Mac when you're using it like maybe maybe speakers didn't Co loud enough I didn't know that was an option um you turn it up so basically I I I I've been in some situations where I've been playing music and I've been using just the built-in speakers because that's where I've been that's the context I've had I haven't been able to plug in speakers and you just don't get quite enough out of them right it's they're not quite loud enough sometimes uh depending on the setting so boom 2 is a volume enhancement app by a company called Global delight and what they do is they juice the sound right they they make the system get louder and so they have an offer for all of our listeners you can log on to boom4 maac.com that's B oom f r maac.com the app comes with a 7-Day trial period you can use the entire app and it includes audio effects once convinced you can go ahead and buy it from boomr maac.com so you don't have to keep your ears waiting why don't you log on to Boom for maac.com now that's interesting I'm going to I'm going to use that I'm going to give the trial a chance and we're going to go ahead and listen to it and see how it works you and I were talking before we started recording Dan about all of the different suppliers that are issuing forecasts linked to the iPhone 7 uh well tsmc was one of the most recent ones that we reported on and they I don't know if the company itself mentioned it but um a lot of these are analysts that are talking about what's happening and the results that they posted uh feature guidance were related I Believe by an analyst to uh be closely tied to iPhone 7 because that company's making all of the application processors and most of the um I believe that all of the the Qualcomm chips that apple is using remember Qualcomm shifted away from tsmc and went to Samsung however that was only for um newer products I believe and iPhone 7 is using the original parts from Qualcomm that are made by tsmc if I have that correct so basically tsmc is making all of the you know the biggest chips for iPhone 7 um and most of the new Android phones I believe are either being made by smaller Chinese Fabs or by Samsung now so most of the higher-end phones that are made with Qualcomm chips I believe are made by Samsung there may be some mix that comes from other companies so that kind of all points to uh tsmc is having getting a lot of their good news from the launch of iPhone 7 the uh the co- CEO in in the article we wrote uh he was talking about demand for high-end smartphones is continuing to improve when that's that goes completely opposite of what we've been hearing all year was that no one's going to buy premium smartphones anymore that everyone's kind of comfortable buying a $100 phone all of a sudden and so there was kind of a lot of news about how Apple was going to be bearing the brunt of this backlash where people aren't going to be buying high-end phones anymore so that a year later almost that doesn't appear to be have any of that has been true another thing um related to supply chain orders the further off ones suppliers that that Supply a lot of companies uh one of them is gun which I believe don't they make the plastic lenses for everybody in in the smartphone industry basically I'm I'm not sure I I believe that's the case um so they Supply kind of everybody and remember I did a series of Articles starting kind of last year a year ago where uh kind of the Japanese equivalent to the Wall Street Journal the Niki published kind of strategically timed articles without a by line that came out and said oh the supplier chain looks really bad for apple and a couple of the things that they wrote um some of these reports were saying that Apple cut their supplies by 30% and it's it's very difficult to look at the supply chain and know what's happening because Apple has multiple suppliers and some of these suppliers that that have some you know real impact that they're reporting you can't specifically tell if they're talking about supplies being lower because Apple's ordering less or because Apple's getting from somewhere else or because their other companies that they Supply are dropping their forecast so it's it's very easy to write about things and come up with a convincing story but that isn't really supported any sort of solid truth and so in amidst all of these articles we've been publishing recently talking about iPhone 7 being very positive launch and at this point you know the the strongest competitor to iPhone 7 in terms of premium phones and larger phones is Samsung and Samsung is right now going through one of the biggest crisis we've ever seen in the smartphone industry I mean it's really bad they've stopped production of their phones they a couple times changed production to begin supplying people who already had an effective phone and this is across millions of units and now they've canceled the thing outright so this is like a huge Interruption for Apple's one of Apple's biggest competitors and really the only other thing you can talk about is Google's pixel but Google's pixel is limited to one carrier in the US it's not that it only works on Verizon but you can only buy it through Verizon so if you want if you have a or or buy it directly through Google you know you can have a a plan on T-Mobile that you bring over your pixel and they will let you use it but they won't give you the same plan you know this preferred plan so it is it is a very pretty severe restriction to be on one carrier in the United States at this point and Google has now relaxed all of the things that it said were