tht

rob53 said:

blastdoor said:

I’d love to see intel regain the process lead and win apples foundry business. 

Why? Intel was always slow to improve their products. They always run hot as well. 

blastdoor is just saying that if Intel can regain the fabrication lead, he'd love it if Intel can fab Apple Silicon. He's not saying Apple will be using Intel designed processors. That is exactly what should happen. If Intel has the best fabs in the world, Apple should contract them to fab Apple Silicon, assuming the (cost x Watt)/mm2 all work out.

Intel plans on catching up and passing TSMC. We all know what happens to plans, so probably not. But, Intel as a second source manufacturer of Apple Silicon isn't a bad idea either, or Samsung Semi. It would require Apple to sell more products, so long road to go on that.

Hah!

The original rationale for the iPad Air 12.9 using miniLED - there are left over stock - was just stupid.

There have also been claims that Apple could offer a matte option for the display, providing an anti-glare coating to the tablet line for the first time.

Ooh, a loaded iPad Pro 13" is sounding more expensive all the time. Would need to see what the matte option does to image clarity, and how well it cleans. Would finger oils just seep in between the cracks of the nanotexture surface, making it hard to wipe off the finger oils?

mikethemartian said:

Isn’t this what the group that left to start Nuvia wanted to do at Apple and they were told that company management were not interested?

I wouldn't believe anything at face value coming from startup companies. Ultimately, 99% just want to be bought and have a nice payday. Their beliefs change in accordance to where the money comes from.

Remember, the fate of Nuvia was being bought by Qualcomm and designing a chips that go into phones and laptops. Exactly what they were doing at Apple. Server products? Who knows if Qualcomm will do it, but they have 3 generations of phone and laptop SoCs to get into a durable cadence, and however long they are contractually required to stay at Qualcomm.

They had a nice payday and congratulations to them. Apple? Carry apace. You can also see why Apple wouldn't touch them. Just bad business. Considering the lawsuit, Apple knew that Qualcomm hiring them was a definite possibility, if not the most probable outcome of Nuvia.

This has been one of those obvious moves for long while now.

Upcoming Nvidia server hardware is now running at up to 1000 W, requires liquid cooling and cost a whole lot of money. If Apple can produce equivalent performance at 250 to 500 W and having equivalent LLM performance at lower memory footprints, it may actually make LLM chatbots, searches, and services profitable. And they may get a two-for if that hardware can be run in a Mac Pro.

I have not seen whether MS Co-pilot subscriptions make any profits yet. The non-MS LLM services? I think they are all operating at loss. Still early for Google to see if their LLM services will be profitable.

Apple? All part of their ecosystem train and can be amortized across multiple products, especially if their LLM services sell hardware.