I'm no Apple fan-boy at all (closer to the opposite) so it pains me a bit to say, but they have a proven track-record of having zero experience in something, then releasing something really good in that industry.

The iPhone was their first phone, and it really kicked in the smartphone race into high gear. Same for the Apple Silicon processor. And those are just two relatively recent examples.

The iPhone had a lot of prehistory in Apple, from Newton to iPod. Apple Silicon alo has a long history, starting with the humble beginnings as the Apple A4 in 2010, which relied on Samsung's Hummingbird for the CPU and PowerVR for the GPU (plus they acquired PA Semi in 2008).

So both are not very good examples, because they build up experience over long periods.

> So both are not very good examples, because they build up experience over long periods.

They are examples of something they could similarly do for the Apple Neural Engine but in a bigger scale in the future. They have experience deploying it in a smaller scale/different versions, they would just have to apply it in bigger scale in order to be able to compete with NVIDIA.

To be fair, Apple released their iPhone after building iPods for 6 years. So, it's not like they had zero experience with handheld devices at the time.

Also, while Apple did create their first chip (at least of their current families) in 2007, they did acquire 150 or so engineers when they bought PA Semi in 2008. So, that gave them a leg up compared to building a chip team completely from scratch.

Right, the fact they have a habit of releasing industry redefining first products in a category is they do the hard work to make it happen. It’s not by accident.

I assumed their server experience is still working in the iCloud division.

Apple's money can buy relationships to line up the ducks in a row but true genius is willing to work for $1 a year and be rewarded for the upside when it comes, see SJ.