bad about Apple's iPhone in terms of having one company control how things are done and updates and software and things like that so Google is now doing a straight up iPhone but it's not feature competitive with the iPhone and Google doesn't have nearly the reach that people think that they do mean none of their the the most popular Nexus phone ever was a Nexus 5 and it did not sell in huge quantities I believe it sold like 5 or 6 million so this is you know this is a very small thing that gets a lot of press but Apple's biggest competitor is you know they got a a full face knockout and iPhone 7 has been well received even before that so you know the roads are kind of paved for Apple it's kind of Ideal circumstances and we're hearing from Clear uh suppliers that they're very confident going into the future and all of a sudden here's a a n story published um ironically yesterday at 420 but uh it was published uh I saw it on Barons and they just made sort of negative sounding comments about uh how Taiwanese device uh makers were under pressure and that Apple suppliers are the main culprits I quoted a analy here is saying that iPhone sales could turn out to be slightly better than the extremely pessimistic view 3 months ago but saying that Flagship smartphones are in a downtrend the orders for the supply chain are quite conservative compared with a year ago so grain of salt we'll see if how accurate that is in the future because I've now seen two previous reports that I reported on from this from this news site that were clearly wrong I mean you could argue about whether it's right or right when they did the report but in afterward it's like clearly what they predicted didn't Happ well last year you reported on you reported this at the beginning of the year in January yeah a similar story that was talking about criticizing the iPhone 6s and its Supply right the rumor was that Supply Cuts were going to damage the iPhone and that sales would drop by about you know the reduced output would drop by about 30% and that was supposed to have happened in January or March of this year and it it had no real relevance on overall iPhone demand or unit sales for either of those quarters and it if it had had any relevance at all it pertained only to internal inventory adjustments right yeah there's so many things that are going on it's like it's like looking at somebody on a roller coaster and saying oh they're up now they're down now they're up that doesn't really tell you what how they're going to end up at the end of the course they're going to end up at the station you know they're going to end up where they got off but on the way there they're going up and down and around and you know you can report on all those things but it's it's immaterial if you're really concerned about where they're where they're ending up and the media loves to do that kind of stuff because there's so much Dr involved in it but particularly here when you're talking about like like the the one that you're referencing when you're talking about when when you go out and report that sales are going to drop by a half which is they said in the the earlier the I believe it was like two years ago and then later they said uh orders are going to be dropping by 30% that could be the case they could it could be that Apple's inventory is going up and down and and so at one point they're asking for a third less of a supply than they were previously but that doesn't really tell you very much and the problem is it gets interpreted by people who want to read it a specific way and they came out saying that iPhones are going to be dropping by 30% you know that apple is going to be making and selling 30% fewer iPhones which of course never happened people ought to learn that the supply chain production volume rumors for iPhones are worthless right yeah yeah we've seen that over and over and over again and and yet they keep coming out and we keep having analysts drop news right when they want something to happen that's I mean it's not an accident why they're doing it but it is frustrating to see people pushing out headlines that are not true or even sometimes they're they're factually true but they're presented in a way that's either intentionally false or walking the user to a the reader to a false conclusion you know I I can't believe I'm saying this you know we we're Apple Insider we talk about rumors and we cover these things but really no no one should pay attention to these rumors well there's different kinds of rumors but specifically the supply chain rumors when you're talking about how many things are getting built that's there's a lot of other rumors that we have written about some of which are things like patents you know there's features that get patented that maybe Apple's going to use it maybe they're not and we've seen examples of both but it's kind of a subject of interest to readers I think to see what's being researched and what's being documented in patents because that get does give you an indication of a lot of the work that goes on that you don't necessarily see sometimes you don't necessarily see it right away sometimes it takes a while to become a product um and sometimes it's just there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't ever result in a product but it's still interesting I mean now before we move on to product and and those kinds of rumors that we published a report saying that supply chain reports there we go again claimed that Apple will gain market share in 2016 and 2017 that the smartphone market will expand about 7% uh