4 ms·

Time will tell if you're right. I do think that what's happening under the hood of the Apple chip is real and is causing more than a few executives in the silic

Time will tell if you're right. I do think that what's happening under the hood of the Apple chip is real and is causing more than a few executives in the silicon world to lose sleep. This reminds me of when RIM got their hands on an iPhone for the first time. One of many articles: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple_was_lying_about_original_iphone_in_2007 https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple...

novok 6y ago
I think it the hints were there if you were in the industry. CPU scaling is TPU scaling and apple's chips were showing leading single core performance compared to android / qualcomm chips for many years now with very low power usage. After that you could see how they could scale that up relatively easily. Also apple built in some special instructions that makes macOS software better, like core operations of objective-c, so some of this might be very apple runtime specific optimizations.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  The first iPhones used generic Samsung processors and the power is quite similar to the hardware in BlackBerrys contemporary products. They probably just didn’t realize that one day of battery life is enough for most use cases and is less important than a real browser and the other features brought by the iPhone.
  - josh2600 6y ago
    I feel like you're glossing over a bunch of things here. 1) the display on the iphone was gigantic compared to any other device on the market. The fact the iPhone had the battery life it did was amazing. 2) the software on the iphone destroyed anything RIM had ever put forward. 3) the iPhone was a much better piece of hardware aesthetically and performance-wise than anything RIM had ever put out. Their closest competitor was the Pearl and it was garbage compared to the iPhone. 4) Lastly, RIM had 10 year development cycles. Pivoting to attack the iPhone meant ripping apart 10 years of planned development much of which was already executed. Pivoting that hard is just not something companies at the scale or RIM are designed to do. RIM should've seen the writing on the wall, shred their hardware business, and gone all in on supporting BES on iPhone. I digress...
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      I don’t know if there was a future for them anyway. What could they have done that Apple could not? Did they even have a way for third parties to make apps? Even though the iPhone originally didn’t have that the jailbreak community pretty quickly showed that was the way forward.
      - josh2600 6y ago
        Just to be clear, RIM was on top of the world when the iPhone came out, and, if they had been fast pivoting they might still be relevant in the world.

novok 6y ago

I think it the hints were there if you were in the industry. CPU scaling is TPU scaling and apple's chips were showing leading single core performance compared to android / qualcomm chips for many years now with very low power usage. After that you could see how they could scale that up relatively easily. Also apple built in some special instructions that makes macOS software better, like core operations of objective-c, so some of this might be very apple runtime specific optimizations.

tinus_hn 6y ago
The first iPhones used generic Samsung processors and the power is quite similar to the hardware in BlackBerrys contemporary products. They probably just didn’t realize that one day of battery life is enough for most use cases and is less important than a real browser and the other features brought by the iPhone.
- josh2600 6y ago
  I feel like you're glossing over a bunch of things here. 1) the display on the iphone was gigantic compared to any other device on the market. The fact the iPhone had the battery life it did was amazing. 2) the software on the iphone destroyed anything RIM had ever put forward. 3) the iPhone was a much better piece of hardware aesthetically and performance-wise than anything RIM had ever put out. Their closest competitor was the Pearl and it was garbage compared to the iPhone. 4) Lastly, RIM had 10 year development cycles. Pivoting to attack the iPhone meant ripping apart 10 years of planned development much of which was already executed. Pivoting that hard is just not something companies at the scale or RIM are designed to do. RIM should've seen the writing on the wall, shred their hardware business, and gone all in on supporting BES on iPhone. I digress...
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    I don’t know if there was a future for them anyway. What could they have done that Apple could not? Did they even have a way for third parties to make apps? Even though the iPhone originally didn’t have that the jailbreak community pretty quickly showed that was the way forward.
    - josh2600 6y ago
      Just to be clear, RIM was on top of the world when the iPhone came out, and, if they had been fast pivoting they might still be relevant in the world.