rmoo

Guys, this isn't a story.
1. Intel already announced back in 2020 that they were going to use TSMC in 2022 as part of their transition year from 10nm to 7nm. (Technically Intel has been producing CPUs on their 10nm process since 2019, but they only achieved the ability to exceed 4 cores on it in 2021). 
2. Only GPUs (a new product for Intel), certain Xeon CPUs (that ran into issues with Intel manufacturing them on their 10nm node) and Atom CPUs (their small core CPU that was created for their failed attempt at making smartphone and tablet CPUs ... I have no idea what they are going to be used for, maybe Windows 11 tablets) are going to be manufactured at TSMC. The vast majority of their chips - laptop, desktop and some Xeon - are going to be manufactured on Intel's 10nm node. 
3. Intel already signed a deal to use TSMC's 6nm and 4nm nodes for this purpose. The first batch of GPUs is already being manufactured on this node: https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-alchemist-gpu-tsmc-6nm-process/ so all that is happening here is Intel's attempt to upgrade from the 4nm node to the 3nm node for the other half of the deal. Why is Intel doing this? Because AMD is very justifiably angry at TSMC for delaying their Zen4 from 4Q2021 to 3Q2022 (which allowed Intel to use Alder Lake to narrow the gap on process size and beat AMD in offering DDR5 and PCIe 5 ) and increasing their prices for the privilege. As a result, AMD is jumping ship to Samsung and their 3nm process: https://wccftech.com/amd-rumored-to-become-samsungs-first-3nm-customer-along-with-65-revenue-growth/

Now please note that Intel always preferred the 3nm process. TSMC suggested that they use 4nm instead because they intended to serve Apple and AMD first. But now that AMD won't be using TSMC's 3nm capacity, Intel is merely asking TSMC if that provides an opening to use 3nm instead of 4nm. So, Intel is likely asking "what is the maximum number of chips that you can fab for us while still accommodating Apple"? Unlike AMD, Intel doesn't need more than a few million GPUs and Xeon/Atom CPUs ... 10 million max likely. Whatever number TSMC will state that they can offer, Intel will buy.

That is all that is going on folks. In 2023, Intel will be back to using their foundry exclusively. The only interesting part is that TSMC may have lost AMD to Samsung for good. TSMC is fighting back by trying to get Qualcomm to choose its 3nm node over Samsung's for their flagship SOCs, and Qualcomm is listening to their pitch (no final decision yet). Also, Nvidia was frustrated with yield problems on Samsung's 8nm node - which left them unable to leave AMD in the dust because of TSMC's inability to manufacture enough GPUs for for them - so they are shifting their entire GPU operation to the 5nm and 6nm nodes that Apple and MediaTek are abandoning. However, Intel is aggressively pursuing Qualcomm, Nvidia and Google for their 7nm node starting in 2023. Samsung's new foundry in Texas is basically being built to counteract Intel's new foundries. 

Now that Samsung has caught up to TSMC - they will actually start mass production on their 3nm node before TSMC will - and Intel narrowing the gap with both (their 7nm is equivalent to TSMC 6nm and Samsung 5nm), the foundry wars begun have they. It is going to be neat to watch.

maury markowitz said:

... which is why there's basically 1 in 20 games on the Mac?

Its not like they can blame weak GPUs any more.

Come on you know that it is lack of market share. https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/27/21083870/rocket-league-mac-linux-service-refund-reason-why

And the reason for the lack of market share is the cost of Apple machines. Back in the Intel days, the entry point was $1000 for a dual core 1.1 GHz CPU that would have barely been able to play the 99 cent mobile games or the ancient stuff like Portal on Steam. For that you can get an Intel Core i7 device with a midrange Nvidia GPU. 

The switch to Apple Silicon has made things worse. Despite what Apple's PR is willing to allow you to believe, market share has not increased. But now the RAM on Macs can't be upgraded and there is no third party GPU support, even over Thunderbolt. Your "you can't blame weak GPUs" is false. While the M1 in the Mac Mini, MBA and entry level MBP has CPU performance comparable to many gaming machines, the GPU performance is nowhere close (on games anyway, not the Final Cut Pro stuff that Apple designed and optimized it for). To get RTX 3060 performance you need to spend $3300. That would get you an RTX 3080 system easy. Or two RTX 3060 systems with enough left over to buy an iPhone SE 2020. 

That is also why the "Apple needs to take gaming more seriously and invest in it" talk can't be taken seriously. The pricing just isn't competitive and the decades' old "total cost of ownership" sales like that Apple pushes doesn't work in gaming because hardware gets upgraded or replaced every 3 years - or less - in order to be able to play the latest games. No one who is even halfway serious about gaming is going to buy a Mac. What you want is for devs to ignore this, create or port games for macOS anyway and lose money. 

