Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst

Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by renewiltord on Saturday November 04, 2023 @04:08AM (#38139039)

I know a guy who once worked on Apple Silicon and then moved to Google to work on their CPUs. Something he told me really struck me. He said he liked Google because they’re really cool and he told me that he liked that they had this thing called a “blameless post mortem” (very familiar to us software folk) and he thought it was cool.

He said that when they missed a deadline for tape-out, there was a blameless post-mortem and it did a good job of identifying the problem. And it was quite effective.

I asked him why he was surprised. Was Apple different? He’d been there almost a decade “Oh, I don’t know if there was a process. The idea that we could delay tape-out was unthinkable”.

That stuck with me for the difference between the two organizations.

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Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by troupo on Saturday November 04, 2023 @04:18AM (#38139074)

> The idea that we could delay tape-out was unthinkable

Apple's insistence on releasing updates/upgrades to everything once a year will inevitably bite them in the ass.

In the past few years they've already started slipping deadlines for software (updates to iOS/MacOS in early fall, some advertised software late in the fall, or next year). It's only time before this happens to hardware.

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Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by oezi on Saturday November 04, 2023 @05:24AM (#38139371)

I mean they had to delay M2 Max because they couldn't finish it in time for last year's M2 reveal, right?

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Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by _pigpen__ on Saturday November 04, 2023 @09:17AM (#38140762)

Their failure, or inability, to release tick/tock updates on Intel, was surely biting them in the ass. How much revenue was lost by not updating the trash-can Mac Pro for six years?

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Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by tonyedgecombe on Saturday November 04, 2023 @10:15AM (#38141192)

>How much revenue was lost by not updating the trash-can Mac Pro for six years?

My assumption is that the devices that aren't being updated regularly aren't big sellers. If they were then they would get more attention.

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Re:Apple Spent $1B on the M3 Tape-Out, Says Analyst by troupo on Saturday November 04, 2023 @11:55AM (#38142206)

There's a difference between regular updates and major yearly releases with unskippable deadlines.

Also, trashcan Mac was Apple's own self-inflicted damage, and nothing to do with Intel.

A lot of the issues with lagging updates to anything that's not iPhones are also precisely because there's no time and non resources to focus on anything but the next release.

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