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> The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung) Why does Samsung ha

by est31 6y ago

> The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung) Why does Samsung have smaller buying power than Apple? Doesn't Samsung sell more phones than them? Or is it because while Samsung sells more phones in total, Apple still has the most successful single models?

cogman10 6y ago
I'd imagine lots of reasons. Apple has the hardware guys to design whatever chip they need. They also have a mountain of reserve capital (Something like $1 trillion I believe?). Further, Apple's closed ecosystem means that if you want them to sell them your hardware you have to conform to their standards. With Samsung and android, it's a different story. There are many android vendors and the people producing the Bluetooth chips are selling to many of them (broadcom). Samsung has the ability to make their own chips, but to get everything working flawlessly they not only have to make their chips awesome but also improve the android driver stack to work with their new awesome chips. That stack has to also be compatible with the other bluetooth manufactures on the market making it a harder change to make. In other words, with apple and a vendor, there are pretty much just the 2 parties involved which control everything. With Samsung and vendor it's not just them but also the likes of google and other bluetooth vendors that can get in the way of really fixing things.
- signal11 6y ago
  I get what you're saying, but Samsung is also huge and Bluetooth is used in lots of electronics that Samsung sells -- including laptops, tablets, smart watches, TVs... or conceivably could sell, like future IoT products. If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. I know cases where they've had two suppliers. Displays and modems come to mind, although I've not Googled to verify.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.
    - dflock 6y ago
      > go and implement the technology on their own Samsung could obviously do this too, but as you say, they lack the will - and motivation.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        Besides that they also lack the amount of control over the software side. Google is the entity that controls the stack, not Samsung - their responsibility ends at the kernel / HAL interface. So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
        Godel_unicode 6y ago
        This is, of course, totally untrue. Samsung changes a ton of things about their flavor of Android, at every level of the stack. Edit: Samsung has apparently already ripped out the Bluetooth stack and replaced it with their own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447
  - cogman10 6y ago
    I get what you are saying but they are simply in different positions. Broadcom can say "Hey, there's a bunch of work here to make this not suck" and Samsung, even if they wanted to do their own thing, realizes they too would have to go through that effort to make everything work. It wouldn't be a simple matter of just making non-sucky bluetooth, they'd have to also work with the android OS to improve the bluetooth stack and no guarantee that those changes can be merged. Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices. > Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away. If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.
oriolid 6y ago
It's because Samsung can get away with selling total garbage. I work on an audio-related app, and a huge majority of the hacks in the app to work around bugs in phones are for different Samsung models. Still more than half of our users keep buying them.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  This, but slightly revised: it's because Samsung is in the market of selling cheap hardware. Apple sells luxury products and part of their value-add is leverage with their vendors. Apple can come to a vendor and say "these are our constraints on what we are willing to buy. Here's testing benchmarks. You are required to meet them. Failure to do so voids the purchase contract." The vendor will then, of course, say "We'll have to charge you more if we're spinning up a test infrastructure we don't have." And then Apple will negotiate a price point and pass the anti-savings onto the consumer. They do this at multiple levels at multiple points in their hardware story. I met someone once who worked on the USB integration specs back in the first-couple-generation iBooks. Apple built a rig for physically testing the connectors (including multiple cycles of intentional mis-plug, i.e. flipping a USB-A connector over wrong-side-up and pushing hard against the socket). They told the vendors selling them USB sockets that the sockets had to survive the rig, or the sale was void. Vendors priced accordingly. But the resulting product is more robust than others on the market.
  - oriolid 6y ago
    > Samsung is in the market of selling cheap hardware I'm not sure about this. There are people who pay >1000€ for their flagship phones and believe them to be premium products, but they are just as buggy as the cheap ones. Huge amount of CPU power and impressive camera specs, though.
    - iopq 6y ago
      I've never had one, can you expound more on this topic? The S21 Ultra seems like a very good purchase from reviews. QHD screen with dynamically adjusted 120Hz seems really like the best spec.
masklinn 6y ago
> Apple still has the most successful single models? Not just that, every apple device has wireless access, and Apple has thrice the operating income and more than twice the net income of Samsung Electronics. But yes the "value" of individual devices is also part of the equation, in the sense that Samsung has a lot of cheap-ish devices with fairly short lifetimes, they're not going to fight for device quality. Apple has a very limited number of devices they support for a long time. And they're probably bringing in a lot of baggage from having been screwed over by the plans and fuckups of their suppliers in the past. And even then, the more time passes the more they just go "fuck'em all" and move chip design in-house, not just the "main" chips (AX, MX, SX) but the ancillary as well: the WX and HX series integrate bluetooth on the SoC. There's no doubt they'll eventually go their own way on larger devices as well, the U1 is probably the first steps towards that.
rkangel 6y ago
I didn't realise that Samsung actually sold more phones than Apple (I've just looked at the numbers and you're right). Apple's smaller set of devices does help them a little but there isn't a lot to choose there. I think my overall point is still valid because I have had Samsung phones for a while and have found their Bluetooth to be pretty good. This is not surprising as Samsung actually bought one of the biggest Bluetooth chip vendors (CSR) at one point, so they do have control over the full stack.
- pw201 6y ago
  Samsung bought what was advertised as mobile handset business after CSR failed to spot that combo BT/Wifi chips were the future and threw away their lead. Qualcomm got the rest a few years later. ("what was advertised as" because there wasn't really a differentiation in the R&D bits, so there was a somewhat arbitrary split and hasty redacting of repos given to Samsung to avoid names of other customers in comments). Samsung's phone division and electronic parts division aren't the same thing, so there was no guarantee that the phones would buy the Bluetooth/Wifi from their new acquisition, although I hear they did eventually.
blihp 6y ago
A typical manufacturer approach is to beat the hell out of your suppliers on price to make your margin which is likely most of what Samsung does with its buying power. Apple does that but is also willing to throw money at issues and go as far as financing facilities for vendors. Where most manufacturers don't care about the device they sold the second it's out of warranty[1], Apple takes a longer term view of the relationship. So Apple is far more likely to say 'we need this fixed and are willing to provide X million dollars and a team of our own engineers to solve the problem' while Samsung probably goes more like 'make cheaper and make it better... and make it cheaper!' So the reason Samsung typically has less influence is that when all you do is crush your suppliers margins to make your own, said suppliers don't tend to make much of an investment in making things better since they are incentivized to just make them cheaper. [1] in fairness, they can't afford to: while Apple has an ongoing revenue stream from its devices, most other manufacturers don't. It's Google/Facebook/etc who monetize the devices post-sale while for the original device manufacturer it's merely a liability at that point. This is a factor in why Android has a rather dismal track record re: updates on older devices.

