4 ms·
They have to pay back the investments in R+D first though, no?
by hderms 6y ago
They have to pay back the investments in R+D first though, no?
- ogre_codes 6y agoThis is the big gotcha. A lot of people see the incremental cost of the CPU as the cost, but the actual cost is: `(development cost + (units sold * incremental cost) ) / units sold` But a lot of Macs have higher end Intel CPUs so the per/ unit cost of Intel CPUs is pretty damned high.
- sjwright 6y ago90% of these Mac silicon investments would directly benefit their iPhone cash cow—perhaps not this cycle, but certainly in the chips they'll put in future iPhones. And the remaining 10% would indirectly benefit benefit their iPhone cash cow in the form of keeping people inside the ecosystem.
- ogre_codes 6y agoYou have this backwards. The Mac silicon is inheriting the investments Apple made in the iPhone CPUs. This will continue. The bits which Apple invests to make their existing hardware scale to desktop and high end laptops won't benefit the iPhone much at all. On future generation chips, Apple will spread the development costs over a few more units, but since iPhone + iPad ship several times more units than the Mac, the bulk of the costs will be born by them.