Teardown: Apple iPad Pro 2018

“While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China. In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 per cent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.” Tim Cook, CEO, Apple, 2 January 2019, Q4 Letter to Investors.

The third-generation iPad Pro, released last November, would have been one of the products that was on Tim Cook’s mind as he issued Apple’s first profit warning in 16 years. Its flagship tablet, the Pro starts in China at RMB6,499 in its 11-inch version (the specific subject of this teardown) and RMB8,099 in its 12.9-inch version. Or, in sterling, £769 and £969 respectively.

But given the warning, it is those Chinese prices that matter. Despite an emerging middle class, huge population and the Croesus-like wealth of its upper class, average disposable income is much lower than in the UK. In 2017, a typical family living in Shanghai, China’s richest city, had about $19,000 to play with; their UK counterparts had $34,000 (£27,300).

In China, Apple is a luxury brand and status symbol, ranking alongside Louis Vuitton and Tesla in its perceived affordability. That means the company has long been vulnerable to a slowdown there in consumer spending.

What has that meant for design? As Cook said, “challenges” were anticipated. It was more their degree than their arrival that sparked his comments. The latest Pro shows signs that Apple had already started trying to control build costs and its bill of materials more aggressively.

At the same time, it is still taking steps to preserve a business model that owes much to upselling, particularly here the Apple Care maintenance package.

Before we dive deeper into that, here are the Pro’s main specifications. The 11-inch model has a 2,388×1,668px Retina display with a big 150Hz refresh rate. There are four woofer-and-tweeter speaker units. There is a 12MP rear camera and 7MP front camera, now with Face ID recognition. You can opt for between 64GB and 1TB of internal storage. The engine room comprises an eight-core in-house A12X Bionic CPU, an M12 motion coprocessor and integrated seven-core graphics.

With full support for peripherals such as the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, this is a powerful machine.

Back to those cost-down design decisions.

There have been a couple of quibbles for Apple fans. The battery is actually a little smaller than in the second-generation Pro (29.45Wh v 30.8Wh), though improvements in performance should compensate on battery life. Then, the iPad Pro has shifted from a Lightning connector to the widely used and non-proprietary USB-C.

Both those decisions will have reduced the cost load, albeit more in nip-and-tuck than slash-and-burn fashion. The iFixit teardown team also noted that Apple has opted for a modular USB-C port where the previous Lightning port was soldered to the logic board. An off-the-shelf versus build decision, possibly?

The teardown then found that the battery is easier to remove, with more tabs to lever it free. A nod from Apple to the fact that many owners are already replacing cells rather than products. Keep your core customers happy and they will trade up… eventually.

“It looks like Apple is trying to change, but the voice on the other shoulder was a little louder than the repairability angel this time around,” iFixit concludes. Its main reason for equivocating is that much of the Pro is held in place by gobbets of repair-repelling adhesive. As noted, Apple Care is a nice little earner and while the company seems to have made some trade-offs, they only go so far.

One final cost issue on the Pro has to be innovation. When the first generation arrived in 2015, it promoted the concept of tablets that can extend into almost fully-functional laptops, responding to the Microsoft Surface. This third generation could never have been as striking, but there is still not that much new,  just mostly incremental improvements in performance and size – plus the inevitable ‘all-screen’ fascia, AR and Face ID (and even on that last addition, the dot projector/selfie/IR array is, in iFixit’s view, “the same basic hardware we’ve seen since iPhone X”).

However a question that arises is: “What else should Apple have sensibly done – or should any other player in the space?”

The 2008 global economic downturn came when the smartphone market was in its infancy and tablets were Toughbooks. Even during uncertainty, there was headroom for innovation in design. That is far less the case today.

It is, therefore, unlikely that Apple will be alone in making the tweaks and concessions that appear to have gone into this Pro – it’s not just in China but consumers everywhere are feeling the squeeze.

Key components: Apple iPad Pro

Exploded view

 1  Display

 2  Battery

 3  Motherboard

 4  Rear assembly

 5  Pencil

Motherboard

 6  NFC Controller, NXP Semiconductors

 7  Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module, Apple/USI

 8  Flash memory, Toshiba

 9  DRAM memory, Micron

 10  CPU/GPU/NPU, Apple

 11  Power controller, Texas Instruments

 12  Touchscreen controllers, Broadcom

“While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China. In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 per cent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.” Tim Cook, CEO, Apple, 2 January 2019, Q4 Letter to Investors.