up to 16% with next year's phone so do we believe this how how are we supposed to take this well it it is interesting in the face of previous sort of consensus even at the beginning of this year was that smartphones were just not only reaching a plateau but were tumbling downhill and particularly high-end smartphones and people are just going to stop using them and I didn't see any factual basis for that when they were saying it and I was refuting it saying that this isn't really does not appear to be uh solidly based it appears to be people saying this because Apple has full control of the high-end so of course you're going to say the high end doesn't matter and we haven't seen any evidence of that we haven't seen people deciding that they don't no longer want to have a smartphone and really you know they talk about smartphones going away or or being commoditized down into nothing but smartphones are a combination of a whole lot of things that we used to carry you know a lot of us carried a PDA we frequently carried cameras and had a phone and a music player and a lot of other devices that you know we didn't carry all the time but are now done on your phone and it even replaces a lot of time that you would spend on your computer a decade or so ago so smartphones are a combination of things and a very convenient package and they're gaining features they're not we're not going to distill them down to a simpler thing and phones aren't primarily about being phones they're mobile computers that we call smartphones but most of what we do today is Computing functions and using a network and it's not primarily for voice calls we're using data calls I mean voice calls are now data calls but um a lot of what we're doing is messaging and FaceTime style messaging and look at all the work that Apple's put into iMessage to to make that a more engaging platform so it's sticky so people stick with iPhones so a lot of the predictions that people are making are just clearly just way off base and they're the reason that they're predicting those things is not because the facts sort of support that it's because that's what they want to have happen the same thing as you know IDC when they come out and say oh it looks like people are really trending towards two inone notebooks that look exactly like a Microsoft Surface and it's like well we kind of understand why you're issue that press release it's not because there's really evidence that people are buying a bunch of services it's because you found a data point that you can turn into a story to say two in one sales are going up but you know that's not actually the where the trajectory of the market is going we're not rushing to Microsoft store to buy their product that this is the pr that's trying to make that happen so there's a difference between rumors and rumors now you're talking about devices and patents and how we can sort of see that patents even though a particular invention may not make it into a product they sort of show us the area that Apple's focusing on and where they're putting their attention into innovating sometimes they also acquire interesting things for example we we've talked a lot about the rumor of a MacBook with a uh a touch capacitive uh function row right right recently they purchased a company I think based in Australia who makes a keyboard with eink keys right did you see that I saw the reports of it I don't I don't know if that was actually true that they had acquired them okay well the report that I read and I'm just pulling it up right now I saw there was a rumor about them talking about being acquired by Apple or in talks and then uh Telegraph UK published an article I think today or last night saying that uh Tim Cook who's traveling in China right now visited these developers okay but it's not clear if that's accurate or not I asked Apple about it but I haven't heard back okay and they don't always say when when they've acquired something but they don't always respond right away either yes you don't necessarily see that technology released just as it exists just as it was um that what you do is is is you you wait a generation of phone and you see that they incorporate it in a different way that they take some base underlying technology and reuse that in a new and interesting way that wasn't there before yeah you know the way that I think about this is going way back to the acquisition of touchworks you remember this you know touchworks years ago they made a keyboard that replaced a G4 powerbooks keyboard and it had a little ribbon cable that went off to the side and plugged it to the USB and it was a touch capactive keyboard that you could do multi-touch on on your laptop and this this thing became what powers the touchcreen in the iPhone and people who saw this didn't realize that okay if you take this solid thing that's meant for a laptop and repurpose it and put it behind a screen and make it transparent which is a lot of work right yeah that you suddenly get a pocket computer that's touchcreen but Apple did I think they were capacitive you know capacitive technology was there before but what was missing was a lot of the analysis in terms of when you put your finger on the screen it's not like a stylus where you where you could triangulate the specific point where the stylus was touching um when you touch a a screen with your finger you're either hitting it with the whole pad so you're you're hitting a whole area and also when you do gestures when you swipe or you a variety of things that you can smear your finger around the screen it's really