loekf

The Barclays people don't know what they are talking about. You don't need 1300 people to design a power management controller for a phone, so handling the charging/discharging of the battery and generating all those voltages for the SoC, modem, wireless amps etc.

It's just another game than doing a CPU, GPU etc.

However, I'm sure Apple has gained the knowledge after doing iPods and iPhones for the past 15 years.

80 people is about right for such a PMU (power management unit), also given that Apple will move to in-house developed wireless charging,
wants new power tricks (e.g. modulate supplies like AMD and Intel are doing) etc.