7 ms·

Apple M1 is the kind of thing that truly impresses in the post-Jobs era, IMO.

rektide 6y ago
Years of snapping up brilliant companies/minds[1]! * PA Semi, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi * Licensing then hiring most of the Imagination Technologies GPU engineers, including setting up an office down the street from them in St Albans, 2017-2020. * some of Dialog Semiconductor, 2018 * Intel's smartphone division, 2019 * Intrinsity, who had some cutting edge chip design, 2010 There's also an unbelievable ton of photography, micro-display, motion capture, ar, computer vision companies they've acquired. They're plucking up 3-5 promising talented players a year in terms of microminiature sensors/displays/optics. Apple, the most exciting, gigantic, talent-acquiring behemoth that capital has ever given rise to. They do deserve accolades for doing great work, yes. But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared, but Apple has total iron claims on their chips. It's imbalanced as it is, & Apple seems to have all the money & all the power to keep tipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for?
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    Exactly. Not just that, acquiring the talent is one thing. Providing the culture & resources for them to succeed over a long period of time? That's special & why most M&A activity results in a neutral or even negative result.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    By open marketet I think he/she means producing products/services that can be used by multiple other companies. As opposed to being confined to the Apple silo. Note: I'm not judging that analysis, just trying to refine the interpretation.
  - rektide 6y ago
    > All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for? That's exactly the problem with monopolies. As one two or three companies get to be ever more outsized giants (Apple: 2.2T$, Amazon & Microsoft: 1.6T$), owning more of the talent pool, there's less other players with any chance to build up success, to acquire talent. People can keep making small, successfully-acquired companies, but this idea that it's everyone elses fault for not challenging the monopoly is not a statement I'm very sympathetic to.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Apple’s market cap was less than 10% of what it is now when they bought PA Semi. Monopolies have nothing to do with this.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    Monopoly power from two sided markets. Apple is in the position where it outbid competition. They take 20% cut from app sales and sell 200 million units.
    - zepto 6y ago
      When the bought PA semi they were nowhere near the size they are now. All that happened is that Apple made better investments than their potential competitors.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    In a lot of cases, it was probably something more insidious, as indeed is the case for a lot of acqui-hires in the software space: most of them probably didn't have anyone using their stuff (relatively speaking). A lot of these companies that produce these things are building things that simply aren't useful unless "deployed" or "applied" at scale. The best way to put it is it's the difference between designing an AK-47, and designing a battleship. Most techies look at things, and assume they're like a AK-47; if the big players don't use it, DIY guys can still home-craft their own AKs and it'll have a profound impact on the world. But with many of these sorts of tech firms that are getting acquired, if they aren't actually having their stuff used by one of the big guys, it may as well not exist. If you design a battleship, and there's not a nation-state interested in building it, despite having what may be an excellent design, you've got ... nothing. Nobody can DIY that like they can a design for a rifle. A very good analogy here would be graphics cards. If I come up with a software innovation, like a new rendering technology, it's viable for anyone to slot into a game engine somewhere and play with. If I come up with a new hardware design, and it doesn't get applied by one of the actual hardware vendors out there, it may as well not exist.
- mushufasa 6y ago