The third-generation iPad Pro, released last November, would have been one of the products that was on Tim Cook’s mind as he issued Apple’s first profit warning in 16 years. Its flagship tablet, the Pro starts in China at RMB6,499 in its 11-inch version (the specific subject of this teardown) and RMB8,099 in its 12.9-inch version. Or, in sterling, £769 and £969 respectively.

But given the warning, it is those Chinese prices that matter. Despite an emerging middle class, huge population and the Croesus-like wealth of its upper class, average disposable income is much lower than in the UK. In 2017, a typical family living in Shanghai, China’s richest city, had about $19,000 to play with; their UK counterparts had $34,000 (£27,300).

In China, Apple is a luxury brand and status symbol, ranking alongside Louis Vuitton and Tesla in its perceived affordability. That means the company has long been vulnerable to a slowdown there in consumer spending.

What has that meant for design? As Cook said, “challenges” were anticipated. It was more their degree than their arrival that sparked his comments. The latest Pro shows signs that Apple had already started trying to control build costs and its bill of materials more aggressively.

At the same time, it is still taking steps to preserve a business model that owes much to upselling, particularly here the Apple Care maintenance package.

Before we dive deeper into that, here are the Pro’s main specifications. The 11-inch model has a 2,388×1,668px Retina display with a big 150Hz refresh rate. There are four woofer-and-tweeter speaker units. There is a 12MP rear camera and 7MP front camera, now with Face ID recognition. You can opt for between 64GB and 1TB of internal storage. The engine room comprises an eight-core in-house A12X Bionic CPU, an M12 motion coprocessor and integrated seven-core graphics.

With full support for peripherals such as the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, this is a powerful machine.

Back to those cost-down design decisions.

There have been a couple of quibbles for Apple fans. The battery is actually a little smaller than in the second-generation Pro (29.45Wh v 30.8Wh), though improvements in performance should compensate on battery life. Then, the iPad Pro has shifted from a Lightning connector to the widely used and non-proprietary USB-C.

Both those decisions will have reduced the cost load, albeit more in nip-and-tuck than slash-and-burn fashion. The iFixit teardown team also noted that Apple has opted for a modular USB-C port where the previous Lightning port was soldered to the logic board. An off-the-shelf versus build decision, possibly?

The teardown then found that the battery is easier to remove, with more tabs to lever it free. A nod from Apple to the fact that many owners are already replacing cells rather than products. Keep your core customers happy and they will trade up… eventually.

“It looks like Apple is trying to change, but the voice on the other shoulder was a little louder than the repairability angel this time around,” iFixit concludes. Its main reason for equivocating is that much of the Pro is held in place by gobbets of repair-repelling adhesive. As noted, Apple Care is a nice little earner and while the company seems to have made some trade-offs, they only go so far.

One final cost issue on the Pro has to be innovation. When the first generation arrived in 2015, it promoted the concept of tablets that can extend into almost fully-functional laptops, responding to the Microsoft Surface. This third generation could never have been as striking, but there is still not that much new,  just mostly incremental improvements in performance and size – plus the inevitable ‘all-screen’ fascia, AR and Face ID (and even on that last addition, the dot projector/selfie/IR array is, in iFixit’s view, “the same basic hardware we’ve seen since iPhone X”).

However a question that arises is: “What else should Apple have sensibly done – or should any other player in the space?”

The 2008 global economic downturn came when the smartphone market was in its infancy and tablets were Toughbooks. Even during uncertainty, there was headroom for innovation in design. That is far less the case today.

It is, therefore, unlikely that Apple will be alone in making the tweaks and concessions that appear to have gone into this Pro – it’s not just in China but consumers everywhere are feeling the squeeze.

Key components: Apple iPad Pro

Exploded view

 1  Display

 2  Battery

 3  Motherboard

 4  Rear assembly

 5  Pencil

Motherboard

 6  NFC Controller, NXP Semiconductors

 7  Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module, Apple/USI

 8  Flash memory, Toshiba

 9  DRAM memory, Micron

 10  CPU/GPU/NPU, Apple

 11  Power controller, Texas Instruments

 12  Touchscreen controllers, Broadcom

Paul Dempseyhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/02/teardown-apple-ipad-pro-2018/

Powered by WPeMatico