I don't even believe there is a real avenue for console gaming for Apple. The PS5 and the XBox One X cost $500. The M1 Mac Mini? $700. So the idea of Apple producing a machine with equivalent graphics power for $200 less than their current 8 core GPU device just isn't happening even if Apple chooses to emulate Microsoft and Sony and sell it at a loss. Maybe more things could be done with iPhone and iPad gaming, but they have tried Apple Arcade and it didn't have an impact, mainly because they didn't move nearly as many Apple TV units as they hoped (again, cost). 

hriw-annon@xs4all.nl said:

Not so long ago Microsoft had a go trying to be a third mobile platform. They even bought Nokia to make it happen.
They know tech and had a more than decent OS, and they failed.
If Microsoft and Nokia together can not manage to be a competitor who can?

Forcing Apple and Google to make their products worse is going to make competition happen?

As someone who owned a Windows Phone, claiming that it "had a more than decent OS" is false. Microsoft's failure here is bigger than you are stating. Microsoft actually preceded Google and Apple. Their first attempt was Windows CE back in 1996 (they began supporting ARM in 1997) and their second was Windows Mobile in 2000. While Windows CE found success as appliance firmware - though that is now losing ground to Android and other Linux distros - Windows Mobile failed at phones and tablets. Except at one thing: spurring Google into action. Their fear that either Windows CE or Windows Mobile might catch on one day and that Microsoft would use it to lock them out and grow Bing's market share is what caused them to decide to enter the mobile market and ultimately buy Android in 2005. Lest we forget, the tech world was very different back then. Google was tiny, with Microsoft and Yahoo being much bigger. As the antitrust judgment against Microsoft only covered PCs, they were free to lock competitors out of other devices. So had Microsoft's mobile devices gained traction, that would have actually resulted in Bing having a bigger search market share than Google, who lest we forget had only recently surpassed Yahoo in market share, and even that was due to Yahoo's decision to de-emphasize being a search and tech company and pivot to being an entertainment company instead. 

Back then, EVERYONE thought that either CE or Mobile would ultimately succeed. Because of this, when Andy Rubin tried to attract investors for Android, he had no takers for a platform that everyone thought that Microsoft was going to crush anyway. So then Rubin tried to sell Android to mobile device manufacturers that didn't have their own OS, including HTC and Samsung. HTC was making Windows Mobile smartphones and Samsung was making Windows CE ones, so both turned Rubin down. This allowed Google to buy Android - which was near financial collapse - for a pittance: unable to attract investors and no one else wanted them. Google had spent some time studying Microsoft's business model with CE and Mobile, and created one for Android designed to exploit its weaknesses: providing it to OEMs for free instead of licensing it, and allowing OEMs to modify it in order to differentiate it and promote their own software and services. Both HTC and Samsung switched from Microsoft to Android immediately and others followed suit shortly after.

This sort of thing is what people who call Android and iOS a duopoly are overlooking. Neither Apple or Google used unfair tactics to get where they were. They couldn't. At the time, Apple had 4% PC market share and their most popular product was the iPod. They weren't even able to initially launch the iPhone on more than one US carrier. Google meanwhile didn't even have the capability to manufacture and market a product. They had to rely on third parties, who screwed Google over every chance they got. Android and iOS succeeded against - at the time - much bigger and more entrenched competition by offering a clearly better product (Apple) and having a much better business plan  - for example the open source based on Java and Linux helped Google attract the indie developers that Microsoft, Nokia and the rest on proprietary platforms couldn't - and were also able to ultimately develop a better product (Google).

Even for the folks who point out that Google bundled Gmail and YouTube: have we forgotten that Microsoft released Hotmail years before Google released Gmail? Again, Google made a better product. Also, everyone - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo - initially tried to compete with YouTube with their own service. Google was merely the first to admit that it wasn't working and throw in the towel and buy YouTube, which Microsoft (and Yahoo) could have done first but were too arrogant to admit that they were beaten by an upstart. I really don't see why governments should step in and punish Apple and Google for their success or reward Microsoft and Amazon - whom lets face it any action against Google and Apple will inevitably benefit because no one else has the resources to compete at this point - for their failures (remember Amazon's ridiculous phone)?

tht said:

9secondkox2 said:

tht said:

9secondkox2 said:

Coulda had an iPhone native halo? Dang. 

That's not my read. It's still a cloud streamed game, it would just have an individual listing in Apple's App Store instead of an XBox cloud store app.

