Conclusion

Apple's products are sometimes a great demonstration that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the company is well known for putting together standard components together and creating something revolutionary out of them. Therefore, it is of course impossible to judge the magnitude of the potential success of the 3G iPhone based on the above analysis alone. However, many important points can still be made.

First of all, Apple is in the unique position of combining short lead times with in-house application processor development. We believe this might allow the 3G iPhone to become the first OpenGL ES 2.0 mobile phone if our assumption that it uses the PowerVR SGX 520 (or 530, or …) is correct. There is a possibility that it is still based on the MBX Lite, or perhaps even on the same chip as the 2G iPhone, however this would make little sense given Apple’s capability to move quite fast indeed.

While this also allows Apple to possibly use more powerful or power efficient components for other subsystems such as Bluetooth, doing so much in-house may prevent them from releasing as many different models as other manufacturers who have the flexibility of using more different chips and form factors/operating systems at the same time. On the other hand, it is also necessary for other manufacturers to learn how to move as fast as possible and minimise the lead time between a chip’s tape-out and end-product availability.

It is important for other manufacturers to understand that diversity advantage as it will likely remain one of the key dynamics when going against Apple in the years to come. They thus shouldn't try to get away with only a single killer product in their line-up at a time: they need multiple ones (plus the obvious derivatives) to corner the market and slightly better suit everyone's specific requirements. For the best and for the worst, Apple simply doesn’t seem to have either the capabilities or the corporate culture required to achieve that.

In terms of end-user experience out of the box, we believe the benefits of 3G (and likely GPS) will be the most obvious, as well as overall improvements in battery life, especially in multimedia workloads and Bluetooth. Certainly the software equation should also be considered in great detail, but this is not the intent of this article, and neither would it truly be doable before the product’s final announcement. As we already mentioned, it will also be interesting to see if/how Apple initially exposes OpenGL ES 2.0 and what the performance is like. Certainly, this is the part we are ourselves most excited about.

In conclusion, we hope you enjoyed our analysis and we look forward to Steve Jobs’ keynote to see how many of our listed most likely possibilities are correct and what, if anything, we thought completely unlikely actually does happen. Even post-announcement, we hope this analysis will be helpful given that the specific components will not immediately be known and our analysis goes substantially beyond which specific chips are likely to be used.

Full disclosure: Neither the author nor any other staff member owns any stock or other financial instrument in any of the mentioned companies.
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