Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 467 posts

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#321

Post by swores »

jdmichal wrote: post #317
ar_lan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating. I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped becau…

The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. It was a library management platform (2001) that also offered purchase and download of FairPlay DRM-laden music files (2003). Later it would offer DRM-free MP3 download for select music (2007) and eventually its entire catalog (2009).

Why be so quick to jump to "I can tell someone why they're wrong"? Taking the time to read their comment a second time might lead to the realisation that they clearly weren't commenting based on a perceived connection of 'streaming platforms', the connection was "business models which succeeded on account of offering a legal & convenient service cheap enough for people to choose it over their previous piracy".

Maybe I've just done the exact same thing, perhaps I was wrong to read an attempted correction into your comment and you just thought you were adding some interesting additional information to the conversation. In which case my bad, and sorry. But I think unlikely you'd share that as random "fun fact" extra info rather than replying to a misunderstanding of the previous comment's point.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#322

Post by mrguyorama »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #262
meindnoch wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"

> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and e…

Do you reboot every day?

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#323

Post by robocat »

Havoc wrote: post #158

At what point does this become a monopoly issue? Sure others could have outbid hypothetically so it is on paper fair but Apple has a lot of cash.

Conjecture: I suspect that Apple is underwriting or paying for the new fabs years in advance, since Apple has wads of cash overseas that it needs to invest (due to US tax laws). Apple can place orders years in advance for all the output of entire fabs, and by paying for fabs it would be able to control costs of exclusive orders for the production. Apple doesn’t want to bid prices up against competitors, so long term contracts make sense. TSMC would perhaps not be able to finance such aggressive moves to new nodes without Apple, and contracts can remove most financial risk for TSMC.

The above is just capitalism at work - the richest company in the world investing in the world’s most expensive toys. Apple has ~5x the market cap of NVidia and Apple can predict their usage of silicon, whereas NVidia’s market is more volatile.

Whether the above is monopoly power is arguable.

I also would strongly suspect that TSMC has political requirements embedded in the contracts. For example Taiwan needs phones that are secure against China (security against state level attacks), and Apple can meet needs that other fab users cannot. There is no doubt in my mind that TSMC are using Apple as part of their silicon shield: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Taiwan+Silicon-Shield

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#324

Post by wvaske »

josephcsible wrote: post #310

It feels somehow unfair and anticompetitive to buy up all the stock of the best processors so PCs and Android devices can't have any.

They don't really compete with desktop processors. During the initial phases of production, there are still relatively high defects per wafer. But the mobile chips are small so you lose a small percentage of chips per wafer due to these defects.

After the defect rate decreases enough then the larger chips will start to get made (GPUs, and CPUs).

If this is true, Apple is getting exclusive access for a period of time when the failure rates are highest then other customers will get their allotments down the road when defect rates are at acceptable levels for the size of their chips.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#326

Post by kilolima »

Seanambers wrote: post #318
anthomtb wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>music pricing. For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.

Can't imagine anyone putting anything other than pirated mp3s in 95%+ of mp3 players ever produced.

So would it be fair to say that Apple built the iPod to take advantage of music piracy?

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#327

Post by anthk »

derefr wrote: post #274
giobox wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous. Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 9…

> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one. Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies c…

No, you are wrong. Since Windows 98, having a machine with a CD was mandatory to be a multimedia PC. Heck, I remember four CD game releases such as Blade Runner.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#328

Post by jdmichal »

guiambros wrote: post #184
coder543 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen I disagree entirely, for reasons that should be obvious once we examine the actual state of the market at the time. Storage was not the thing that made iPod successful. The microdrive had existed for several years by then[0][1], developed originally for digital cameras. Like most st…

From Wikipedia: " A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499. " Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product. It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of t…

> It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.

PDAs were being developed at the same time as the iPod and probably have a much better parental claim than the iPod. The first smartphones -- the ones before the iPhone -- were basically PDAs with cellular modems, and utilized the similar OSes as their non-modem-bearing predecessors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant

I had an HTC Wizard, specifically the Cingular 8100, which came out two years before the first iPhone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#329

Post by rcarr »

ozarker wrote: post #290
rcarr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rust community seem to be leading the fightback on this but I think it'll be about 5 years before there's a big switch over. If I owned a popular electron app, I would definitely be thinking about starting to write a Rust version or migrating to Tauri because if you're not then somebody will be. Once that Rust version hits feature parity with your core functionality people will end up jumping ship for the faster,…

5 years sounds optimistic

You've got stuff like the following that are coming along nicely so might not be as far down the road as you think:

- https://zed.dev/releases

- https://lapce.dev

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#330

Post by anthk »

derefr wrote: post #299
giobox wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97. For what its worth, Microsoft Office…

You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001 , would tend to hav…

I'm from 1987, and born in Spain. Most DOS games (mainly shareware ones from magazines) were dead by ~1998-1999. Multimedia software exploded since 1996 even for multimedia CD's in Spanish, such as encyclopedias, cooking guides, video guides, tourist VR views, Trivia games and so on. No one mentally sane would develop for DOS in 2001. Period. By 1999 everyone who was a PC user had a CD drive for it, at least to install Windows 98 and any modern game. That's it.

Floppies were only used to share small documents and maybe some split(1)/Hacha splitted software from cybercafes into some floppy stacks.

And to boot from floppy on unsupported PC's.

Bear in mind that most Pentium MMX based PC's had a CD drive. Even the ones still running in 2002 were CD based.

Post reply on HN