I think we are saying the same thing, but would like to understand if you see it the same way I do. I see this pair of sentences: Custom hardware makes no sens

I think we are saying the same thing, but would like to understand if you see it the same way I do. I see this pair of sentences: Custom hardware makes no sense if you can just wait 18 months and the performance of a generic chip will double. Once you can't just "wait for performance increases" then building your own silicon starts to make sense. As a restatement of the economics of building competitive systems. My comment was that the economic forces that allowed IBM, HP, and DEC to build custom hardware and recover those costs through sales have returned. The mechanism of that return is that Apple has shown that product differentiation through custom silicon is sufficient to add margin to a product above and beyond the cost of developing that custom silicon. Your comment appears to say the same thing; which is that the previous strategy of maximizing margins of letting a semiconductor company produce a better chip and then use it, is no longer more effective than you telling a semiconductor fab to make the chip you want to use and then using that. That is what you are saying isn't it?