
Apple Goes Vertical and Why It Matters - rbanffy
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333633&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=link&utm_medium=EETimesDaily-20180830
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ChuckMcM
Love the Alan Kay quote:

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
— Alan Kay

Didn't help Sun Micro much :-). One could argue they weren't "serious" about
the software I suppose.

This article is basically saying that Apple becomes nearly
untouchable/catchable when they are building their own chips and devices and
software. And yet that particular pattern has failed again and again. Digital
Computer Corp was my first experience with it, Sun was my second, there are
companies that decided to make Java "engines" which probably qualify as the
third.

From what I have observed, companies and the software they produce can be
viewed as exploring a graph where a local maxima is a successful product and a
minima a failed product. If you can accept that model, then you can see that
different hardware options can enable you to reach different maxima on the
same graph, however once you've started building your own hardware you limit
the spaces you can reach to only those where your hardware can reach them.

As a result, people who are trying to sell hardware (chip companies), being
unconstrained by the local maxima you are pursuing, wander out into the
solution space and uncover different and sometimes wildly better maxima that
can solve the same problem. The vertical manufacturer then finds their bespoke
hardware a drag on their ability to move from their current maxima to the one
growing in the market adjacent to them.

If the new comers execute well they either put the vertically integrated old
timers out of business or constrain their growth to a limited part of the
graph.

I thought Apple had learned that lesson with PowerPC but perhaps they just
felt they were doing it wrong and this time it will work. I'm guessing it
won't work long term.

~~~
electic
Apple doesn't make their own hardware. What they do is design their own
hardware and chips. I agree with you that if they actually made their chips
this would be bad.

Case in point, you can see Intel really struggling because not only do they
design their own hardware but they also make it quite literally with their own
fabs. This has resulted in a lot of delays moving to 10nm and beyond.

AMD on the other hand spun out their fabs and now use fabs around the world to
handle the actual manufacturing. This frees them up to actually design
hardware and innovate at a much greater clip. Heh, they are even going to 7nm.

The same applies with Apple. It is quite cheap to be vertically integrated
because you simply don't really have to make anything. The capital investment
is quite low. It is something that Sun didn't have the luxury of.

~~~
cc439
>"Heh, they are even going to 7nm."

The problem with quoting process nodes from different fabs is that there isn't
any standard for defining the minimum feature size. IIRC, the gap between the
process node's nominal and the actual minimum feature size began diverging
after the 45nm era and has devolved into being absolutely meaningless at this
point. Personally, I believe the vertical integration afforded by owning your
own fabs actually pans out even though Intel appears to be struggling at the
moment. AMD divesting their fabs was one of the largest reasons why they were
so uncompetitive up until recently and a large portion of their current
renaissance lies in the fact that we have reached the end of the line in terms
of consistent process shrinks. There's only a few nm left until we arrive at
the physical barrier of individual atoms and the independent fabs have now had
enough time to catcb up to the very frontier of process engineering.

~~~
FabHK
At JuliaCon 2018 in London, Sophie Wilson (Broadcom/ARM/Cambridge) gave an
insightful overview about the "Future of Microprocessors", and she touched on
this topic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw)

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jarjoura
Not really sure what this article's final point is? Facebook and Google have
hardware teams that allow them to build impressive data centers. Cisco has
lost a lot of potential revenue from all the components FB and Google have
managed to build in-house.

Even if you say that's not the same, Samsung is probably the closest to Apple
in the consumer space. They own the entire pipeline in various degrees.

Yea Apple is winning in profits, but it's not the vertical integration that's
doing it.

~~~
saagarjha
Samsung doesn’t own the OS to the extent that Apple does.

~~~
MBCook
At least not the one people actually want.

~~~
saagarjha
Ha, yes. It’s kind of fitting that I forgot about Tizen.