by est31 6y ago

cogman10 6y ago

I'd imagine lots of reasons. Apple has the hardware guys to design whatever chip they need. They also have a mountain of reserve capital (Something like $1 trillion I believe?). Further, Apple's closed ecosystem means that if you want them to sell them your hardware you have to conform to their standards. With Samsung and android, it's a different story. There are many android vendors and the people producing the Bluetooth chips are selling to many of them (broadcom). Samsung has the ability to make their own chips, but to get everything working flawlessly they not only have to make their chips awesome but also improve the android driver stack to work with their new awesome chips. That stack has to also be compatible with the other bluetooth manufactures on the market making it a harder change to make. In other words, with apple and a vendor, there are pretty much just the 2 parties involved which control everything. With Samsung and vendor it's not just them but also the likes of google and other bluetooth vendors that can get in the way of really fixing things.

signal11 6y ago
I get what you're saying, but Samsung is also huge and Bluetooth is used in lots of electronics that Samsung sells -- including laptops, tablets, smart watches, TVs... or conceivably could sell, like future IoT products. If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. I know cases where they've had two suppliers. Displays and modems come to mind, although I've not Googled to verify.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering. The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.
  - dflock 6y ago
    > go and implement the technology on their own Samsung could obviously do this too, but as you say, they lack the will - and motivation.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Besides that they also lack the amount of control over the software side. Google is the entity that controls the stack, not Samsung - their responsibility ends at the kernel / HAL interface. So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
      - Godel_unicode 6y ago
        This is, of course, totally untrue. Samsung changes a ton of things about their flavor of Android, at every level of the stack. Edit: Samsung has apparently already ripped out the Bluetooth stack and replaced it with their own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447
- cogman10 6y ago
  I get what you are saying but they are simply in different positions. Broadcom can say "Hey, there's a bunch of work here to make this not suck" and Samsung, even if they wanted to do their own thing, realizes they too would have to go through that effort to make everything work. It wouldn't be a simple matter of just making non-sucky bluetooth, they'd have to also work with the android OS to improve the bluetooth stack and no guarantee that those changes can be merged. Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices. > Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away. If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.

