> I wonder if it's because Apple captures so much margin from the final product which means they can afford to spend top dollar on CPU design teams? That's an

> I wonder if it's because Apple captures so much margin from the final product which means they can afford to spend top dollar on CPU design teams? That's an excellent question. If I could answer it completely and definitively I'd probably be making my living as an industry analyst for some magazine or investment fund. I have a suspicion that might be right, though. Apple and Google today, and sometimes other companies, are starting to remind me of AT&T before the divestiture. They're such big, profitable players that they can have huge skunkworks attacking adjacent problems to their core business and keep doing so in new directions.