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Do whatever they are doing now, but twice? What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
Peak HN. Surely a casual brainstorm by a casual reader of the thread somehow unlocks all of the challenges that ASML is facing.
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They make about 50 a year. One of the parts in these machines is a 30cm mirror that is the flattest that humans can make with our current level of technology. If you have a way to churn them out please let Zeiss SMT know.
Do whatever they are doing now, but twice? What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
For example, the mirror might require extremely high purity silica, made in a top-notch cleanroom environment. To produce 2x, you don't just need 2x the raw material, you need 2x the air filtration systems, purifying machines, trained staff.
Which is fine, that large footprint can be doubled! But maybe this whole process is only going to be state-of-the-art for 5 years, and after that won't command top dollar.
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Do whatever they are doing now, but twice? What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
Doing twice as much of it wouldn't scale. Making a super-flat mirror is extremely difficult and requires state-of-the-art facilities, and state-of-the-art equipment. And highly trained, experienced employees. And there aren't enough of any of that to scale rapidly. It's not just about scaling 1 input. You have to scale the entire supply chain.
If there is enough money sitting on the table, it seems like it would be worth it to do that. But it sounds like it would take too long with uncertain returns?
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They make about 50 a year. One of the parts in these machines is a 30cm mirror that is the flattest that humans can make with our current level of technology. If you have a way to churn them out please let Zeiss SMT know.
Do whatever they are doing now, but twice? What in the process wouldn’t work with this method?
Presumably a lot of the machinery needed to build these components is incredibly specialized too. That machinery won't be purchasable off the shelf. It will be ordered custom with long lead times, and (again!) could have bottlenecks in production that make it simply impossible to deliver in large quantities.
I'd bet (with no supporting evidence, just a gut feeling) that this industry needs to know five years in advance what the demand for chips in a given process node is going to be just to set up the supply chains to manufacture the right number of lithography machines. If that estimate is wrong, it'll take so long to build up that infrastructure that you might as well not bother, and just try to get things right for the next node.
Tim Cook must sweat bullets every time he reads a headline about China potentially invading Taiwan.
Tim Cook has shown a pretty serious willingness to work with the CCP in the past, and their human rights track record right now is pretty bad. What makes you think either he wouldn't do so after an invasion or that China would do anything to disrupt one of the biggest prices and competitive advantages in the world (TSMC)?
Yes, this would lower QoL pretty significantly for both countries.
And this is what we call monopsony.
It definitely would be nice if there were more options at the cutting edge, but it's like that for good reasons and it's not likely to change.
I’d love some super smart technologist in this forum to give a realistic and practical pathway to disrupting apple in the mobile or “computer” market. Given the fact that Apple has such a dominant position in every part of the supply chain infrastructure I’m challenged with being able to see how any organization could possibly come up with something that pushes Apple into bankruptcy.
Is this really something a technologist could take on? Apple could almost certainly copy and improve any hot new tech before it has time to seriously hurt their bottom line. They have a ton of resources... My guess is that only another Apple could dethrone Apple. That's to say a company that produces high quality products with strong branding consistently over multiple decades. Google and Samsung are competitors but…
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You don't mention Samsung, is this the case of their 3nm not being actually 3nm? https://wccftech.com/samsung-secures-3-nm-advanced-chip-orde...
I'm not an expert on the tech and can't say. Just going on what the Economist article talks about, South Korean manufacturing represents a tiny fraction of the smallest processes right now. The article you linked says the 3nm will start producing in 2024. That's good news, maybe there's competition coming.
I just don't think Samsung is really that far behind as right now both companies are just selling promises.
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Or in the case of desktop/laptop computers, "I want Microsoft to have the power". If Apple suddenly vanished, realistically speaking most of its desktop marketshare would fall directly into Microsoft's lap as those users switched to Windows. The only exception would be devs using Linux instead, which at best represents a single digit percentage of computer users. So in this scenario you end up with Windows being cata…
But ... Apple isn't going to suddenly vanish. It would be a slow fade, and there's plenty of room for different things to happen. All those Mac users aren't going to be in a hurry to run to Windows. It's certainly possible Microsoft could build something attractive to them, but I think it's also quite possible that someone else could too. But that said, even if MS did get all the market, when the concern is Apple's c…
I think it would take quite a significant investment — as much or more than e.g. Framework has sunk into building their hardware business — to smooth the desktop Linux experience out enough to appeal to non-developer Mac users. That last "10%" that the desktop Linux is missing is hard. It'd also probably take a unprecedented level of cooperation from hardware component manufacturers to make high quality Linux drivers available for components from day one (the general consumer isn't going to want to wait somewhere between half and a full generation for robust hardware support, as is the case with the components in many prebuilt computers).
That's not impossible but it'd take a confluence of events that I don't see as particularly likely.
> …wouldn't an MS world be better? I am certainly no fan of Windows, but it does seem much more compatible, and usable in broader ecosystems than Macs do.
Compatibility and flexibility are qualities Windows has now at least in part due to meaningful competition. Make no mistake, Microsoft would love to command a walled garden of their own if they could, and in the absence of Macs they could probably boil the frog into making such a thing reality.
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One of the hallmarks of being a hacker is a Democratic spirit. The ethos that we’re forever vigilant and deeply skeptical of structural power. Apple has too much power, no for profit company or person can responsibly wield with that much power.
It’s a nice thought, but the reality is statements like this are just “I want google to have the power” and that’s not better
There’s literally hundreds of ways to organize people’s labor that isn’t just private capital Vs private capital but there seems to be best few leaders that are thinking outside the box.
My preferred approach here is actually building a powerful democratic cooperative, and I’ve written a ton on this site alone on that. That seems like it’s equally as hard as trying to build a direct competitor, with the upside that it’s Democratic. Why shouldn’t we try?