hard to for a computer to know what you're trying to do and it has to be done really quickly and it has to be done accurately and and predictably or it doesn't feel right and so I think a lot of the work I don't know if they actually acquired that what touch works that company or I think they kind of Aqua hired the people they bought they they bought touchworks and bought the IP and and acquired the people as well yeah some control over the technology but anyway that the technology that they were acquiring wasn't necessarily capacity to touch screens but it was the gestures of how to translate sloppy human fingers with you know um kind of a design language of how it's going to work well and it was also the the multiple fingers at a time kind of thing to be able to handle touch typing was a was a feat that had not been done before that's why Android for many years didn't do that because they were afraid of they knew it was patented technology and then after a while it got to the point where you know Samsung was getting away with being able to do whatever they wanted to do and the courts were just not responding for so many years it took them years to get the to go to court and then Apple brought all these Pat and the court said oh we can only hear about four of those and we're going to allow Samsung to go out and buy patents so that it's an equal fight so that you both look like you're infringing technology so it's just such a clown show in the courts that they basically gave Apple's technology to everybody else to to to have that that's when Google really embraced it an Android and made Android much more like the iPhone than it was originally originally it had like a little track ball on it and a keyboard yeah was a Blackberry but it wasn't just a shift in hey we should copy Apple not Blackberry it was a shift in I think we can just steal their technology because nothing's going to happen and we're giving it away so they can't sue us for money we're we're seeing sort of the uh this play out in the courts now right there's a there's Samsung and Apple before The Supreme Court and the the courts expected to hand down a decision sometime in in June of next year but it it looks as if the court is focusing around the issue of creating and instating rules to adjudicate future litigation they're they're a little less concerned in how designed patent laws impact the case even though that's what this case has been about Samsung is is arguing that damage should damages should be assigned based on just the part or portion of profits that can be attributed to the infringing part so they're saying that the the design of the phone is the only thing that should be assessed for the damages and it shouldn't be the against to the whole phone and the opposite I mean the kind of things that they're arguing was you know these were so these cases were so old I believe it was from 2011 I mean that's like 5 years old now it's kind of ancient stuff I mean one of them was a swipe unlock which Apple's not even using anymore on iOS 10 but the fact that my that Samsung very clearly copied it and they documented that they were copying it because it worked better than what they were trying to do on their own their whole argument that they didn't copy was clearly not true and so now they have to say oh well sure we copied it but shouldn't be able to first of all they first of all they wanted to stop any sales ban on on ongoing phones until they were they didn't matter anymore and they successfully basically didn't they successfully ran around wasting time until the injunctions wouldn't matter anymore so they got they did that successfully and now they're saying well we shouldn't even have to pay for lost profits because this was one feature on the phone and it wasn't the only reason people bought her copy got phones and you know the fact that Apple can only bring like four or five patents at a time means that it's just impossible to sue a company like Samsung who's just stealing dozens and dozens and dozens of your of everything every feature on your phone and then they say oh well you only won one of these after four or five years and it doesn't represent the whole phone I mean it's just such a a bizarre clown show that this is still going on but yeah that's where they're at right now because it is a big and conversely Samsung did the opposite so Samsung has some technology that they have patents on related to uh mobile technology or mobile wireless and they licensed it to in infinion which is now part of Intel Apple bought ships from that company for the mobile broadband up to iPhone 4 something like that 4S uh when they switched over to Qualcomm and Samsung was suing for for patents that that already licensed to the company that sold the chips to Apple so it was already technology that they didn't yeah there was no infringement there and they were trying to create this thing where how some somehow Apple was responsible for technology that was already licensed in the products that they were buying these off the-shelf components and Samsung was saying you know basically we want to apply this significant uh penalty that's much more than the cost of the chip was and so they're they're extremely hypocritical in what they're arguing I mean they're just they're just arguing any Direction they possibly can yeah and as I'm looking at this it it seems like they're arguing any way they can that basically they should pay less that that even if they still have to pay that they should pay a fraction of what's been assessed for them so far the