Hacker News Reader

Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

> we saw Apple release the first ARM-based Mac in 2021

Refreshing to hear it called its proper name instead of Apples marketing terminology.

There's nothing improper about calling it Apple Silicon. Yes, the chips have ARM-based CPU cores, but those cores are designed by Apple, not Arm, and they're only one part of the overall A-series and M-series designs.

Apple, by the way, was a co-founder of Arm and helped develop ARM processors for use in the Apple Newton. Its early work on making ARM CPUs highly power efficient paved the way for their now-widespread adoption in mobile devices. There's some irony in how a part of the Apple Newton reverberates throughout the industry today.

Yes and no. Apple was a co founder when ARM was spun off from Acorn and the ARM processor already existed for 5 years.

Acorn supplied the engineers, VLSI supplied the manufacturing, Apple supplied the money

Fair, but that money is a linchpin. Having the vision to see a commercial application and the will to fund its development into a real product is equally pivotal to the bringing about of a thing —- even if we engineers sometimes struggle to see it that way.

Apples investment track record in the 90s differs with your opinion that they were future seeing oracles who brought pre-ordained projects into existence. Hell they even sold their shares in ARM 5 years later, so they obviously didnt think that much of it.

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadg...

It was a victim of being associated with a failed product line and a failed corporate era. Baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

Typical 90s Apple, short sighted and not seeing the wood for the trees.

If they had kept their stake instead of selling it off they would own the majority of the entire computing world by now.

There’s no chance ARM would be where it is now if it was under Apple’s thumb for a decade. Being hungry and scrappy is sometimes a good thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com