Jony Ive's new "independent" firm has one big primary client: Apple.

John Gruber had thoughts on that in one of his two takes on the issue so far

> This angle that he’s still going to work with Apple as an independent design firm seems like pure spin. You’re either at Apple or you’re not. Ive is out.

But also,

> Apple’s hardware and industrial design teams work so far out that, even if I’m right and Ive is now effectively out of Apple, we’ll still be seeing Ive-designed hardware 5 years from now. It is going to take a long time to evaluate his absence.

I didn't watch the full September iPhone keynote, but from what I saw there was a noticeable lack of Jony Ive voiceover in the featured iPhone product videos. I may have just missed it, though?

In the Jobs era, Apple would sometimes make drastic hardware changes very close to the release of new hardware. It's possible that the criticism of the keyboards from so many corners (WSJ, famously [3]) may have shifted their plans.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2019/06/jony_ive_leaves_apple

[2] https://daringfireball.net/2019/07/on_the_post-ive_future_of...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

iPhones have been getting thicker/weightier every year since 6, with the exception in 7.

Nvidia is never going to happen given the bad blood between them and Apple. Sigh.

Money can clean up a surprising amount of bad blood.

True and false. Qualcomm could be seen as an example where money and monopoly helped clear up some bad blood. Nvidia doesn't have a strong enough monopoly, and the damage to Apple's reputation went beyond money.. so, sometimes no amount of money is going to resolve a conflict when your product has a mere 10-20% performance differential vs the nearest competitor. If Nvidia were to bring out some sort of super-chip that offered 10x performance per watt at half the price.. Apple might raise an eyebrow, but AMD has been keeping up and Apple has no reason to switch.

I've been wondering if Apple might get in to the dedicated GPU game. First replacing the integrated Intel gpu in the lower end machines with their mobile gpu chip designs, then maybe tackling a scaled up version?

They used to use PowerVR GPUs in the iPhone line, but I think (?) they're designed in-house now. They have their own Metal graphics API already. And they're on a 7nm process from TSMC.