interesting thing is that if you read the transcripts that the justices are not specifically focused on the details of this case as much as what preceden should be for the future what jury instructions should be because they're they're trying to come up with a way that they don't have to hear this kind of case again that when it comes up to the courts again that a juror is going to understand how to determine what's going on properly and they're struggling with this right they're you know in in the transcripts the justices are trying to because it's a design-based case they're they're talking about instead of phones they're talking about about you know a distinctive designed product like the Volkswagen Beetle so they're saying if the beetle was a stroke of Genius a design that was done on from from pen to completion in 3 days should they only be assessed 3 days worth of Damages for infringing or or should it be you know more than that because the engine took 100,000 days and it's an interesting question that they're reaching at right what is what is attributable to the the successful product is it the design and if it is the design should just charge for that one component or is it the total thing because Samsung is kind of like the and they come in and Apple's of course not the first company they've done this to they did it to Panasonic they did it to I mean everyone in the industry they've come in and just swarmed with a copycat product and stolen their stuff and disregarded patents and they have a lot of support at home in the government because they are such a huge it's not like a big company it's like a network of companies and there's a tremendous amount of um corruption between them and the government well they're so large that it's it's a s Korean version of too big to fail right they they have all of their heavy industry tied up with Samsung they're they're not just a maker of phones and appliances and white goods that we see here in the US they also make automobiles they make military equipment they make pretty much everything and so if you damage that company first of all you're damaging cultural honor right because it's so closely tied and associated with with being so large there it's it's a national interest and you're you're also stand to harm the whole South D Samsung and Samsung is more than just making products too they I think they sell insurance and you it's just they just do everything and specifically I mean smartphones were back in 2 between like 2010 when they started copying to around 2014 uh smartphones were a big part of Samsung's profit Center and increasingly that's I mean iPhone 6 did the most damage more than any lawsuits but and then also there's just kind of like this negging competition from China to where Samsung used to sell quite a bit to China and now it's like there's just no market for it because there's there's plenty of commodity phones that you can get for cheaper whereas Apple had a very different product and sold it very differently in China and it was you know Apple Apple only sells premium phones Samsung sell a lot of things and you know part of that is the premium phones where they get the most money but to have a decrease in the premium phones tremendous decrease from iPhone 6 that continued for 3 years now and then to be hit with the Note 7 thing even before the Note 7 blew up uh there was a pretty significant problem happening within profitability in phones because they give away so much to sell a phone and their their average selling price are going down so a lot of Samsung's profitability actually comes outside of phones it comes from selling parts to other phone makers and from selling displays and a variety of other things that are doing better than smartphones have so I don't think the government is like backing up the South Korean government is backing up Samsung's smartphones as much as they are just allowing the company to do kind of whatever it wants to do and the same thing happens in China where um intellectual property doesn't really have the same there's not the same culture of protecting that but that's now happening in the United States where you know intellectual property has always been kind of a big part of the United States ability to be a world leader and to stay a world leader because we're developing technology and building into products and there's protection under law so somebody else can't just come out and copy it and there are some problems with that I mean if you look at you know drug companies and stuff it's very difficult to come up with a new drug it's very expensive and then once they do you have this life-saving drug that solves a problem that nobody else knows how to do and they want to charge money for it and so people look at that and like oh that's an ethical dilemma we should allow all these other companies to copy this drug that they spent so much money working on but what what happens is that there are tons of research and tons of work on making new drugs let's continue the example that are not successful right they they pour huge amounts of into money into things that don't go anywhere and so the one time they do have something that works they have to recover cost not just for the um the one that's successful but also to have paid for all of the work that was that was essentially useless not only subsidize their things that didn't work out like you're talking about they also need to have money left over to be able to come up with the next new drug to keep the thing going so Apple is very Apple's business model is very much