In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure all capacity for themselves.

Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it was quite successful at opening up the market and enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs.

That all said, I suspect the original intent was to fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC in order to soak up idle capacity. But plans changed along the way (for likely performance reasons) and added to the IFS's poor perception.

Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung - perhaps only cheaper prices and even then it's unproven to fab any non-Intel chips. So the only way to keep it afloat is by continuing to fab Intel's own designs, until 18A node becomes viable/ready.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42006992

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Fundamentally Apple wants to leverage their supply chain to maximize shared parts between the Pro and base iPhones. Lack of hardware innovations makes it hard to create product differentiation.

Heck, even the A18 Pro chip seems a marginal upgrade over the base A18 chip: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/apples-a18-chip-desi...

Just as Standard Oil used their position to force railroads and other distributors to only carry their oil and not of their competitors', the same case here with Google.

Arguably all these antitrust cases, while better late than never, are at least a decade late. If it was filed in the early 2010s, then possibly there could've been viable competitors to Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Meta. But now these tech titans all have unassailable positions.

I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.

Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40926826

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

As an end user this sounds appealing since it allows to opt in or out.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40442367

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Easy to forget that Microsoft has had 5 years since the release of Qualcomm SQ1-powered Surface Pro X back in 2019. Sure these Nuvia-built cores are much superior but Windows on ARM remains a WIP at best.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40423331

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Could be extrapolating this incident too much but it feels it encapsulates the transformation of Apple from this quirky, unconventional upstart into a monopolistic leviathan the past 2 decades. There's also a sense of hubris at suggesting your single electronic device can replace all those creative tools.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298472

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40288972

Points: 19

# Comments: 1

The most interesting aspect of the M4 is simply it's debuting on the iPad lineup, whereas historically it's always been on the iPhone (for A-series) and Macbook (for M-series). Makes sense given low expected yielded for the newest node for one of Apple's lower volume products.

For the curious, the original TSMC N3 node had a lot of issues plus was very costly so makes sense to move away from it: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...

On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.