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Apple will never be an existential threat unless they make a drastic change to their strategy. They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops

Apple will never be an existential threat unless they make a drastic change to their strategy. They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS. Apple has chosen high profits and a locked down platform. They have one or two options to meet customer needs.. That lack of choice will always mean a substantial number of people will choose something else. If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices. It's a very similar situation with the iPhone. Apple makes a great phone in many respects, but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share. It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Apple Silicon in the iPhone and iPad is a low power & low performance chip compared to AMD/Intel. They have a huge challenge scaling that up to compete on desktop. Their first chips are going into their lower performance products. I'm sure it'll be decent in that role, but Apple likely NEEDS 5nm just so that it makes a respectable showing compared to AMD/Intel.

bigiain 6y ago
> a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS Not sure that's been true for some time now. Wouldn't they be better described as "a premium manufacturer of mobile phones that run iOS with an app ecosystem they make 30% commission on, who also make legacy propitiatory laptop and desktop devices"? (I agree with the rest of your comment though. Apple _don't want_ 99% of Android or Windows customers, and are more than happy for Huawei and Oppo and AliExpress to sell phones and laptops to people Apple dont care about. They _might_ care a bit about encouraging top of the range Samsung or Pixel phone customers to iPhones, maybe. And they at least used to try to woo the dev/webdev crowd to macOS machines, but less obviously these days, it seems to me.)
toxik 6y ago
You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope. I don’t think Apple is struggling with performance in their chips at all. > If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices. And none of them work reliably.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope. Which has 0 relevance. GGP was asserting that Apple Is an existential threat to AMD. Given AMD is not an Apple supplier (of CPU anyway) and Apple will not sell their chips to the outside world, that makes sense on no axis.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    AMD would like to produce and sell mobile CPUs, which are a very important market for chip makers, and which rely very much on betting on the smallest possible node, to minimize power consumption.
    - distances 6y ago
      > AMD would like to produce and sell mobile CPUs Any sources for this? As far as I know, AMD has never designed CPU for mobiles.
      - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
        As far as mobiles broadly, my laptop has a Ryzen CPU in it. It's not out of the question for them to consider such a move, but I think that the bigger issue here for AMD is that it means they will wind up a mode behind the edge, giving their main competitor- Intel- more time to catch up.
- pault 6y ago
  > And none of them work reliably. That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box. I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years. And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.
actuator 6y ago
> but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share. While true for the world for now, they already own half of the phones sold in US. In revenue/profit terms, it is even higher. They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook. They are at a dangerous position where they can suffocate others like this easily because no one else has comparable cash to outbid them for cutting edge stuff.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  If it is not allowed to do a "fabulous phone processor", manufacture it in the best way possible and profit from it, there will be no investment / advancement at all
  - actuator 6y ago
    They should be definitely allowed as this looks like a good business deal, the dangers of monopolizing on competitive advantages nonetheless. My statement was just about the power they have.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    This is the kind of thinking that leads to monopolies. If companies get too big a market share they can and will be reduced in stature by various governments around the world. Today's competitor becomes tomorrow's overbearing monoculture. I'm not really afraid of that happening to apple anytime soon but it certainly could if they start trying to use monopolist power to push out competitors.
- kergonath 6y ago
  > They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook. Such an advantage is not the end, though. Look at where Intel is, with all the R&D spending, fab, and anti-competition moves from a couple of years ago. Engineers move around, and it is difficult to keep a top team for decades. You always end up making mistakes that can be used by your competition. They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market. ARM Macs may be different in the future, but I don't think the performance advantage in phones is that important. People chose mostly on features and ecosystem. Even Android geeks do not care that much that last generation's iPhone outperforms their current flagship. Android still sells. Now, more performance does give more room for some features, but this is a second-order effect. For now, you can find almost any iPhone feature in some Android phones, often with bigger batteries or other things like a headphone jack or a SD port. OnePlus' phones are slower, but it's not the end of the world. A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS I think you can run Linux, Windows, some of the BSDs, on them, can't you?
- reader_mode 6y ago
  If by can run you mean half of the hardware doesn't work on linux and the drivers are shit on Windows then yes. And I doubt this will be the case on ARM. Apple is quickly turning from pushing he at a premium to pushing HW and services in a walled garden package.
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  Windows is officially supported by Apple. Linux works, but the latest models usually have bad driver support for a while. I'm using a 2-year-old MacBook Pro with Arch Linux and it works fine after some tweaking. BSD is not well supported.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  It is unclear if it still be the case once they switch from Intel CPUs to ARM - not looking good if their locked down walled garden mobile hardware is any indication.
GeekyBear 6y ago
> It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Anandtech's Tiger Lake deep dive compares performance gains when running SPEC at a 15 watt TDP and a 28 watt TDP. >At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review... We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP. This bodes well for an architecture that has much better performance per watt. >Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in ST workloads. Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
- webmobdev 6y ago
  > We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP. But why are we comparing with Intel chips, when it is AMD chips that have been more successful in delivering higher performance with lower TDPs?
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    The numbers from those performance tests aren't all good news for AMD. >Against the x86 competition, Tiger Lake leaves AMD’s Zen2-based Renoir in the dust when it comes to single-threaded performance. >[In multicore] AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads. We'll have to see what the testing figures look like after Zen3 and Apple Silicon ship.

