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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.

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I guess it's not black magic apple is doing right here. From my experience with big companies, Intel just got buried in its processes, approvals, middle-management etc.pp.; they still got the talent, and in the past years there wasn't any serious competitor to them.

The dual wake-up call from AMD and from Apple (ARM), combined with the money Intel has in its pocket will have a serious influence on the cpu market. Unsure if they'll come out ahead, but it will get interesting and probably cheaper, not only for consumers.

There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.

Each individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.

The risk of Apple deciding to design their own chips was massive.

Apple started working with ARM in the 80s, eventually used in the Newton. I don't know that they did design directly, but they influenced the changes that became ARM6.

I would speculate that the Palo Alto (P.A. Semi) acquisition is what kicked off this round of the Apple semiconductor (r)evolution.

The individual risks are small now, but they weren’t when Apple was recovering from near death.

Vertical integration is certainly contrary to mainstream management philosophy these days. Today, the more dependencies you can work into your business plan, the smarter you seem. You’re an expert juggler, woo! That free API you were using got retired? Not your fault, who could have predicted?

To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.

Like IBM circa 1968?

Vertical integration for our Mgt guru generation could not last. In fact the problem of intel not farming out its fab business (and recognise its asset is x86 etc) is the problem. What apple smart at is cut the line to fab.

Still ibm then have no consumer whilst apple now has no business and cloud business domination ... still lots of space to play.

But if windows moved to arm with the same result I cannot say intel can survive though.

Well, the world was changing and new opportunities arose. I think it's different now compared to then.

In 1968 there weren't that many computing devices around. When video games and home computing came around, there were massive opportunities and the entrenched players missed some of them.

Same with mobile phones, same with the internet, same with smartphones.

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