Comment by cormacrelf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cormacrelf | Hacker News Reader

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The only way to analyse this as something bad Apple has done is to make out a case under competition or antitrust law in some jurisdiction. In Australia we have the concept of exclusive dealing, which the US (I think) doesn't have an equivalent to, but even then, it's extremely difficult to violate this law as a purchaser of goods/services, using money to buy them. This is because ANYBODY can acquire money and compete with you by offering more money. You could hold a monopoly on your own products (and then if you imposed exclusivity arrangements on purchasers of your products you would be abusing your market power to lessen competition), but it's essentially impossible to hold a monopoly on money itself.

In all, you're characterising Apple, competing fiercely in an open market, as preventing other people competing by being too good at it. That is a bit ridiculous. If AMD and Qualcomm die out as a result, it will be because they couldn't keep up, which is capitalism functioning correctly. Even under those very broad laws, the only party you can remotely fault is TSMC, and even then, they are literally just taking from the highest bidder, which is again capitalism functioning correctly.

Ultimately I'm not making a legal argument. All I'm saying is that it's very bad for the industry and for the public in general that Apple is the only entity that has access to the cutting edge and that it's only available in their golden cage. It doesn't really matter to me if this is capitalism working correctly or not, or if it's legal or not, ultimately all that matters is that because of this computing is being pushed back, we're not seeing as much competition on performance as we could be, and that's generally bad for everyone. I understand that Apple is just looking out for #1, I just think this is bad for the general public.

Right, and I’m saying they are not the only entity with access, because all you have to do to get into the golden cage is have a really good idea and get financing, and that is possible. Letting everyone else get your idea of a fair share of production capacity to produce sub-par chips is not my idea of good progress. If they truly deserve capacity allocated to them, they should demonstrate they can design better chips, convince someone with money to fund it, and do what Apple’s done (buying TSMC a fabrication plant). That they haven’t done this, and they are punished by not having the cash to acquire production capacity, means that they will feel the pain, and have to start innovating their way out. This is what capitalism gives you: the fire under your butt to innovate. That’s how it’s good. If you prefer the lazy to succeed anyway, you are free to feel that way.

Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind, and are now working harder than they were before to design something better. Just because capitalism in the long term usually gets competitors to converge does not mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that had been flatlining, so there is more competition now than there was before.

But the chips are not sub-par. The entire point of my argument is that at an equal lithography the competition can outperform Apple. The performance advantage that Apple can demonstrate is under the margin of improvement from 7nm to 5nm all else being equal (RAM, TDP, etc..)

There was already a fire under their butt before Apple. Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing against each other. And that competition yielded architectures that are at least on par and very probably better than what Apple can do.

They can design better chips. They just don't have as much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already did before with, for example, the first generation of small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s that were just as good, had to wait for years to access the parts.

I wouldn't be too worried. If they are competitive designs, they will be able to get money to have them manufactured. There is lots of money to be made doing it, so there is lots of capital available. I don't think this will result in a huge setback to humanity's progress like you are making out.

But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning for this better than they did, but you can fault these companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to supply chain strategists too.

The designs are competitive, and they can't get the money to have them manufactured. By the time AMD and NVidia have access to 5nm Apple will be about to move to 3nm. They are going to have a full node of delay for the foreseeable future.

You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as much money as possible and were trying as hard as they could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple. There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority of Apple processors aren't even being sold on performance.

Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that selling processors is very competitive. There will never be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple unless iPhone sales nosedive.

Right, so 5-10 years ago, seeing the writing on the wall, one of these companies should have bought/merged with another to pool more resources so as to remain a big enough bidder in the face of an entrant who would soon be massive. If the goal is to get a 5nm chip out the door today, maybe it seems hopeless, but if the goal is to compete with Apple, there are so, so many things to be done. It's a fair fight, they're just losing. I don't really have anything more to contribute, but this has been a good talk.

>but if the goal is to compete with Apple, there are so, so many things to be done

Can you give some examples? And a time frame in which AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia can use the same tech as Apple?

I just gave you both. Merge, and 5-10 years. Also shepherd or buy your own chip manufacturer like Apple did.

Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do not like the reality of capitalism. This is like complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when Germany won it fair and square under international law. Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING, wait till you see what companies do when they decide they don't want to play by the rules!

It's not Apple's fault that Global Foundry and Intel didn't invest in the 3nm. If you read up on Apple and Intel you would know that Apple (Jobs) was ready to use their CPUs for the iPhone but they won't produce anything other than the x86 (note: StongARM is shelved). Same crap happened with the PowerPC consortium. Motorola would not produce any enhancements in the CPU that dealt with graphics processing cause they only cared about their networking devices. IBM didn't care about power efficiency because they just wanted CPU that were going into their mainframe. Apple worked an agreement with Intel to make the Intel processor (not AMD) exclusive for the Mac, Apple would get new top of the line CPUs in quantity and Intel would get access to Apple's PowerPC patents (AltiVec). Intel also started to ignore the laptop market (just sold underclocked existing processors). Apple dabbled in CPUs with the iPhone 4S and years later released the M1.

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