So, Halo would be running on a PC or Xbox in a data center, and streaming the display to client iOS devices. That's not native whatsoever. Native is a compiled app using Apple's ObjC/Swift/Metal frameworks.

It seems I forgot to post an “/s” following my post. 

Can you imagine what everyone would be doing if Apple allowed cloud? Epic snd all the rest of the sleaze would be trying to use that to redefine what an App Store is and try to assault iPhone users with untold number of crap schemes. 

At first, I’ll be honest, I thought Apple was wrong about xcloud initially. 

But after the epic slime fest, it seems Apple had great foresight. 

My apologies for not getting the sarcasm. Yes, cloud streaming is basically a Trojan horse. Microsoft retains all the value, all the leverage, and Apple would basically be at their mercy if cloud gaming takes off.

This is silly. It isn't that cloud streaming is a "Trojan horse." It is that if you are a software and internet services company - which Microsoft and Google currently are and Nvidia aspires to be - then you have every interest in video gaming migrating from hardware platforms to software and cloud ones. Microsoft and Google make almost nothing on hardware. Nvidia does, but by selling a $200 part to go in a machine that costs $2000. A hardware independent streaming model where revenue can be generated by maximizing ad and subscription revenue to the widest number of users - the same that YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Apple Music etc. rely on - is absolutely preferable to what exists now. For all that console gaming - for example - is discussed, it really is a tiny niche subculture. The combined sales of an XBox, Nintendo and PlayStation console during a typical 7 year generation is about 250 million. You break it down and it is even worse: many people buy all 3 (or at least 2 of the 3) and some people buy multiple (an XBox for each room in their house, or their PS breaks, or they buy one early in the cycle and then buy another when the refresh with better specs hits) so you really are talking about 50-100 million people. These people are ardent mind you - they buy the consoles and accessories, watch Twitch and YouTube for hours daily, pay $70 for the games plus who knows how much more for the DLC etc. - but it isn't that many of them. Cloud gaming is a way of expanding from that 50-100 million (again, console only, I guess if you include PC gaming you could double that) into the 1.5 billion people who buy smartphones and tablets each year. If they are able to get a mere fraction of that market, they could double or triple the size of the current console and AAA gaming industry. And if the new customers they pull in take the $500 that they would spend on a PlayStation or $3000 that they would spend on a gaming rig and use that to buy games instead? Even better. 

So, it isn't a "Trojan horse conspiracy" to harm Apple. It is more akin to how the rise of Netflix and similar streaming services WERE NOT in the interests of DVD and Blu-ray manufacturers. By the way, Apple totally helped this trend along. They removed CD/DVD/Blu-ray discs from Macs to "encourage" downloading media from iTunes instead. They also created servers and storage media to handle the massive media libraries that they wanted people to download, and the original purpose of the Apple TV was to facilitate people streaming their iTunes content (instead of playing music CDs and movie DVDs). Was it a conspiracy to harm Sony, Samsung and other electronics manufacturers? Nope. It was merely Apple - who didn't manufacture DVD and Blu-ray players or have retail operations to sell DVDs - pursuing their own commercial interests. Which is exactly what Nvidia, Microsoft and Google are doing here.   

lmasanti said:

Qualcomm is saying: “Attention Shareholders: We are going the way of Intel with Apple!”

Intel had record profits in 2020 and is on pace to have record profits again in 2021. 2022 will be even better for them because of the combined benefits of finally producing CPUs that outperform AMD - though at the cost of A LOT of power - with Alder Lake as well as joining Nvidia and AMD in the GPU game. So yes, Intel is fine and Qualcomm is going to be fine also.

There are certain areas where market share does matter, and being a component supplier is one of them. Apple has only 15% of the smartphone market and 35% of the tablet market (with very few iPads having mobile radios to begin with). Qualcomm won't miss much from their $23 billion annual revenue by losing money on the $40 modems that it sells Apple. And no, they don't need to sell very many CPUs for Windows on ARM devices to make it up. Qualcomm's next big bet is on CPUs and platforms for IoT and AI, and if that pays off - though Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Samsung are competitors there - it will more than make up for the lost Apple modem revenue.

It is losing ground in the Android and ChromeOS CPU device market to MediaTek - and potentially Samsung - that threatens Qualcomm. Just as AMD is a much bigger threat to Intel than Apple will ever be because both are going after the same Windows and ChromeOS (for PCs) and Windows and Linux (for servers) market share that is much bigger, MediaTek and Samsung are bigger threats to Qualcomm. MediaTek is now the #1 chipmaker globally - surpassing Qualcomm - and Samsung in addition to stealing Google's business from Qualcomm is going to start replacing Qualcomm SOCs with their own Exynos SOCs in their midrange phones starting in 2022. 