like a drug company in terms of that they're constantly doing research some of it doesn't pan out but they're very focused in the research that they're doing to come up with new products in the future that people are going to want to buy and other companies in the tech industry particularly are like uh pill Pharm or pill makers that are looking at what Apple does and trying to just copy it and there's there's some efforts to do kind of innovative things but a lot of what we've seen outside of apple has not been successful for years and years and years so it's like things like you know they're making such a big deal about 3D screens on cell phones a few years ago and then it was curv screens everybody needed a curve screen I didn't really understand why that was important but they convinced every in the media to be talking about curve screens all these they have curve screens and when is Apple going to come out with a curve screen it's like what is the benefit so you can lay it down and it doesn't lay flat on the table I don't get it but there's there's so many examples of that and and right now there's the um the VR thing which I think VR is going to be interesting at some point but right now I don't I think it's kind of like 3D television where it's kind of thing where you put on glasses and it's kind of cool for 15 minutes and then you want to not do it anymore that's my experience with 3D television and everyone has come over to my house it's like hey check out these 3D glasses and they're like 15 minutes it's like okay let's let's just watch it regular the the issue with the television right and this is something I I go to CES every year and at CES you always see all the new televisions and what happens is television used to be a product that you know they they made a new one every year but the new one every year was largely a lot like the one from the previous year right when we had two televisions analog TV before we had the HDTV switch over a TV was pretty much a TV he had fancy features you had like the Trin on and like the sometimes they were bigger yeah sometimes they were smaller they were Trinitron there was differentiation but largely you bought a TV you kept it for 10 years or more right in in those days you bought a television you kept it until it broke at least yeah so there's something tremendously better and there wasn't tremendously better things coming out so yeah and and there frequently wasn't anything tremendously better and and so the the life cycle of buying a TV was that you bought one and kept it for a substantial amount of time and that if you bought a new one you bought it because your old one broke and it wasn't cost-effective to repair or because you wanted something significantly larger you wanted these new features but it wasn't uh every you know there was not a buying cycle where everyone went out and bought a fresh new TV every year or every two years the way people buy phones right and so at CES the push has been TV manufacturers trying to figure out a model where they can get people to throw out their TV every couple years and buy a fresh new one and so it was um first it was everyone moving from 720p to 1080p then it was thin screen frames then it was 3D TV then it was the refresh rate moving from 60 HZ to 120 HZ or even 240 Herz right and then it was everyone trying to move to curv screens and 4K and next next year it's going to be 8K probably right they're they're keep chasing what's it going to take to get people to buy TVs more frequently yeah I mean I think the the pace of technology and the productization of things because the market is much larger now um I think the pace is faster I don't know how much difference there is in how long people keep their televisions I mean do you buy a television every year hell no I haven't bought a television I mean I know television isn't Central to my existence but I haven't bought a television since 2010 now Dan I want to talk to you a little bit about some uh some patents and things about the 17 iPhone so Mikey wrote a story on our site about Apple patenting a method for embedding light sensors directly into device displays and what he's suggesting is that embedding light sensors directly into the display is a step towards getting rid of the chin and forehead bezel yeah we talked about that last week too we we did although he wrote about the patent this week this is just one of more thing in on the march to getting a phone that doesn't have the forehead bezel right um I don't I don't I'm not pulling up the article immediately in my head but was it talking about integrating a camera or a fingerprint sensor or kind of both this one is about light generating layers that are a part of the substrate of the display and by having light sensors integrated directly into the display they can sense proximity sense the the light Ambience around it and have it be built in so you don't have to have the chin and forehead separately um they're also talking about the idea that you could have a TFT layer in which sensors are embedded directly into the TFT layer of the screen uh but basically in in any scenario within the patent and of course patents address a couple scenarios more because they want to try and cover as widely as possible uh the the sensors are placed within the display itself not above it as it is the case currently in the iPhone and the iPad and Mac yeah that's interesting they still have a earpiece you're going to have to put somewhere that is true there's some um this is all about sensors and it doesn't mention anything about