oriolid 6y ago

It's because Samsung can get away with selling total garbage. I work on an audio-related app, and a huge majority of the hacks in the app to work around bugs in phones are for different Samsung models. Still more than half of our users keep buying them.

shadowgovt 6y ago
This, but slightly revised: it's because Samsung is in the market of selling cheap hardware. Apple sells luxury products and part of their value-add is leverage with their vendors. Apple can come to a vendor and say "these are our constraints on what we are willing to buy. Here's testing benchmarks. You are required to meet them. Failure to do so voids the purchase contract." The vendor will then, of course, say "We'll have to charge you more if we're spinning up a test infrastructure we don't have." And then Apple will negotiate a price point and pass the anti-savings onto the consumer. They do this at multiple levels at multiple points in their hardware story. I met someone once who worked on the USB integration specs back in the first-couple-generation iBooks. Apple built a rig for physically testing the connectors (including multiple cycles of intentional mis-plug, i.e. flipping a USB-A connector over wrong-side-up and pushing hard against the socket). They told the vendors selling them USB sockets that the sockets had to survive the rig, or the sale was void. Vendors priced accordingly. But the resulting product is more robust than others on the market.
- oriolid 6y ago
  > Samsung is in the market of selling cheap hardware I'm not sure about this. There are people who pay >1000€ for their flagship phones and believe them to be premium products, but they are just as buggy as the cheap ones. Huge amount of CPU power and impressive camera specs, though.
  - iopq 6y ago
    I've never had one, can you expound more on this topic? The S21 Ultra seems like a very good purchase from reviews. QHD screen with dynamically adjusted 120Hz seems really like the best spec.

masklinn 6y ago

> Apple still has the most successful single models? Not just that, every apple device has wireless access, and Apple has thrice the operating income and more than twice the net income of Samsung Electronics. But yes the "value" of individual devices is also part of the equation, in the sense that Samsung has a lot of cheap-ish devices with fairly short lifetimes, they're not going to fight for device quality. Apple has a very limited number of devices they support for a long time. And they're probably bringing in a lot of baggage from having been screwed over by the plans and fuckups of their suppliers in the past. And even then, the more time passes the more they just go "fuck'em all" and move chip design in-house, not just the "main" chips (AX, MX, SX) but the ancillary as well: the WX and HX series integrate bluetooth on the SoC. There's no doubt they'll eventually go their own way on larger devices as well, the U1 is probably the first steps towards that.

rkangel 6y ago

I didn't realise that Samsung actually sold more phones than Apple (I've just looked at the numbers and you're right). Apple's smaller set of devices does help them a little but there isn't a lot to choose there. I think my overall point is still valid because I have had Samsung phones for a while and have found their Bluetooth to be pretty good. This is not surprising as Samsung actually bought one of the biggest Bluetooth chip vendors (CSR) at one point, so they do have control over the full stack.

pw201 6y ago
Samsung bought what was advertised as mobile handset business after CSR failed to spot that combo BT/Wifi chips were the future and threw away their lead. Qualcomm got the rest a few years later. ("what was advertised as" because there wasn't really a differentiation in the R&D bits, so there was a somewhat arbitrary split and hasty redacting of repos given to Samsung to avoid names of other customers in comments). Samsung's phone division and electronic parts division aren't the same thing, so there was no guarantee that the phones would buy the Bluetooth/Wifi from their new acquisition, although I hear they did eventually.

blihp 6y ago

A typical manufacturer approach is to beat the hell out of your suppliers on price to make your margin which is likely most of what Samsung does with its buying power. Apple does that but is also willing to throw money at issues and go as far as financing facilities for vendors. Where most manufacturers don't care about the device they sold the second it's out of warranty[1], Apple takes a longer term view of the relationship. So Apple is far more likely to say 'we need this fixed and are willing to provide X million dollars and a team of our own engineers to solve the problem' while Samsung probably goes more like 'make cheaper and make it better... and make it cheaper!' So the reason Samsung typically has less influence is that when all you do is crush your suppliers margins to make your own, said suppliers don't tend to make much of an investment in making things better since they are incentivized to just make them cheaper. [1] in fairness, they can't afford to: while Apple has an ongoing revenue stream from its devices, most other manufacturers don't. It's Google/Facebook/etc who monetize the devices post-sale while for the original device manufacturer it's merely a liability at that point. This is a factor in why Android has a rather dismal track record re: updates on older devices.