Xed said:

tenthousandthings said:

Seems like it is a three-way equation. There is the science of hardware, the development of software, and the marketing of systems. Apple already has a well-oiled machine that runs on an annual cycle for all three elements. [A-series, iOS, iPhone]

For Macs, 18 months is arguably a better timetable for all three elements. For Apple Silicon, it takes time to ramp up from the base M-series to Pro/Max to multiple dies. For macOS, the annual pressure seems like it has become too much — Monterey had important features announced that ended up delayed, and an 18-month macOS cycle would ease that. Finally, an 18-month refresh cycle works well for marketing. People would know what to expect. They could upgrade every 18 months, or after three years, after four and a half years, or after six years. They could get AppleCare for any of those intervals. 

Macs non-annual HW updates in the past to stay competitive with other PC vendors because that's when Intel had processors (at scale of the type Apple needed). Now that they control the shebang they don't have abide by those component supply laws, but the annual cycle for humans around the world is still the same.

For those reasons they'll likely go with an annual or a biennial cycle (for their notebook categories), with macOS still occurring every year free of charge. macOS get annual updates that works across all their other OSes. This helps gets switches and retain users. It's synergetic and makes all their device categories better than their sum parts.

Huh? Intel updates their CPUs every year. It was Apple who only updated their Macs on a biannual schedule for their own reasons. I have never gotten the emphasis on macOS being free of charge and annual updates. Windows has been "free" also for ages, in the sense that everyone who purchases a Windows machine gets a perpetual Windows license tied to that machine. Microsoft used to charge for upgrades, but that ended with Windows 8 at the absolute latest. And annual updates is a feature when Windows emulated ChromeOS with regular rolling updates? Yeah, none of this will attract switchers, who buy devices primarily to run the apps they want - games, professional software and lots of other apps weren't even available on x86 Macs and even fewer will run natively on M1 Macs - and also consider price (a premium Wintel or WinAMD machine like a Dell XPS or HP Elitebook with 16 GB RAM, Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and Nvidia or AMD dGPU costs less than an M1 MacBook Air with half the RAM and only 7 GPU cores). As for retaining users, the loyal Apple fans will remain so, especially if they don't need x86 software and don't need to still run Windows on virtual machines or bootcamp. But as for the "synergy" ... the vast majority of iPhone and iPad users are still running iTunes on Windows, and this is despite Apple doing their level best to make the iTunes on Windows experience as painful as possible to "encourage" people to switch (the same is true of iCloud and they flat out don't support Safari on Windows anymore). 

Add it all up and no, Apple updating their Mac CPUs less frequently than Intel, AMD and Qualcomm updates their PC counterparts won't give Apple a competitive advantage. Impossible to spin that otherwise. It won't be a disadvantage either, mind you. 

lkrupp said:

The problem with Disney+ is that once you’ve watched all the Marvel, Star Wars, and Mickey Mouse content for the umpteenth time what’s left. Critics of Apple TV+ are always yammering about the lack of a big catalog. Well, Disney+ has a huge catalog that most have now seen over the decades. So what’s new about it?

Judging Apple TV+’s success by how many subscribers it has is like comparing Android numbers to iOS numbers, or the speed in GHz of a CPU. It’s really all about the actual performance or quality.

But just like a certain cadre here relies on technical specs alone to ‘judge’ the success of a system, the critics count the number of shows available on Apple TV+ and compare them to the useless crap thats available on Amazon Prime Video, for example.

Disney/Marvel/Star Wars/Pixar and the Disney Channel create content for themselves first which then gets farmed out to Disney+. As they aren't going anywhere, Disney+ can leverage them to add new content a lot faster than Apple TV+ can before originals even enter the picture. Also those theatrical movies and Disney channel cable shows are already profitable from theater grosses, cable fees and adevertising revenue before they even hit Disney+. Meanwhile, subscriber revenue will be the only way that Apple recoups the costs for a movies and TV series that they spend hundreds of millions developing and producing. And even comparing originals, for a lot of those Disney+ can just do sequels, live adaptations and remakes of their old movies and TV shows. That puts them in a much stronger position than the other streaming services. Take sector leader Netflix: stuck between giving huge paychecks to has-been actors and directors who can't get movie studios to fund their projects anymore - so that loyal fans of this talent who watched their products in theaters in the 90s and 00s will watch their new streaming projects - and making western remakes of anime. Which model is more likely to still be viable 15 years from now when there won't be any more iconic anime series to adapt and fans of Adam Sandler and Will Smith tire of third rate projects?

