As a matter of fact, from the M11, FiiO has already announced the plan of FiiO M11, M11Pro, M15 and M15Pro. The reason is that for niche products such as players, the development investment of an Android processor platform is too high, you must use several models of sales to recover the investment (roughly estimate the investment of R&D of several models is nearly ten million, among which the processor platform accounts for the largest proportion). The M11Pro is kind of an accident which is indeed encouraged by our fans.
The reason why the M15Pro was canceled is because the Pro version generally does some minor upgrades on the standard version. However, the appearance style and designs will not have major adjustments.
Earlier we had 2 plans for the M15Pro. One was to use oxygen-free copper electroplating on the surface of the M15, and enhance part of the internal capacitance and resistance to higher-precision and higher-performance specifications. However, changes of the M15Pro based on this plan will be minor. If we name it as "Pro", we would be very uneasy.
The other plan was to change the analog amplification part to a THX circuit on the basis of the M15. Similar to the relationship between the M11 and the M11Pro. But the M11Pro chose the THX AAA 78 scheme. So, the M15Pro must choose the THX AAA 788 scheme. Otherwise, it can not surpass the M11Pro on analog parts. What is more, if using the THX AAA 78 scheme, the M15Pro would even be weaker than the M15 in terms of some key performance indicators like the driven capacity.
However, if using the THX AAA 788 which is designed by THX Technology for desktop HiFi devices, the driven capacity, power consumption, heat generation, volume and other aspects of the M15Pro would be much larger than the M15. In that case, the size of the M15Pro will increase a lot, which is almost a totally new player. Eventually, we canceled the M15Pro plan.
It is very difficult for FiiO to do this. I really hope users can understand this. Take a look at processors used in Chinese and foreign players so that you will get to know more about the truth. If we compare the player industry with mobile phone industry, that would be unreasonable. After all, there are countable mobile phone manufacturers, each with an annual income of tens of billions and thousands of engineers. The sales of a certain model nearly equals to dozens of times the sales of the player industry combined.
In addition, the current high-performance processors are only Qualcomm, Samsung, MTK, Huawei Kirin and Apple. Apple and Huawei Kirin are not open to others, and the IIS audio output port of MTK does not support DSD and 192K/24B. So only Qualcomm and Samsung left. And purchasing processors from Qualcomm and Samsung is not that difficult, including Qualcomm's 865 and 855, Samsung's 980 and so on.
However, it is useless only with the processor. Because it needs the development documents, development kits, various drivers, kernel programs and so on provided by the manufacturer. Otherwise, processors make no sense.
FiiO is lucky to win supports from Samsung and its agents to develop the processor. They have also opened up many low-level code permissions and provided a lot of free technical support, so that we can complete the development. But there are shortcomings. A few companies use Samsung's processor. The EXYNOS7872 SoC is only used by FiiO and another manufacturer, Meizu, in China. Therefore, , technical capability for Samsung semiconductor is relatively weak here. This also causes some lingering problems, for example, non support of apple music. And this needs to start with the underlying code.
And for Qualcomm chips, except for big companies and agencies (design companies), we are unable to get the underlying code base currently. This means all function development and subsequent upgrades must rely heavily on agents. What's more painful is that every new feature or bug fix involving the underlying code needs to be paid, and it's not cheap.
In addition, Qualcomm has only opened up parts of their models for HiFi player industry and other niche industries. Not all of its processor chips are open for sales and providing technical support. Therefore, we can see that in Chinese player industry, processors from Qualcomm is only limited in 4XX series. (excl. those haven't been started mass producing.)
There are benefits as well. Most of the companies are using processors of Qualcomm, which means broad accesses to technical support. As long as you are willing to pay, it is relatively easy to get what you want.