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Apple is America's semiconductor problem

semiconductor-digest.com

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Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#191

Post by Y_Y »

baxtr wrote: post #190
tsunamifury wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand if you have ever worked at a high level in these companies they are hardcore evil. Maybe not in this case but they 100% do the evil thing and press it to their advantage.

That’s the story you’re telling yourself to make sense of the world.

I would call this "understanding" and reckon it you could use it as a reply to pretty much any comment. Unless you see things exactly as they are and apply no interpretation, then this is the mechanism by which humans "make sense" of the world.

I guess you mean that the story is harmfully reductive or demands further critical examination, but I just want to defend telling oneself stories as a thinking tool.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#192

Post by fsflover »

ankit219 wrote: post #107

A weird article. Apple was not the first or the only company to look to East Asia for cheap manufacturing, elctronic equipments, chips, or cheap labor. The trend was started and accelerated by motor companies and hardware just followed suit. Then, some other points are just...there. Apple is America's semiconductor problem because Apple is so big it purchases things in bulk and gets discounts - like every other big c…

> It's one thing to assume the most nefarious intent from the start and then look at everything from that lens. It mostly leads to paranoia, not insight.

The intent is pretty clear and uncontroversial: profit by all means, like any other for-profit entity. Real problems arise when the company becomes (nearly-)monopolistic and their actions start to harm whole industries, like in this case. In other news, monopolies are bad for you.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#193

Post by _djo_ »

cryptica wrote: post #180

In this case, people are the problem for being suggestible and buying Apple obsessively. I've worked for 3 different tech companies which bought and forced me to use an expensive company-supplied MacBook, in spite of the fact that their software project ran in production on Linux which is free. The problem is that people are brainwashed.

That says more about you than about those making those decisions. Have you ever spent the time to figure out why those tech companies might prefer to issue Macs? To look at their total cost of ownership numbers, at the availability of configuration management and security software, at levels of support, and at overall reliability and machine lifespan?

I've been involved in a few exercises to decide what type of machine to use as a standard developer spec device. MacBooks generally turned out to be our best option when taking all requirements into account.

Linux-based offerings are getting steadily better, which is a good thing, but levels of support are still a bit of a problem.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#194

Post by baxtr »

Y_Y wrote: post #191
baxtr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the story you’re telling yourself to make sense of the world.

I would call this "understanding" and reckon it you could use it as a reply to pretty much any comment. Unless you see things exactly as they are and apply no interpretation, then this is the mechanism by which humans "make sense" of the world. I guess you mean that the story is harmfully reductive or demands further critical examination, but I just want to defend telling oneself stories as a thinking tool.

I agree that as human beings we can’t live without stories as thinking tool. Although I wouldn’t call it “understanding” but “interpreting”.

I wanted to say that good vs evil are hardly absolutes. No one at a large corporate comes to work saying: today I will be evil again.

Instead they tell themselves they’re helping investors getting a good return, or that they’re “smashing Google for copying iOS”.

There is a great quote by Shakespeare saying: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I’d say storytelling makes it so!

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#195

Post by _djo_ »

These two articles are much better at explaining why any smartphone or computer manufacturer could never hope to source most of their components from the US.

It's not just about semiconductors, but the entire supply chain.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/why-the...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#196

Post by Y_Y »

paulmd wrote: post #150
wrsh07 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with your take. Mobile is particularly challenging. I'm optimistic about a hardware only startup succeeding (Framework but for phones), but building your own hardware and your own OS is much harder, I think. This doesn't negate any of your points

For an even spicier take: GPL has accelerated/worsened this trend, imo. Not out of anything they really did wrong, but actually just by well-intentioned success. It’s about “code revenue” vs “services revenue”. If I can’t sell you a copy of Office 97, well, obviously that pushes things to the Office 365 model. And the unfortunate reality is that a huge amount of important code is now GPL, which means a huge amount of…

Overall great comment, I wanted to highlight the part about "dumping". A huge amount of dumping-equivalent behaviour guess on in the software industry, I sometimes wonder what kind of market we'd see if it were prevented.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#197

Post by rowanG077 »

Kirby64 wrote: post #154
rowanG077 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. Apple pays insanely well to exclusively use TSMC top tier node. I would not be surprised if the SoC in an iphone costs Apple 10 times as much as the average android phone SoC.

The “average” SoC or the high end ones in flagships? Don’t be surprised at how much Qualcomm charges for their flagship stuff. Even if Qualcomm is a node behind, they also need their “margin” for making the thing. Apple pays a big design team, but they don’t pay the additional margin on the SoC… just whatever TSMC charges. Remember, Qualcomm has to pay TSMC too.

The average. We are talking about the entire smartphone market here. It makes no sense to compare only the most expensive android chips.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#198

Post by threeseed »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #186
teknologist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To show them that their battery life could go from 2.5 hours to 8 or more, perhaps. That was the Mac experience that customers weren't asking for yet "wowed" them when it came.

> To show them that their battery life could go from 2.5 hours to 8 or more, perhaps. x86 already was on its way towards such a goal.

Years later.

And it took the threat of the PC industry moving to ARM to light a fire under Intel.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#199

Post by happymellon »

rob74 wrote: post #187
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had delivered a version of Windows for ARM capable of seamlessly emulating x86 code with no compromises This is hardly possible on most ARM chips because x86 has a much stronger memory model than ARM. Also concerning "with no compromises": common x86 implementations have a very fast implementation of the SIMD instruction sets (SSE..., AVX/AVX2, perhaps AVX-512) that is much slower to emulate on ARM because…

Well, Apple seems to have achieved this (for all intents or purposes) on MacOS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2 - "In some benchmarks, x86-64-only programs performed better under Rosetta 2 on a Mac with an Apple M1 SOC than natively on a Mac with an Intel x86-64 processor"), so there's no reason why Microsoft shouldn't be able to do the same for Windows? Of course, Apple designed the M ser…

The M1 was significantly faster than other ARM chips.

Why? My impression is that due to Apples permissive licence, they are able to make more changes. If we just look at the mess that ARM is making of Qualcomm situation, where we finally have a performing alternative chip.

Arm hasn't granted anyone else the ability to make significantly modified chips for multiple platforms, so Nuvia were fine while it was all just research.

> Arm's claim against Qualcomm and Nuvia is about protecting the Arm ecosystem and partners who rely on our IP and innovative designs, and therefore enforcing Qualcomm's contractual obligation to destroy and stop using the Nuvia designs that were derived from Arm technology

Its rather telling that Qualcomm are allowed to make mobile chips, but not these ones because they want to "protect the ARM ecosystem".

RISC V can't come soon enough.

Re: Apple is America's semiconductor problem

#200

Post by lnsru »

baxtr wrote: post #190
tsunamifury wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand if you have ever worked at a high level in these companies they are hardcore evil. Maybe not in this case but they 100% do the evil thing and press it to their advantage.

That’s the story you’re telling yourself to make sense of the world.

Think about recent Boeing adventures. I will put these doings definitely in the evil category.
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