bigiain 6y ago

> a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS Not sure that's been true for some time now. Wouldn't they be better described as "a premium manufacturer of mobile phones that run iOS with an app ecosystem they make 30% commission on, who also make legacy propitiatory laptop and desktop devices"? (I agree with the rest of your comment though. Apple _don't want_ 99% of Android or Windows customers, and are more than happy for Huawei and Oppo and AliExpress to sell phones and laptops to people Apple dont care about. They _might_ care a bit about encouraging top of the range Samsung or Pixel phone customers to iPhones, maybe. And they at least used to try to woo the dev/webdev crowd to macOS machines, but less obviously these days, it seems to me.)

toxik 6y ago

You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope. I don’t think Apple is struggling with performance in their chips at all. > If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices. And none of them work reliably.

masklinn 6y ago
> You are of course aware that Apple is soon selling computers with their own processors, I hope. Which has 0 relevance. GGP was asserting that Apple Is an existential threat to AMD. Given AMD is not an Apple supplier (of CPU anyway) and Apple will not sell their chips to the outside world, that makes sense on no axis.
- ant6n 6y ago
  AMD would like to produce and sell mobile CPUs, which are a very important market for chip makers, and which rely very much on betting on the smallest possible node, to minimize power consumption.
  - distances 6y ago
    > AMD would like to produce and sell mobile CPUs Any sources for this? As far as I know, AMD has never designed CPU for mobiles.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
      As far as mobiles broadly, my laptop has a Ryzen CPU in it. It's not out of the question for them to consider such a move, but I think that the bigger issue here for AMD is that it means they will wind up a mode behind the edge, giving their main competitor- Intel- more time to catch up.
pault 6y ago
> And none of them work reliably. That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box. I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years. And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.

actuator 6y ago

> but they're one company and they can't meet the wide variety customers demand. That's reflected in their market share. While true for the world for now, they already own half of the phones sold in US. In revenue/profit terms, it is even higher. They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook. They are at a dangerous position where they can suffocate others like this easily because no one else has comparable cash to outbid them for cutting edge stuff.

WanderPanda 6y ago
If it is not allowed to do a "fabulous phone processor", manufacture it in the best way possible and profit from it, there will be no investment / advancement at all
- actuator 6y ago
  They should be definitely allowed as this looks like a good business deal, the dangers of monopolizing on competitive advantages nonetheless. My statement was just about the power they have.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  This is the kind of thinking that leads to monopolies. If companies get too big a market share they can and will be reduced in stature by various governments around the world. Today's competitor becomes tomorrow's overbearing monoculture. I'm not really afraid of that happening to apple anytime soon but it certainly could if they start trying to use monopolist power to push out competitors.
kergonath 6y ago
> They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook. Such an advantage is not the end, though. Look at where Intel is, with all the R&D spending, fab, and anti-competition moves from a couple of years ago. Engineers move around, and it is difficult to keep a top team for decades. You always end up making mistakes that can be used by your competition. They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market. ARM Macs may be different in the future, but I don't think the performance advantage in phones is that important. People chose mostly on features and ecosystem. Even Android geeks do not care that much that last generation's iPhone outperforms their current flagship. Android still sells. Now, more performance does give more room for some features, but this is a second-order effect. For now, you can find almost any iPhone feature in some Android phones, often with bigger batteries or other things like a headphone jack or a SD port. OnePlus' phones are slower, but it's not the end of the world. A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> They're a premium manufacturer that produces desktops and laptops that only run MacOS I think you can run Linux, Windows, some of the BSDs, on them, can't you?

reader_mode 6y ago
If by can run you mean half of the hardware doesn't work on linux and the drivers are shit on Windows then yes. And I doubt this will be the case on ARM. Apple is quickly turning from pushing he at a premium to pushing HW and services in a walled garden package.
_-___________-_ 6y ago
Windows is officially supported by Apple. Linux works, but the latest models usually have bad driver support for a while. I'm using a 2-year-old MacBook Pro with Arch Linux and it works fine after some tweaking. BSD is not well supported.
m4rtink 6y ago
It is unclear if it still be the case once they switch from Intel CPUs to ARM - not looking good if their locked down walled garden mobile hardware is any indication.

GeekyBear 6y ago

> It's also too early to say that Apple Silicon is a threat to anyone. Anandtech's Tiger Lake deep dive compares performance gains when running SPEC at a 15 watt TDP and a 28 watt TDP. >At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/9 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review... We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP. This bodes well for an architecture that has much better performance per watt. >Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in ST workloads. Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...

webmobdev 6y ago
> We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP. But why are we comparing with Intel chips, when it is AMD chips that have been more successful in delivering higher performance with lower TDPs?
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  The numbers from those performance tests aren't all good news for AMD. >Against the x86 competition, Tiger Lake leaves AMD’s Zen2-based Renoir in the dust when it comes to single-threaded performance. >[In multicore] AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads. We'll have to see what the testing figures look like after Zen3 and Apple Silicon ship.