the earpiece there is some interesting ideas about you know without having any specialized knowledge of how any of this works on a really low level it's very easy to say oh you could take the fingerprint sensor and put it into the display and the camera also and what's sort of interesting I mean part of that is like when I first read about integrating basically camera sensors within the display part of sensor it's kind of one of those things where you're like oh I wouldn't have thought to do that but that's kind of an interesting idea wonder how that actually work and in actual uh production um but another example that we've already seeing is on the camera within the camera there's Focus pixels so it's it's pixels that instead of um creating an image they are helping to focus what the camera is interpreting and seeing so there's a lot of a lot of technical directions that can happen that aren't necessarily easy to predict and it's not like a an vious thing of we have to get this we have to get this we have to get this and now we're done to where we don't have a chin and vessel could also be that the the phone starts taking on a different shape where we don't use it the same way um one sort of example of that is not exactly changing the shape of the phone but the idea of having a watch where you get some of your most important things with a glance of your wrist instead of pulling out a phone and putting it up to your ear or looking at it and then also so with coming with airpods being able to sort of talk and interact with a phone even if you're not looking at it so in addition to the changing of the phone itself it may be that the role of the phone is changing where it's becoming almost like a server in the background that you stow away on your person somewhere and then you you know you have a conversation with Siri or a conversation with whoever you're talking to and um you're looking at status reports some things on your wrist that you don't have to fully pull out your phone to check on so there's a whole lot of kind of interesting directions that phone is going in right now one of the other patents that Mikey wrote about is the idea of a super resolution multi-sensor camera using Cube prisms and the diagram that I'm looking at is that like the Periscope kind of idea where it splits up the it is the Periscope idea it's it's exactly the Periscope where what they've got is um is is is what you say a periscope but because there are now more sides as opposed to just focusing on a sensor placed at the end you can add the additional sensor coverage on the sides of the thing as well and their goal is to capture more information for the camera in the same amount of physical space yeah that's an interesting idea and then it's also kind of I saw a previous one where they were showing sort of a similar arrangement to basically create a tunnel of mirrors so that you could have um more larger longer optics for shaping the light before it hits the sensor because there's there's only so many things you can do in a very slim assortment of lens covers in a phone that's that thin right and photography is based upon light so yeah so if you can bend around a corner and send it down the hallway and that's an interesting idea as well and also this the idea of having multiple sensors we already seeing that with the iPhone 7 plus having two cameras that kind of work in conjunction with each other but having having even more more sensors that do specific things there's a bunch of Android phones most of the Android phones that I've seen that that use two camera sensors one is color and the other is high resolution black and white and the idea is to that uh the luminance information the the structure the black and white detail is more important than the resolution of color because color you know it's kind of like taking a a really sharp so so they'll capture all the detail information with black and white and then use the color map from the the color camera to colorize the black and white photo that's kind of the idea I think um I haven't I haven't seen the actual results of it and it sounded like it wasn't as good of a thing I mean in in practice but it's you know like an interesting idea and of course there's a lot of other ways you could uh use multiple cameras to do interesting things there's that um it's a low resolution I believe an IR camera that you can plug into your phone and take heat map pictures of things and so the resolution isn't very high but it's a different kind of that's the FL one what's that yeah that's called the Fleer one fli1 yeah yeah I have one of those and and what they're doing is is they capture the infrared information with the cameras on its device and then overlay that on top of the camera information used from the the camera that's built into the phone yeah so if you had multiple sensors looking at different parts of the spectrum and putting them together you could do some really cool stuff now last week you and I talked about the idea of the phone being made out of ceramic zerone right and I was really hot on the idea I thought it sounded like a great thing and and in the interviewing week I've had a thought and I want to to hear you tell me I mean I I was thinking about this and I was thinking about how much Apple's invested in aluminum right they have tons and tons and tons of CNC machines going turning out iPhone enclosures by the hour and to change away from that to a what is a slower process to make the the ceramic cases doesn't make as much sense to me as it did last week yeah that would be a