  This comment has a negative tone, but this doesn't seem to me to be a tragedy. Acquiring talent and putting them on the bench to stave off would-be competitors stifles innovation (re: Palihapitiya's criticism of Google). Acquiring talent and putting them to use on projects that achieve more scale and impact, sooner, than could happen at a small company -- that seems like innovation and the free market market at its best. It's not like these people had their work stolen -- they were compensated!! Presumably quite well.
  - rektide 6y ago
    > Acquiring talent and putting them to use on projects that achieve more scale and impact, sooner, than could happen at a small company -- that seems like innovation and the free market market at its best. So, you're a fan of a free market, where free is defined as whatever direction Apple wants to go. Got it. Free for Apple to do as they please. I don't know if there's quite "consensus", but definitely one of the top 3 greatest, most important events in all computing was the Gang of Nine taking & extending IBM's AT Compatible bus to build the new, intercompatible ISA[1] bus. It took the fractured, proprietary world of microcomputers by storm, savaged many great company, by creating a genuine open market for personal computers. It commodified the system, allowed anyone to compete & to deliver peripherals & changes & innovations. The Gang of Nine freed a locked down proprietary computing market. Without their actions, we might not be typing on laptops, we might not have smartphones today. They freed the market. Innovation churned greatly, because there was so much going on, so much creativity, so many different things being tried. Today, only a very very few have the power to shape things. There are only two major smartphone OSes on the planet. There are only a couple scrappy hopefuls about, intent on freeing the market from this stagnancy, from everyone being on the same OSes for the entire next decade too: folks like Pine64, who are building a Linux PinePhone project, who are building great low cost open source dev boards, who are building DIY low-bandwidth long-distance LoRaWAN[2]. Society needs to support healthy competitive free market innovation. Simply measuring how quickly one company is free to do whatever it wants, how quickly it can iterate, is not enough. All great events in computing, the modern saga of computing as we know it, came from a genuine freedom to explore & tinker with what might be possible. Leaving Tim Cook in charge of this human project is drastically against the human spirit of liberty & progress, and there's no good in computing that has ever come from these kinds of totalizing powers, extreme vertical integration, & closed systems. These players have always ended up ossifying, off in some crystal palace they've built themselves, direly needing to be disrupted. Being free from competition, alone in your innovating, is a tragedy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145684
- foobiekr 6y ago
  Buying PA Semi, for one, was an interesting move. They'd shipped their embedded PowerPC chip and it was both way over the promised power budget and the errata was crazy. That was not an obvious buy in any way. Ditto Intrinsity.
- zepto 6y ago
  > At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared Except these companies had a massive headstart over Apple, and failed to deliver. Furthermore Qualcomm generally act to suppress innovation through patents.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 6y ago
  On the other hand, how many of these companies would have faded away and never been heard of again if Apple hand't stepped in? Was Samsung or Huawei about to invest in these technologies? Even on this thread I see people saying phones are commoditised now and the new models aren't interesting. Apple's competitors believe this, they aren't about to invest millions on these small technical innovations and improvements that by themselves are incredibly niche. Instead Apple brings these incremental innovations, which otherwise would be relegated to specialist parts if they survived at all, to hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. If Apple hadn't done this the chances these advanced technologies would be in so many people's hands right now would be close to nil.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them. When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)
smoldesu 6y ago
I wish I cared about the battery life in my laptop, it might even make me want one of those M1 devices.

