While true for the world for now, they already own half of the phones sold in US. In revenue/profit terms, it is even higher. They have already beaten everyone with a fabulous phone processor design. Imagine that coupled with fab advantage. While others can differentiate on other things but at some point, some differences will become hard to overlook.

They are at a dangerous position where they can suffocate others like this easily because no one else has comparable cash to outbid them for cutting edge stuff.

Such an advantage is not the end, though. Look at where Intel is, with all the R&D spending, fab, and anti-competition moves from a couple of years ago. Engineers move around, and it is difficult to keep a top team for decades. You always end up making mistakes that can be used by your competition.

They won't keep the fab advantage. The money TSMC gets from Apple will contribute to improving production, which will also benefit other TSMC customers. Just like Apple buying most of the world's supply of NAND chips a couple of years back did not kill the market.

ARM Macs may be different in the future, but I don't think the performance advantage in phones is that important. People chose mostly on features and ecosystem. Even Android geeks do not care that much that last generation's iPhone outperforms their current flagship. Android still sells. Now, more performance does give more room for some features, but this is a second-order effect. For now, you can find almost any iPhone feature in some Android phones, often with bigger batteries or other things like a headphone jack or a SD port. OnePlus' phones are slower, but it's not the end of the world.

A vertically integrated Apple will suffocate the others if they become dominant enough to utterly dominate their market, which I don't see happening as long as they focus on the high end.

But they aren't just focusing on the higher end. They have products at competitive prices now like iPhone SE or Watch SE/ older gen watch.

And unquestionably TSMC now has much more 7nm capacity for sale than they would have if Apple were vertically integrated and owned their own fabs.

Anandtech's Tiger Lake deep dive compares performance gains when running SPEC at a 15 watt TDP and a 28 watt TDP.

>At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...

We're getting to the point where Intel is no longer able to deliver significant performance improvements inside a low TDP.

This bodes well for an architecture that has much better performance per watt.

>Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in ST workloads.

Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...

But why are we comparing with Intel chips, when it is AMD chips that have been more successful in delivering higher performance with lower TDPs?

>Against the x86 competition, Tiger Lake leaves AMD’s Zen2-based Renoir in the dust when it comes to single-threaded performance.

>[In multicore] AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads.

We'll have to see what the testing figures look like after Zen3 and Apple Silicon ship.

I think you can run Linux, Windows, some of the BSDs, on them, can't you?

Linux works, but the latest models usually have bad driver support for a while. I'm using a 2-year-old MacBook Pro with Arch Linux and it works fine after some tweaking.

BSD is not well supported.

Apple is quickly turning from pushing he at a premium to pushing HW and services in a walled garden package.

Not sure that's been true for some time now. Wouldn't they be better described as "a premium manufacturer of mobile phones that run iOS with an app ecosystem they make 30% commission on, who also make legacy propitiatory laptop and desktop devices"?

(I agree with the rest of your comment though. Apple _don't want_ 99% of Android or Windows customers, and are more than happy for Huawei and Oppo and AliExpress to sell phones and laptops to people Apple dont care about. They _might_ care a bit about encouraging top of the range Samsung or Pixel phone customers to iPhones, maybe. And they at least used to try to woo the dev/webdev crowd to macOS machines, but less obviously these days, it seems to me.)

> If you get a PC, you get literally thousands of choices.

And none of them work reliably.

That is absurd. Last year I built a PC with off the shelf components that I spent about 30 minutes picking out, and all I had to do was stick the windows installer into the USB port to get everything set up perfectly out of the box. I have never had any reliability issues and I only reboot about once per month for updates. I used Apple products exclusively for a decade, but a contract role last year required me to use a Windows dev environment. I was holding my nose going in, but using WSL has been a joy and my MacBook is now collecting dust in the closet. In my experience most Mac purists that turn their nose up at commodity PCs haven't used one since MacBooks became the standard hip startup dev machine. Things have changed a lot in the last ten years.

And let's not pretend that Mac hardware has been perfectly reliable lately. In fact, of my hand rolled desktop PC and my 2017 MacBook Pro, the PC has had far fewer hardware reliability issues. Apple's declining hardware quality and increasingly unjustifiable retail prices have pretty much chased me off the platform after 10+ years of fanatical loyalty.

Sure companies fill them with shit, that’s not really a flaw in the underlying hardware/OS though. Those same people have less scope for that on OSX/Linux sure, but again that doesn’t mean the software/hardware is better.

Which has 0 relevance. GGP was asserting that Apple Is an existential threat to AMD. Given AMD is not an Apple supplier (of CPU anyway) and Apple will not sell their chips to the outside world, that makes sense on no axis.

Any sources for this? As far as I know, AMD has never designed CPU for mobiles.

It's not out of the question for them to consider such a move, but I think that the bigger issue here for AMD is that it means they will wind up a mode behind the edge, giving their main competitor- Intel- more time to catch up.

My experience is the opposite. In my team at work people have either recent Mac book pro or Thinkpad with Linux. And it seems like the ones on Macs have always all kind of issues (with zoom screen sharing, with openvpn/tunnelblick, with docker not working as expected, and lately, as it's hot in paris, cooling issues - I laughed as they were exchanging tips too cool their laptop with stuffs you can put in the freezer, because otherwise their computer would be so slow that some of our time sensitive tests would fail...)