5 ms·

Isn't all Apple's hardware IP "in" China?

• Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Pretty much. Hardware is in China, patents and money are in Ireland, software development and hardware / visual design is in the US.
• sigstoat 8y ago
  as a simple example, not necessarily realistic, consider the circuit boards of the iphone. yes, they've got to ship the gerber files to china so the boardhouses can fab the boards. but those are just images of the copper and mask layers. apple doesn't have to ship the electrical schematics, with tolerances and notes and explanations of why things are done the way they're done, outside of their office building in california. same with their ASICs; the masks and such have got to go to the fabs, but not the HDL describing the logic. so, certainly some of their IP ends up over there, but not necessarily the juiciest bits.
  • gowld 8y ago
    So, their outsource partners can't invent new things, but can clone every existing thing for a small fraction of the price? That's a good deal for them.
    • mkhalil 8y ago
      It doesn't really work like that either. You can buy iPhones and take them apart, so you have the logic board. Do you know how to install Ubuntu on it? Without the logic behind why the board was designed that way, it's going to be non-trivial to reverse engineer what's going on. Think of it as a .exe file. Cracking software isn't a trivial task. Cracking hardware is harder.