Also, the Android vs iOS argument makes no sense for two reasons. First, for hardware, yes it is better to sell 10 million $1000 MacBooks and get a $400 margin off each ($4 billion) than it is to sell 100 million $200 Chromebooks and get a $20 margin off each ($2 billion, with a lot of that given back in returns and service warranty claims due to cheap construction and parts). But with a service where subscriptions are the only revenue source, yes 100 million subscribers at $9.99 a month beats 10 million. 

Second, no matter what Daniel Eran Dilger claims, the idea that Google's model of prioritizing market share over unit sales when they sell almost no hardware has been anything else but a massive success for Google is absurd. Compare Google's quarterly revenue before Android really took off to their quarterly revenue now: $9.7 billion 3Q 2011 to more than $65 billion 3Q 2021. The reason for more than 650% revenue growth in 10 years? Chrome was already the dominant PC browser by 2011, and PC sales generally declined in that time anyway. So the main reason: ad revenue from those 3 billion active Android devices. And if you must discuss hardware, it is why Google still makes Android devices despite selling less than 10 million a year while LG and HTC - despite each having sold hundreds of millions of such devices - don't. 

Yes, Apple has spent the last 40 years proving that market share isn't the only thing. But Microsoft - who like Google makes little on hardware - has spent an equal amount of time proving that it is indeed a thing ... something that can definitely be leveraged for massive profits. Google came along and improved Microsoft's model by leveraging a platform that is free to manufacturers and services that are free to end users to grow market share large and fast enough to win a 3 front war against Yahoo, Apple AND Microsoft despite starting out with much less revenue than all 3 of them (yes, even Yahoo). And even in the hardware game, Samsung spent the early Android era aggressively focusing on growth even as media and industry critics were laughing at them, calling the phones and tablets that they were spamming the market with tacky plastic gimmicks. But absolutely no one laughs at them now. Why? Chinese firms aside, they are the only competition in mobile that Apple has left.

stompy said:

The whole report is blissfully ignorant of how the software development community actually works.

Remember that Apple at one point also was a huge advocate of cross-platform web apps (when there was still a huge threat of Microsoft shifting their PC dominance to mobile leading to developers following along ... this would have been a way to get developers to make apps that would run on both Windows CE/Mobile and iOS). It wasn't until iOS and its app store became so dominant so fast - which absolutely no one at the time expected - that Apple shifted positions. 

shamino said:

So the author is saying what?

Apple will someday cut off support for apps that don't upgrade, so you should summarily stop using them today.

To what purpose?  Make sure you suffer today instead of waiting for some unspecified time in the future when you might (or might not) be forced to?

That sounds pretty counter-productive to me.  Especially when Apple hasn't even completed their hardware transition.

Seems like someone is taking the business decisions of software companies and developers personally. The result of this current age of tech fandom where companies and their CEOs are the new Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. Not that fandom of celebrities in any way better mind you. 

Wesley Hilliard said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

"How badly do you have to fail at games"

I do wonder if Apple will ever push for more Apple Arcade games specific to Mac, or if that will stay focused on mobile experiences.

Market share will dictate the latter. 2 billion iPhones versus 20-25 million macOS devices sold a year. Honestly there isn't anything that Apple could do to make a bigger dent in gaming. An 11th gen Intel Core i7 gaming PC with 16 GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX 3060 costs $1400. A comparable macOS device is going to be at least $2000. In about 6 months a laptop with a 12th gen Intel/Nvidia RTX 4060 will still cost about $1500, but it will be roughly equivalent to a MacBook Pro that costs $2500. And in 9 months when the next-gen AMD Zen 4 CPUs and GPUs come out? You get the picture. And that is talking about a midrange gaming PC. A Zen 4 low end gaming laptop will be capable of 1080p gaming without even needing a discrete GPU, and will under $500. Note that the Steam Deck's Aerith SOC has an integrated GPU and is capable of 720p gaming, and it is only a Zen 2+ on a 7nm process (Zen 4 will be on a 5nm process). Apple Silicon can only fight back against Intel and AMD-powered devices that are going to be cheaper, more powerful or both by achieving superior power per watt, but unfortunately the gaming crowd is the one that cares about such things the least. Also, AMD Zen 4 is going to make heavy strides in power power per watt when they reach 5nm in 2022 and when their Zen4+ gets released on Samsung's 3nm in 2023.

So a combination of market share, price and steadily improving CPUs and GPUs from Intel, AMD and Nvidia is going to prevent Apple from being able to gain traction in any area other than mobile gaming.