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classichasclass
Their description of PA Semi is a little odd. Yes, I'm sure there was some ARM
work but at the time they were far better known for PWRficient and the PA6T,
and they still had military contracts for it at the time they were acquired.
There were rumours that was going to be the next PowerBook chip until Apple
went Intel.

~~~
tambourine_man
Thanks, I though I was the only one that remembered it still.

I was salivating for an Apple designed PPC back then and was devastated when
they switched to Intel.

Even though it was probably the right decision, the world got a little more
boring with effectively a single ISA for mobile and desktop.

Same with OSs, something died with the original classic OS that never
recovered, even though pragmatically, I love being able to run Photoshop on
laptop Unix machine.

~~~
classichasclass
Yes, I remember the feeling well when the announcement came out. And I agree
that Apple's human interface zenith was sometime in the classic Mac OS
timeframe.

Oh, well, I've got a Talos now. I don't suffer any illusions that it'll bring
Power ISA back to the desktop in any great numbers, but it's at least
competitive.

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aaronbrethorst
From the article: _Steve Jobs quotes Alan Kay at iPhone 7 launch._

Announce date of iPhone 7: _iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are smartphones
designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. They were announced on
September 7, 2016_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_7))

Steve Jobs's death: _Steven Paul Jobs ( /dʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October
5, 2011)_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs))

:-\

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Seems quite obvious that it was meant as '7 or '07 or 2007, as alluded to in
the text itself (iPhone launch in 2007), probably a typo.

------
amelius
But the question is: should developers outside of Apple applaud this trend?
How about consumers? Or small startups? Will complete vertical integration
eventually spoil the market?

~~~
lisper
No. No. No. Probably.

~~~
batteryhorse
No. No. No. Yes.

------
beautifulfreak
Apple could buy a fab but doesn't, so vertical integration isn't a religion
for them. Nobody said it was, but I like pointing out their restraint. Maybe
when the semiconductor that replaces silicon, say diamond, is close to viable,
they'll splurge, not wait for it. They were worried they wouldn't be able to
differentiate the iPhone, that's why they bothered with the A series chips.
Forward thinking led them to see other phones improving beyond "good enough"
or whatever. Maybe VR was on their horizon, too, or something else unknown.

I like to imagine the satisfaction felt by whoever got the board of directors
to approve going the direction of designing chips, not that they couldn't
afford an R&D folly. Everybody likes to tell Apple how to spend its money, but
almost everyone is wrong. Whoever championed ARM acquisitions must feel extra
smart, since they were proved right. But will Apple ever make a super
inexpensive notebook or PC powered by an A series chip? Probably not, because
of stupid economics. They could, but they won't.

~~~
mmmBacon
Apple owns a fab.

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/14/apple-buys-
former...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/14/apple-buys-former-maxim-
chip-fab-in-north-san-jose-neighboring-samsung-semiconductor-)

~~~
beautifulfreak
For prototypes, low volume production. But they haven't bought a fab that can
produce their A series chips, which I think shows restraint.

~~~
mmmBacon
Ok you said they didn’t buy a fab and you weren’t correct

Building and operating a fab for 7nm is a massive undertaking.

I find your comment incredibly naive. It cost 10s of billions of dollars to
develop just the 7nm process alone. Global Foundries just cancelled all
development of 7nm and beyond to focus on specialty processes and their 14nm
process. Building an advanced node Fab would be an enormous undertaking and
take many years before the first production wafer came out. Not to mention
that there’s no guarantee that fab would be successful. On top of that fabs
are all about volume, they are hugely expensive to operate. So it’s unlikely
an Apple only fab would be economically competitive.

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throw_me_baby
I think the reality is more aligned with "hardware differentiators have better
margins than software differentiators"

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myrandomcomment
One point, I thought that PAsemi was a PPC design house, not ARM.

~~~
aidenn0
It was started by ex-Digital employees that previously worked on the
StrongARM, thought that is still an odd mention since IIRC they worked on MIPS
cores in the time between.

~~~
myrandomcomment
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi)

Wiki says PPC. First chip was the PA6T. PPC.

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teabee89
Am I the only one who found the following typo anachronistically funny: "Steve
Jobs quotes Alan Kay at iPhone 7 launch" ?

