I guess they will succumb faster than the old Xerox-age market leaders, because they are not focussed on consulting (= making other companies believe their constantly syphoning money from them brings value).
How is literally designing your chips to a point where they could be desktop class to replace x86 not innovation? What other company is doing this?
I can't imagine a "finance company on the out" deciding that they will bring all chip development in house.
Seriously though, some people just don't like Apple and they make a lot of noise about it.
That's more a sign that the company wants more profit by owning the top to bottom stack.
Perhaps they saw the existing chipsets as not delivering what they wanted or not scaling to fit demand, but it's still an investment not directly tied to product (their core competency).
They pretty much had their hands tied. Intel failed to deliver for years now, and AMD never had a competitive offer on mobile and still does not.
Is bringing mobile/embedded and now desktop-class CPU design in-house really something one does as a cost-saving measure? Apple wants control over their entire stack, and sure, that relates to their business as a whole, but if this was solely about profit maximization surely there would be better strategies.
> it's still an investment not directly tied to product
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here. Are you arguing it's not a direct investment because the CPUs aren't products in and of themselves, but rather components for other products? If so, I don't agree -- Apple's investment in, say, case tooling/manufacturing processes and equipment exclusive to their products is surely an investment directly tied to those products, right? The CPUs are likewise components exclusive to Apple products. That seems to me to be a pretty direct investment.
> but it's still an investment not directly tied to product (their core competency)
I don't even agree with this- Apple's core competency is the top-to-bottom customer experience, which they (almost certainly correctly) think they can improve by making their own silicon. But even if it was true, so what? Again, "investment not directly tied to product" doesn't make innovation "not count".
Heavily disagree, the only reason I would renew my mac in the next 6 month is because the ARM chip, and I will as soon as it comes out.
IBM for one; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture
I mean you asked, and it was obvious. Z is a more interesting architecture by far than the turd Apple is shipping.
IBM has been building chips since day one. I'd expect IBM to divest their mainframe business eventually. The distinction you are missing is that usually "finance-driven" companies don't usually decide to pour billions of dollars into bringing in an already outsourced component in house that they hardly have experience in.
Furthermore, I don't see IBM using the Z to "innovate" - They aren't pushing the mainframes to anyone other than people who are already buying mainframes.
>Z is a more interesting architecture by far than the turd Apple is shipping.
The Z, an architecture for people who are pretty much already buying mainframes, is more interesting than a desktop class chip with what will probably be a completely unmatched in performance/watt? I don't see how the Z is more interesting than a chip that is finally attempting to challenge the 30 year x86 dominance in desktop computing.
Apple hasn't shipped their "desktop class" architecture yet.
Perhaps you are frustrated by the design constraints of low power mobile chips. Ok.
But if you're paying attention, architecture wise, it may be of interest to note that Apple's ARM chips, so far, have delivered good performance in their handheld applications by careful attention to sustained memory bandwidth. Competitors went with more CPU cores.
So there's some fun chip architecture to be had, even in 2020.
A desktop Apple architecture might use something like HBM for main memory, rather than DIMMs.
There's lots of room to innovate, out there in consumer computing.
Last time I checked, Z had 500gb/sec; more than 10x Apple's. Kind of wish IBM had won processor wars. Generally speaking whenever I look at their mainframe doodads, then look at the hot garbage being slung over at Amazon or whatever FAANG shit hole, it makes me sad. The company with the best engineers is an also-ran that mostly sells consultant hours. Maybe they'll sell off the mainframe business independent of the rest of the horse shit and it will undergo a renaissance. Doubt it though.
Facebook, Google and Amazon are known to do their own server design; it wouldn't surprise me if any or all of them were doing custom processors (e.g. better virtualization features for their clouds, or processors that are more oriented towards their workloads). It doesn't sound like innovation, more like cost cutting; these processors aren't delivering a step change to end users, at best they're squeezing out a little more battery life. (By contrast e.g. that sapphire screen that was rumoured would have been innovative, because sapphire can do stuff that glass simply can't).
I'll be happy to praise Google or Facebook for advancements in CPU tech if and when they show us such a thing. Until then, publicly available facts are that Apple is innovating in that field and they're not.
They're designing CPUs - something that many companies have done and many companies will do. Big whoop.
Every Apple device I’ve purchased in the past few years has suffered from a defect: AirPods Pro, iPhone X, 2019 MacBook Pro, iPad. And this doesn’t include Batterygate.
> Apple is already on it's way to the trashheap.
That's why. Even if they're lost some of their lustre (and, if we're being literal, could be "on it's way" in the sense that it was the most valuable company in the world and might've dropped a few percentage points).
Not only the past few years, heck, they launched a phone you couldn't hold properly and people lapped it up. That's not stopped their offerings not only being the best in their class, but often the only products of note (AirPods, iPads, Watch...).
Apple doesn't have to beat Apple. They just have to beat the best of the rest - and apart from perhaps Samsung and Huawei in phones, they're looking pretty peachy still.