paulpan

How far they've grown from Steve Jobs' "never be afraid to self-cannibalize" mentality.

Feels like the wrong approach. Why not just create a docking station for the iPad and a software docking view? Identical to Google's approach with the Pixel Tablet but Apple's superior will be more refined. It even uses the A18 SoC!

At $299 this feels like a very niche product with limited functionality.

Hugely disappointing and shocking news. Demis seemed like the inevitable successor to Sundar. A move of this magnitude couldn't have been made without consent of Larry and Sergey, so it makes me wonder why from their perspective.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion: Google would greatly benefit from this AI bubble to pop and take down OpenAI and Anthropic.

It's the exact parallel of how it'll play out for U.S. automakers: destined for irrelevance given their inability or unwillingness to compete against China in the EV market. Instead they pretend EVs are bad and cry for protectionist policies.

The sad fact here is that OpenAI and Anthropic are only looking for a max 1-year runway (Anthropic's is only a few months away) so that they can IPO and their VC investors cash out immensely. They do not care about AI safety or fairness, only to appease their VC overlords. But the public is being lied to and pitched this narrative that "open weight AI models are all bad".

Pat was seemed to understand the criticality of fabrication process lead in today's day and age. Hence his push and decision to invest in IFS, plus to win over the government funding to sustain the effort.

In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure all capacity for themselves.

Disagree on "failed on GPU" as it depends on the goal.

Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it was quite successful at opening up the market and enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs.

That all said, I suspect the original intent was to fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC in order to soak up idle capacity. But plans changed along the way (for likely performance reasons) and added to the IFS's poor perception.

Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed.

Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

Agree with OP that Intel was probably too deep into its downward spiral. While it seems Pat tried to make changes, including expanding into GPUs, it either wasn't enough or too much for the Intel board.

Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung - perhaps only cheaper prices and even then it's unproven to fab any non-Intel chips. So the only way to keep it afloat is by continuing to fab Intel's own designs, until 18A node becomes viable/ready.

Are there new hardware features announced for the 16 Pro? Apple definitely would love to add an exclusive feature but it seems like negligible pickings. The "Fusion" or "tetraprism" camera is the only other one that comes to mind.

Fundamentally Apple wants to leverage their supply chain to maximize shared parts between the Pro and base iPhones. Lack of hardware innovations makes it hard to create product differentiation.

Heck, even the A18 Pro chip seems a marginal upgrade over the base A18 chip: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/apples-a18-chip-desi...

The premise is actually quite similar to the US vs. Standard Oil antitrust case from a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jersey...

Just as Standard Oil used their position to force railroads and other distributors to only carry their oil and not of their competitors', the same case here with Google.

Arguably all these antitrust cases, while better late than never, are at least a decade late. If it was filed in the early 2010s, then possibly there could've been viable competitors to Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Meta. But now these tech titans all have unassailable positions.

> Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this.

I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.

Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.

At $20 USD/month for the Ultimate tier, the service seems overpriced and no longer the value proposition it had when first launched for $12/month.

If this happens, then it suggests that Amazon expects fulfilling AI-related queries to significantly more taxing than the current state. Also not enough to be offset to be included in the Prime subscription.

As an end user this sounds appealing since it allows to opt in or out.

I may be too skeptical but this seems 1) grossly overpriced and 2) overhyping AI features.

Easy to forget that Microsoft has had 5 years since the release of Qualcomm SQ1-powered Surface Pro X back in 2019. Sure these Nuvia-built cores are much superior but Windows on ARM remains a WIP at best.

Wrong leadership at every level: Sundar as CEO, Prabhakar as Search SVP, Sissie as Assistant/Gemini VP. Maybe they should hire Ilya instead?

This exactly. There are many other ways to express "squeezing into one" but both bizarrely and shockingly Apple (or whichever ad agency) went for "crushing with hydraulic press" instead. How did everyone miss on the negative undertone before this ad was released?

Could be extrapolating this incident too much but it feels it encapsulates the transformation of Apple from this quirky, unconventional upstart into a monopolistic leviathan the past 2 decades. There's also a sense of hubris at suggesting your single electronic device can replace all those creative tools.

The fact that TSMC publishes their own metrics and target goals for each node makes it straightforward to compare the transistor density, power efficiency, etc.

The most interesting aspect of the M4 is simply it's debuting on the iPad lineup, whereas historically it's always been on the iPhone (for A-series) and Macbook (for M-series). Makes sense given low expected yielded for the newest node for one of Apple's lower volume products.

For the curious, the original TSMC N3 node had a lot of issues plus was very costly so makes sense to move away from it: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...

I don't think it's strictly for price gouging/segmentation purposes.

On the Macbooks (running MacOS), RAM has been used as data cache to speed up data read/write performance until the actual SSD storage operation completes. It makes sense for Apple to account for with higher RAM spec for the 1TB/2TB configurations.

Ha, my point is iPhone has become so ubiquitous that is has created a natural monopoly for Apple (50%+ US market share).

Like it or not, there are different rules for the biggest players who wield market power. If you want an iPhone, then Android is not an alternative option. DOJ's argument is that Apple has added artificial disincentives to enable switching to a non-iPhone and also favor its own apps/services.

This is verbatim the argument against Microsoft and how it was wielding its Windows monopoly to stifle competition like Netscape. Easy to forget that Microsoft had closed APIs for 3rd parties and dictated how OEMs installed its OS before the US government judgement. You could've made the same counterpoint at the time that there's theoretical alternative OSes like Linux and Unix.

It boils down to the fact that iPhone is a pervasive computing device and similar to a "public good" should be regulated tightly.

For millions of people, it's their main/sole computing and internet access device so should be a neutral platform - with clear evidence as cited that Apple has not maintained its neutrality. As a neutral platform, customers should have the freedom to use their devices without undue interference or restrictions from Apple.

These are similar arguments made in the Microsoft vs. Netscape case. The lone example of being unable to install non-App Store apps is enough to justify the DOJ's case. Question is what would the verdict be? Similar to the EU's DMA rules would be a likely starting point.

This can't be repeated often enough. App Store revenue (part of Services segment) is a key growth driver and Apple will drag this out for as long as they can.

I think it's inevitable iPhone 16 prices will increase in EU starting later this year. Arguably similar to Valve's Steam Deck, iPhone prices are subsidized by the apps revenue. Apple is going to try preserve their profit margins one way or another.

Wonder how stringent they'll try to be, since you could technically VPN even for a few hours back into an EU server to reset the 30-day period.

Or someone will inevitably create an app that will do this automatically & indefinitely.

It's crystal clear that Apple is trying to protect its Services revenue, which just grew 11% and hit a new record last quarter at $23.1B (https://www.statista.com/statistics/250918/apples-revenue-fr...). Services is becoming its lone growth segment.

Otherwise why go through the additional overhead and headache of implementing region-specific rules? iOS is becoming branched into 3 forks: EU, China, and rest of the world.

This +100. Sundar has been a competent "steward" but clearly he isn't the visionary the company needs nor shareholders expect.

Just look at Google's recent failures or inability to thwart competitors, despite its massive scale and resources:

- YouTube Short: took too long (4+ years) to launch against TikTok

- Meet: lacked feature parity to Zoom despite the perfect market condition

- Stadia: telegraphed its intention (Project Stream) 5 years early and lacked conviction

- ChatGPT: caught flat-footed and playing catch-up for 2+ years now

It's surprising that he hasn't been fired by the board already.