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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

There's a great article about how hardware companies can't compete with Apple. Apple do things like finding a technology for making better laptop enclosures and buying the company that makes it so no one else can use it. It's a good read. https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...

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I think many (most?) hardware companies just don't understand/appreciate software. They look at it like just another line item on the BOM: 152 screws from supplier X, various plastic parts from supplier Y, a rubber gasket from supplier Z, and, oh yea, some software. Find the bucket of software and scoop some out to flash onto the device.

They don't see software as an ecosystem, as the actual product that the user interacts with, as their brand differentiation. They see it as a costly problem that they must solve by finding the cheapest viable bag of bits they can throw on devices and not have customers return it the first day. I swear that's the quality bar for some of these companies.

That's how we get TVs that take 5 seconds to recognize a button press, and have UIs that look like they were made from clipart. Proper font kerning? Forget it, they use 16x8 bitmap fonts from the '90s. That's how we get IoT devices that are 0wned the second they connect to the Internet. That's how we get car stereos that display "��" when you try to play a media file with non-ASCII characters in the name. Many hardware companies don't give a single shit about their software's quality--only that it's cheap and barely works and it keeps the BOM cost low.

This is IMO why Tesla is dominating the EV space - the combination of great software with the hardware, although the recent software update irked a lot of people and is a few steps backward.

For the longest time touch display and navigation software in cars were terrible. Low resolution, small screens, laggy interfaces, and software not connected to the vehicle in the sense where OTA updates can end up fixing and improving aspects of the car.

It looks like the article focuses much more on how the processes Apple employs are expensive, laborious, and challenging – which make them difficult to replicate.

> Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple

It started about fifteen years ago, but Apple discovered that a great use for their extra cash flow was to buy up the processes they (and their competitors) would need in the future. When a screen manufacturer needed money to do the next big thing, then Apple would chip in significant funding and own a percentage of the new joint venture. They would not only get priority and lower prices on orders, but they profited from anyone else buying the same tech. Apple now owns an exclusive license to Liquidmetal, is a significant investor in Corning (Gorilla Glass), invested heavily in a Toshiba LCD plant, paid LG (for LCD) and various SSD manufacturers massive upfront payments for priority and/or exclusivity.

Not just predicting, but driving. With the iPhone market share, Apple has been in a good seat to define what consumers expect from {generation+1} devices.

Which makes it a bit easier to acquire / pre-book the relevant manufacturing capacity, when you know you're going to make a surprise announcement of it as a major feature in the future.

After which, everyone else eventually ends up at the same upstream manufacturers, or trying to duplicate the technology...

any idea what liquidmetal is used for?

SIM ejector

It needs a little more context. The article was written in 2014 and basically reference the era of iPhone 2007 - 2012, ~iPhone 4S manufacturing. The same idea or execution could happen in the future with other products or manufacturing. But most advantage listed aren't as relevant anymore. Or those technology and process becomes commodity.

Has more to do with innate economies of scale than any individual market abuse. Which isn't to say that there is some, but even if you stripped out the market abuse, Apple would still be fine.

Apple is a machine that is fueled by cross subsidizing new platforms (Apple Watch) with their already significant capital investments in the iPhone.

> Apple do things like finding a technology for making better laptop enclosures and buying the company that makes it so no one else can use it.

Why can’t another company build better laptop enclosures ?

Zune vs Ipod Galaxy Tab vs Ipad Android wear vs Apple Watch

Hard to reason all those away as just better components

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