huge shift and and with with what benefit I mean the most obvious detriment is that it's taking longer and it's heavier um on the watch it sort of is interesting and sort of makes sense to say here's a you know a high performance kind of product for for you to wear on your wrist it's sort of luxurious but for a phone that everyone's carrying a phone a mass market phone seems to make less sense to me I could see other wearables and I could see even you know having like part you know perhaps a high-end phone I think Apple's sort of experimenting with the idea of luxury Electronics because especially when they first came out with the iPhone 6 and there was the six and the 6 Plus and the six plus was selling I think it was around 10% of sales it was a a minority purchase and with the success it was bigger and now with a six with a seven and the seven plus I think it's close to tide I mean I saw some information it looked like it was I mean the 7s plus is a real big draw I mean in large part because of the camera um but Apple could um in the future I don't know if it's going to be next year but I mean they could come out with a there was sort of a rumor about a pro phone Pro you know um but if there's a market for that you could sell a higher-end device that had even more you know capabilities that cost more because it's more difficult to make and so I could see using exotic materials on something like that but for for the phone that they're making 70 million of in certain quarters that would be a tall order to jump to some exotic material just kind of for breaking rates it would have to be some offer some huge uh leap over what aluminum is doing right now and and and just you know having built up all that infrastructure and all of that equipment in order to make this manufacturing seems like it doesn't make sense to to discard it quickly right they they are probably the biggest CNC Machining user on the planet it's I'm just I'm having a harder time figuring out how they would go to the longer process that doesn't really take advantage of that infrastructure they built yeah they have been installing billions of dollars worth of equipment in in their suppliers I kind of wish they'd get back to liquid metal a lot of the contracts that's that's what it involves is Apple is buying robots and devices for them so they're like helping them with the capital cost of building out production capacity cuz it's difficult and dangerous to just rely on other suppliers to build things because if somebody else comes up and wants you know a ton of around for something then that impacts your costs but if you're building your parts on your own then you have much more control over the supply I I need to look at the liquid metal I I remember that they purchased the rights to use Liquid Metal we haven't really seen a whole lot come to fruition from that but I I like to think that it still holds promise my other idea that we're talking about materials Apple's been working with a lot of different materials especially with the watch and it's kind of you know it's what are they doing all that for I think part of it is sort of creating a lure around the watch but could also be that they're they're monetizing uh the research into materials for other things that they plan to build in the future like say cars you know using a lot of the same materials so having the ability to machine and develop different um different kinds of Parts uh that's that's kind of a core thing you need to know how to do and Apple's been spending many years figuring how to do this kind of stuff it's not like they just come up with a design and send it to Taiwan to get mass produced which is you know that's basically what Blackberry did for their tablet it's what Amazon did they reused the Blackberry it's what um Google and Microsoft have been doing for their stuff so they don't really on their own have a lot of of Material Science where Apple does and they've been you they've been whittling out titanium and aluminum MacBooks since before they were called MacBooks and the tremendous volumes of iPods that were built using kind of innovative new ways to to build cases and install electronics and things and I think Apple watch I've written before about Apple watch is kind of a continuation of the iPod being the sort of small device sort of practical application for a computer that you carry along with you and of course with the iPhone and iPads and new Macs the the Mac Pro that they haven't done anything with for several years now they originally worked with Automotive suppliers to build that like because people who built parts for car makers knew how to build the kind of case that they wanted to build well Dan let's go ahead and wrap this up for our listeners is there anything else we should discuss I can't think of anything all right well we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the apple and seter podcast uh Dan where can people find you on the internet I'm writing an apple Insider and I tweet from Daniel Aaron e r n and I'm also uh doing the Apple Insider official Instagram you can check us out there excellent well if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and and you found that you took advantage of the deals and found that they were useful please consider leaving this a positive review on iTunes we do appreciate it and thank you for listening this far all the way through uh if if I do my homework on liquid metal and Dan starts posting at ruly drafted. comom we'll tell you all about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast C\n"