Apple and Samsung, frenemies for life | Hacker News Reader

Apple and Samsung, frenemies for life

reuters.com

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Link to primary source, not AppleInsider's regurgitation:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/10/net-us-apple-samsu...

It took me a while to find the original link, it was burried in the fourth paragraph and linked from a single word.

So you can't accuse them of not linking, they just do the bare minimum to credit the original reporting.

I'd suggest the mods update the link to the Reuters story, please.

"Tim Cook, Jobs' successor as Apple chief executive, was opposed to suing Samsung in the first place, according to people with knowledge of the matter"

people = Apple's PR department? /cynic

Wouldn't surprise me. Cook's biggest priority was/is supply chain dynamics. Endangering their relationship with Samsung would be a big red alert on his dashboard.

Either way, who cares? The lawsuits happened. I'd be more interested in a solid comment from Cook on the competitive landscape from here on out.

Knowing Cook's general "Be Nice" attitude, it isn't hard to believe him as the Good Cop. Of course, you can argue this is why Apple PR would run with this story...to which I'd say Apple PR would't risk the possibility of a leak showing the opposite: that Cook agreed with Jobs. They ran with this angle probably because it is true.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually encouraged such a disagreement to hedge their bets. If shit got real bad for Apple, Cook could always walk over to Samsung and try to rescue the relationship.

I'm not sure if it's even necessarily a be nice thing.

Tim Cook strikes me as generally less emotional than Jobs. It may well just be that being dispassionate he felt that when you took the heat out of it the pain to reward ratio just didn't make it a good move (which is pretty much spot on).

"It was the late Steve Jobs' worst nightmare." Seriously? Did they find a medium and communicate past the veil? I've never once heard that applied to Jobs', he seemed to view the competition as crap and well, not competition.

Good to know that Tim Cook was both disagreeing and making the right choice.

I find it so comforting that AppleInsider is able to sway your opinion, lest your opinion be based on facts rather than conjecture.

Exactly how has my opinion been swayed, here? Seems like you're making up your facts.

Generally speaking I hate such lawsuits. However, we know who re-invented the phone and Samsung has a history of essentially cloning products. If someone copied my/your code or website look we'd be pissed, especially if they sold it too as templates.

There's a difference between someone literally stealing your code and somebody just reimplementing something similar to what you have done.

> There's a difference between someone literally stealing your code and somebody just reimplementing something similar to what you have done.

Please, not again. Analogies between product design and code copyright do not work.

that's exactly what jiggy2011 is saying, the two situations are not comparable.

Let's just remember Apple has cloned others' ideas. Mouse. mp3 player. keyboard on macbook pro (originally on sony laptops). FaceTime? Done Asia/Europe for a few years before Apple came out with FaceTime. The way Apple was advertising it, it seemed as if Apple had invented it...

And please, rounded corners on electronic gadgets?

Lastly, the magnetic connector on macbook laptops? Many many years ago I bought a hot water pot (japanese model) that had with magnetic power connector. It was sold many years before macbook pro came out with the magnetic connectors.

If they'd very publicly called out all the open technologies and standards they'd built on to develop it[1], would that be different?

[1] http://goo.gl/SVPYO

Steve Jobs also announced that Facetime itself would soon be an open standard.

http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-...

I've often wondered if Samsung was offended that Apple passed off the "A4" chip that they designed and built as their own work. I mean Samsung knew that Apple was asking them to put an Apple logo on this, and other, Samsung chips, so I assume they knew what was going on. Still, there must have been someone going "thermonuclear" inside Samsung, to see his credit stolen so brazenly.

Do you have a source to the a4 being Samsung designed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4#Design

"The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4 is thought to use performance enhancements developed by chip designer Intrinsity (which was subsequently acquired by Apple)[12] in collaboration with Samsung.[13] The resulting core, dubbed "Hummingbird", is able to run at far higher clock rates than other implementations while remaining fully compatible with the Cortex-A8 design provided by ARM.[14] Other performance improvements include additional L2 cache. The same Cortex-A8 CPU core used in the A4 is also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC.[15][16]"

That comment only refers to the core. These SOC designs include a considerable amount of other components and it's the selection of which of these components to include, how to arrange them and how to optimise the overall system constitutes the design, which was done by the team at Apple (including many engineers that used to work for Intrinsity, no doubt).

e.g in the next paragraph after your quote from the same Wikipedia article:

"RAM is connected to the processor using ARM's 64-bit-wide AMBA 3 AXI bus. This is twice the width of the RAM data bus used in previous ARM 11 and ARM 9 based Apple devices"

The cores are the same - ARM cores are widely reused and licensed in different SOC designs - but they are just one part of the overall SOC which also includes graphics cores, DSPs, I/O controllers, sensors such as gyroscopes and inertial sensors, radio circuitry, etc.

Read my other links, they go into detail about exactly which parts of the SoC are different, and how little that means.

You appear to be claiming with that quote that it's evidence against Samsung design and manufacture that a newer ARM component was used in a new generation of chips based on ARM reference designs. I don't see how that makes any sense. Maybe if it was an Apple bus, or if Samsung wasn't one of the world leading producers of cutting edge ARM-based chips, but otherwise I don't get it.

ARM reference cores like the A8 are widely used, but not specifically the hummingbird, which is an actual instantiation of that reference design and which is only used in Samsung chips, like the A4.

The links also compare the 3GS SoC, which everyone seems happy to concede is a Samsung design, and notes that many of the 3rd party bits were basically unchanged when "Apple" "designed" the "A4".

This is the first time I've ever seen it suggested that the A4 was actually designed by Samsung.

You should get out of the Apple bubble more often, though to be fair, when Steve Jobs stands on stage and claims he designed/invented/built something, the media seem to give him a pass in general, despite his reputation as a master salesman/liar.

Even if they had designed their own chip, basic tests (as well as iFixit style tear-downs) revealed that "There's not much revolutionary here. In fact, the A4 is quite similar to the Samsung processor Apple uses in the iPhone."

"To be clear, we are not talking about full custom circuit design, yet. This is about choosing from essentially the same catalog of individual IP building blocks but selecting fewer of them."

"[Compared with the Samsung chip used for the 3GS] The simplest and most striking observation is just how little discernible change there is to the number or type of circuit block. Both devices have a relatively high percentage of the die consumed by an ARM CPU core containing a large L2 SRAM cache memory along with 10 additional blocks of digital logic. The A4 die is smaller, 51.8 mm2 versus 72.2 mm2, but this says little about the design since A4 is manufactured with 45-nm technology."

"From a circuit design perspective, the changes in the subdivisions of chip real estate are relatively minor. A lot can be attributed to transitioning manufacturing to 45-nm. To summarize the block level comparison with the two "reference" designs, there were no wholesale changes to the floorplan. Yes, the A4 is different, but not by more than one or two blocks. ... It is also reasonable to describe it as evolutionary compared to the references."

from: http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4200451/Apple-s-A4-disse...

The reason for the similarity in their chips was that Intrinsity did most of the custom design for Samsung's chip, Apple also worked with Intrisity and subsequently acquired them.

No. Intrinsity worked with Samsung to develop a low-power variant of the Cortex-A8, that part of the two chips are identical, not similar. And the rest of the chip is similar because it's built from a Samsung reference design with a few bits left out that Apple didn't want. It's like saying "hold the mustard" makes you a master hot-dog crafstman.

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