4 ms·

I suppose it could also mean increased investment in plant, R&D. aquisitions or reduced margins.

smoldesu 5y ago
I'd hope that money could be put towards researching ways to make their machines less fragile, or how to engineer an M.2 slot in a professional device with more than enough room. Maybe a thinner camera?
- brokencode 5y ago
  Infinite money doesn’t translate into infinite R&D, unfortunately. As pointed out by books like The Mythical Man Month, you can’t necessarily speed up development by adding more engineers/resources.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Put another way, infinite R&D will produce diminishing returns very quickly in the same time frame with the same constraints. R&D is a very long game to play, and depends on anticipating and adapting to more favorable constraints. Edit: that said! The benefit of investing in it anyway is potentially changing the course or severity if those constraints by having more control over them.
cronix 5y ago
My bet is on their own fab(s) at some near-future point. They are one of the few who can afford the infrastructure (buildings/equipment) and talent, and they totally rely on a supply chain that is currently dubious, and has the real potential to get a lot worse. And it would fit into all current and likely all future projects Apple does and would likely do since they have proven they are more than capable of designing their own chips.
- sneak 5y ago
  It makes logical sense from a supply chain standpoint, but I fail to see how the fact that Apple is good at designing chips has any relevance whatsoever to the idea that Apple may or may not be good at manufacturing those same chips. "Everybody knows" that a big chunk of the M1/mac performance dominance right now is due to their buying out huge amounts of TSMC capacity at leading edge nodes. Thus, much of the recent M1/M1Pro/M1Max "great leap forward" (pun intended) are directly attributable to TSMC specifically. If every ROI-seeking multibilliondollar hedge fund in the world can't build a leading edge node fab or two to compete with TSMC, what suggests that Apple's money would do any better? Note that this isn't rhetoric - Apple may well be able to do this, and better than some/most; I just don't have any data at hand (myself, it may exist) to suggest that the Apple cash reserves are in any way smarter at this task than big institutional dumb money reserves (which dwarf Apple in market aggregate).
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    A decade and change prior we could have said the same thing about doing in-house chip design instead of just buying off-the-shelf Samsung parts. Or designing their own GPU technology instead of just licensing PowerVR cores. Apple did not have those skills internally and there was no guarantee that those projects would pan out. If there is one thing Apple is actually "good at", it's hiring people who are good at things they don't specialize in, and using those people to build out their own capabilities. So if Tim Cook decided that they need in-house fabs, they would use their massive cash reserves to hire and buy whoever and whatever they need to set up in-house fabs.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > "Everybody knows" that a big chunk of the M1/mac performance dominance right now is due to their buying out huge amounts of TSMC capacity at leading edge nodes. Thus, much of the recent M1/M1Pro/M1Max "great leap forward" (pun intended) are directly attributable to TSMC specifically. That sounds like good common sense, but you don't get the huge leaps in performance that we're seeing with single process advantage (7nm vs 5nm). Qualcomm has 5nm process ARM chips and they barely compete against what apple was shipping on 7nm ~2yrs ago.
  - cronix 5y ago
- j4_hnews 5y ago
  They will contract Intel.
  - short12 5y ago
    Intel? The company that is way behind and can't deliver?? Why?
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  Hmm. As a chip designer, I think there is no chance this will happen. Running a modern foundry is a huge investment and while they move a lot of silicon volume, it is not enough to support a foundry. Not even close. Second, a foundry is a relatively low margin, high volume, high risk business. That is not the kind of business area that Apple enters. Third, running a modern foundry is an incredibly complex process with a huge level of specialized knowledge requiring years of experience to make it all reliably work with high yield. As someone who has been in the business for over 30 years, I won't hold my breath waiting for Apple to build their own semi foundry. On the other hand, might they contribute some investment to help TSMC expand into the US or other locales to further improve their priority and pricing? That is likely to happen. They often make large investments to help their partners spool up and meet the required volumes for Apple business.

