Apple iPhone 12 - A Learning & Development Masterclass

On the 13th October 2020 Apple announced its brand new iPhone. An annual event where Apple fans, like me, drool at the latest tech offerings that the trillion dollar company has to offer.

My interest in these events have become more than just due to the cool hardware that Apple releases though. They are a Learning & Development (L&D) Masterclass

You see Apple is the smartest company I have ever seen in L&D, and specifically how it translates those complex technological advances they pack into their iPhones, iPad and Macs into tangible, accessible and exciting stories that everybody can understand and ultimately to buy their products. I mean how many shops have people camping outside their stores for days in advance just to get the latest product on launch day?

This year was an absolute gem of a presentation by Apple. Let me explain.

The iPhone 12 this year launched with the headlines “Thinner, Smaller, Lighter” and “11 Trillion operations per second”

But what do these headlines tell us?

Well, this phone is much thinner than its predecessor, 11% thinner to be precise, it’s 15% smaller too and 16% lighter. And it is faster than the average human brain can ever imagine.

Sold. 

That’s it.

I’m in and I want one.

But the real story is way more complex than this. The technological advances that Apple and their teams have made in order to make this iPhone 12 is truly astonishing.

If I were to tell you the detail of how Apple have made their iPhone able to process 11 Trillion operations per second it would go something like this....(get ready for mind blowing explanation).........

The world’s first consumer phone powered by 5nm chip

The "five nanometre process" involved refers to the fact that the chip's transistors have been shrunk down - the tiny on-off switches are now only about 25 atoms wide - allowing billions more to be packed in.

The machine required to make these chips cost around ￡92,000,000 each.

But there is only one company making them. And they are still more cost-effective than alternative options, in part because of a low defect rate.

What this company are doing is akin to hitting a stamp on the surface of Mars with a paper aeroplane

They take a molten droplet of tin and fire a high-power industrial laser onto it, which basically vaporises it and creates a plasma.

And that plasma shines UV light.

This all happens 50,000 times a second - so 50,000 droplets get hit - which creates enough light to capture with a series of mirrors - the flattest in the world.

A blueprint of the chip's design is encoded into the light by passing it through a mask and then shrinking it with lenses.

It then hits a light-sensitive coating on a silicon wafer, causing the chip's design to be "printed”

Does your head hurt yet?

Now if you understand all of the above then you’re a smarter human than I am.

Yet this is exactly what we do when we create really engaging L&D. We take these big complicated business strategies and we translate them into tangible, accessible learning for our people to consume. If we do our job well, then people get excited about what we do and really buy in to what is on offer.

In the case of Apple people buy their phones

In the case of L&D people buy in to our learning programmes and really enjoy their learning journey.

Apple is a great role model to L&D and I urge all fellow L&D professionals to look into authors like Carmine Gallo who capture the Apple Experience as a learning tool magnificently.

Written by Peter Boswell, Learning & Development Professional

Credit: BBC and Apple where I sourced all of this information from.