Years of snapping up brilliant companies/minds[1]! * PA Semi, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi * Licensing then hiring most of the Imagination Technologies GPU engineers, including setting up an office down the street from them in St Albans, 2017-2020. * some of Dialog Semiconductor, 2018 * Intel's smartphone division, 2019 * Intrinsity, who had some cutting edge chip design, 2010 There's also an unbelievable ton of photography, micro-display, motion capture, ar, computer vision companies they've acquired. They're plucking up 3-5 promising talented players a year in terms of microminiature sensors/displays/optics. Apple, the most exciting, gigantic, talent-acquiring behemoth that capital has ever given rise to. They do deserve accolades for doing great work, yes. But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared, but Apple has total iron claims on their chips. It's imbalanced as it is, & Apple seems to have all the money & all the power to keep tipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
908B64B197 6y ago
> But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for?
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Exactly. Not just that, acquiring the talent is one thing. Providing the culture & resources for them to succeed over a long period of time? That's special & why most M&A activity results in a neutral or even negative result.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  By open marketet I think he/she means producing products/services that can be used by multiple other companies. As opposed to being confined to the Apple silo. Note: I'm not judging that analysis, just trying to refine the interpretation.
- rektide 6y ago
  > All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for? That's exactly the problem with monopolies. As one two or three companies get to be ever more outsized giants (Apple: 2.2T$, Amazon & Microsoft: 1.6T$), owning more of the talent pool, there's less other players with any chance to build up success, to acquire talent. People can keep making small, successfully-acquired companies, but this idea that it's everyone elses fault for not challenging the monopoly is not a statement I'm very sympathetic to.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Apple’s market cap was less than 10% of what it is now when they bought PA Semi. Monopolies have nothing to do with this.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Monopoly power from two sided markets. Apple is in the position where it outbid competition. They take 20% cut from app sales and sell 200 million units.
  - zepto 6y ago
    When the bought PA semi they were nowhere near the size they are now. All that happened is that Apple made better investments than their potential competitors.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  In a lot of cases, it was probably something more insidious, as indeed is the case for a lot of acqui-hires in the software space: most of them probably didn't have anyone using their stuff (relatively speaking). A lot of these companies that produce these things are building things that simply aren't useful unless "deployed" or "applied" at scale. The best way to put it is it's the difference between designing an AK-47, and designing a battleship. Most techies look at things, and assume they're like a AK-47; if the big players don't use it, DIY guys can still home-craft their own AKs and it'll have a profound impact on the world. But with many of these sorts of tech firms that are getting acquired, if they aren't actually having their stuff used by one of the big guys, it may as well not exist. If you design a battleship, and there's not a nation-state interested in building it, despite having what may be an excellent design, you've got ... nothing. Nobody can DIY that like they can a design for a rifle. A very good analogy here would be graphics cards. If I come up with a software innovation, like a new rendering technology, it's viable for anyone to slot into a game engine somewhere and play with. If I come up with a new hardware design, and it doesn't get applied by one of the actual hardware vendors out there, it may as well not exist.
mushufasa 6y ago
This comment has a negative tone, but this doesn't seem to me to be a tragedy. Acquiring talent and putting them on the bench to stave off would-be competitors stifles innovation (re: Palihapitiya's criticism of Google). Acquiring talent and putting them to use on projects that achieve more scale and impact, sooner, than could happen at a small company -- that seems like innovation and the free market market at its best. It's not like these people had their work stolen -- they were compensated!! Presumably quite well.
- rektide 6y ago
  > Acquiring talent and putting them to use on projects that achieve more scale and impact, sooner, than could happen at a small company -- that seems like innovation and the free market market at its best. So, you're a fan of a free market, where free is defined as whatever direction Apple wants to go. Got it. Free for Apple to do as they please. I don't know if there's quite "consensus", but definitely one of the top 3 greatest, most important events in all computing was the Gang of Nine taking & extending IBM's AT Compatible bus to build the new, intercompatible ISA[1] bus. It took the fractured, proprietary world of microcomputers by storm, savaged many great company, by creating a genuine open market for personal computers. It commodified the system, allowed anyone to compete & to deliver peripherals & changes & innovations. The Gang of Nine freed a locked down proprietary computing market. Without their actions, we might not be typing on laptops, we might not have smartphones today. They freed the market. Innovation churned greatly, because there was so much going on, so much creativity, so many different things being tried. Today, only a very very few have the power to shape things. There are only two major smartphone OSes on the planet. There are only a couple scrappy hopefuls about, intent on freeing the market from this stagnancy, from everyone being on the same OSes for the entire next decade too: folks like Pine64, who are building a Linux PinePhone project, who are building great low cost open source dev boards, who are building DIY low-bandwidth long-distance LoRaWAN[2]. Society needs to support healthy competitive free market innovation. Simply measuring how quickly one company is free to do whatever it wants, how quickly it can iterate, is not enough. All great events in computing, the modern saga of computing as we know it, came from a genuine freedom to explore & tinker with what might be possible. Leaving Tim Cook in charge of this human project is drastically against the human spirit of liberty & progress, and there's no good in computing that has ever come from these kinds of totalizing powers, extreme vertical integration, & closed systems. These players have always ended up ossifying, off in some crystal palace they've built themselves, direly needing to be disrupted. Being free from competition, alone in your innovating, is a tragedy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26145684
foobiekr 6y ago
Buying PA Semi, for one, was an interesting move. They'd shipped their embedded PowerPC chip and it was both way over the promised power budget and the errata was crazy. That was not an obvious buy in any way. Ditto Intrinsity.
zepto 6y ago
> At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared Except these companies had a massive headstart over Apple, and failed to deliver. Furthermore Qualcomm generally act to suppress innovation through patents.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simonh 6y ago
On the other hand, how many of these companies would have faded away and never been heard of again if Apple hand't stepped in? Was Samsung or Huawei about to invest in these technologies? Even on this thread I see people saying phones are commoditised now and the new models aren't interesting. Apple's competitors believe this, they aren't about to invest millions on these small technical innovations and improvements that by themselves are incredibly niche. Instead Apple brings these incremental innovations, which otherwise would be relegated to specialist parts if they survived at all, to hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. If Apple hadn't done this the chances these advanced technologies would be in so many people's hands right now would be close to nil.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  This. This right here. If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine. One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them. When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)

smoldesu 6y ago

I wish I cared about the battery life in my laptop, it might even make me want one of those M1 devices.