I'd hope that money could be put towards researching ways to make their machines less fragile, or how to engineer an M.2 slot in a professional device with more than enough room. Maybe a thinner camera?

brokencode 5y ago
Infinite money doesn’t translate into infinite R&D, unfortunately. As pointed out by books like The Mythical Man Month, you can’t necessarily speed up development by adding more engineers/resources.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Put another way, infinite R&D will produce diminishing returns very quickly in the same time frame with the same constraints. R&D is a very long game to play, and depends on anticipating and adapting to more favorable constraints. Edit: that said! The benefit of investing in it anyway is potentially changing the course or severity if those constraints by having more control over them.

cronix 5y ago

My bet is on their own fab(s) at some near-future point. They are one of the few who can afford the infrastructure (buildings/equipment) and talent, and they totally rely on a supply chain that is currently dubious, and has the real potential to get a lot worse. And it would fit into all current and likely all future projects Apple does and would likely do since they have proven they are more than capable of designing their own chips.

sneak 5y ago
It makes logical sense from a supply chain standpoint, but I fail to see how the fact that Apple is good at designing chips has any relevance whatsoever to the idea that Apple may or may not be good at manufacturing those same chips. "Everybody knows" that a big chunk of the M1/mac performance dominance right now is due to their buying out huge amounts of TSMC capacity at leading edge nodes. Thus, much of the recent M1/M1Pro/M1Max "great leap forward" (pun intended) are directly attributable to TSMC specifically. If every ROI-seeking multibilliondollar hedge fund in the world can't build a leading edge node fab or two to compete with TSMC, what suggests that Apple's money would do any better? Note that this isn't rhetoric - Apple may well be able to do this, and better than some/most; I just don't have any data at hand (myself, it may exist) to suggest that the Apple cash reserves are in any way smarter at this task than big institutional dumb money reserves (which dwarf Apple in market aggregate).
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  A decade and change prior we could have said the same thing about doing in-house chip design instead of just buying off-the-shelf Samsung parts. Or designing their own GPU technology instead of just licensing PowerVR cores. Apple did not have those skills internally and there was no guarantee that those projects would pan out. If there is one thing Apple is actually "good at", it's hiring people who are good at things they don't specialize in, and using those people to build out their own capabilities. So if Tim Cook decided that they need in-house fabs, they would use their massive cash reserves to hire and buy whoever and whatever they need to set up in-house fabs.
- djrogers 5y ago
  > "Everybody knows" that a big chunk of the M1/mac performance dominance right now is due to their buying out huge amounts of TSMC capacity at leading edge nodes. Thus, much of the recent M1/M1Pro/M1Max "great leap forward" (pun intended) are directly attributable to TSMC specifically. That sounds like good common sense, but you don't get the huge leaps in performance that we're seeing with single process advantage (7nm vs 5nm). Qualcomm has 5nm process ARM chips and they barely compete against what apple was shipping on 7nm ~2yrs ago.
- cronix 5y ago
j4_hnews 5y ago
They will contract Intel.
- short12 5y ago
  Intel? The company that is way behind and can't deliver?? Why?
dev_tty01 5y ago
Hmm. As a chip designer, I think there is no chance this will happen. Running a modern foundry is a huge investment and while they move a lot of silicon volume, it is not enough to support a foundry. Not even close. Second, a foundry is a relatively low margin, high volume, high risk business. That is not the kind of business area that Apple enters. Third, running a modern foundry is an incredibly complex process with a huge level of specialized knowledge requiring years of experience to make it all reliably work with high yield. As someone who has been in the business for over 30 years, I won't hold my breath waiting for Apple to build their own semi foundry. On the other hand, might they contribute some investment to help TSMC expand into the US or other locales to further improve their priority and pricing? That is likely to happen. They often make large investments to help their partners spool up and meet the required volumes for Apple business.