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Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology. Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see
by simonh 4y ago
Yes, but the reasons are to do with business and investment as much as technology.
Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, and it’s hard to see that changing. The reason is that they capture a huge slice of the profits in mobile phones. Something like 90%. For a while they capture over 100% of profits, because so many of their competitors were operating at a loss. This enables them to make investments their competitors can’t. Also because their competitors use commodity chips developed by Cisco and Samsung none of the Android vendors can use those chips to differentiate their products, which means even for flagship phones the CPU isn’t a unique selling points, so they can’t justify buying super premium chips. Without the guaranteed sales, the chip vendors can’t justify investing in making super premium chips. They’ve been stuck in this rut for almost a decade now, and still not found a way out. Success breeds investment, but without investment they can’t achieve success. It’s a negative feedback loop, compounded by a prisoner’s dilemma.
With desktop and server chips these factors don’t apply. Apple will never dominate the desktop and server CPU market because they’ve positioned themselves as a niche premium brand. They don’t even make servers, and the desktops they do make are ridiculously high end. They can’t go down market without eviscerating their margins. There’s still huge amounts of money to be made in those sectors, so vendors like Intel and AMD can afford to put in massive investment in new designs. They may be behind now, in some ways, but I don’t see any barriers to them competing in the near to long term.
- jinto36 4y ago* presumably Qualcomm and not Cisco, for mobile SoCs?
- cm277 4y ago100%; the business model side is the major advantage Apple has here. Part of that advantage is the sheer size of the market compared to desktop/servers. They will sell 10s of times more CPUs for iPhones/Macs than anyone will sell for servers/desktops. I am less optimistic that anyone else can compete, since no one else seems to be able to straddle both markets and use scale across both.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago> Apple utterly dominates the mobile phone CPU landscape, That seems to be an interesting definition of "dominates". 14% of global smartphones from independents. 24% by Apple's claims. A curious kind of domination.
- dav43 4y agoI read “dominates” as has the “dominate share of the profits for the industry”. Not dominates shipments.
- belltaco 4y agoBy that metric Microsoft utterly dominates the web server market.
- zinekeller 4y agoYes, but that's not the point here. I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits but Apple is definitely reinvesting them back into making better phones.
- solardev 4y ago> I don't know what Microsoft does with their IIS profits That's ok. Microsoft doesn't either ;)
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThe point is that you've chosen a questionable benchmark that is only correct if you adopt a very spwsific point of view.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoI think the @simonh "domination" point is that Apple has dominated the mobile phone CPU PROFITABILITY landscape, not the SALES landscape, and I for one feel @simonh has a valid point.
- philistine 4y agoMaybe commoditizing and refusing to differentiate your products, merely being content to shove the pablum OS everyone uses is a mistake?