rcfa

It would be kind of useful, if you could get into the habit of listing build number along with version numbers.

This is important, because sometimes Apple sneaks in a minor revision, only noticeable by looking at build numbers, and developers and others with access to prerelease builds often get release candidates no longer marked as beta software. It’s then key to know if one has actually the released version installed, and not just something “relatively close to it”

So, please!

Not comparable to Apple: Apple is a minority player in each market it serves.

FB, like Microsoft of yore, tries to dominate a segment and leverage that to dominate further segments, which is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.

So yeah, they have a good case.

Just don’t think it’ll hurt Zuck, the sum of the split up companies is usually worth more as the entire conglomerate; and breaking up isn’t disowning. So Zuck’s net worth would likely skyrocket from the companies being split up. He’d be a massive shareholder in each of them, and benefit immensely from their separate growth trajectories.

Same happened when the split up Ma-Bell

MplsP said:

We keep hearing about mini led - when are we actually going to see it?

I wonder how the economics of Apple Silicon work - nominally, the chips could be cheaper than intel chips, but apple also has to foot the entire bill for R&D as well as the costs of ramping up production. Those costs exist with intel, too, but they’re distributed over intel’s entire customer base.

Since they control the entire design, Apple may also be able to optimize integration with other components leading to easier and cheaper system board design/production. 

I’m excited about the future of Apple Si. There’s a few hiccups, but the reviews are quite positive and impressive. I’ll be getting a new laptop in the next year or two and looking forward to an M1 MacBook Pro!

Apple only needs to shoulder the chips’ designs, something they already do for iOS devices, the modular way Apple designs its SoCs means the incremental R&D for the Mac chip is rather small. Per unit costs should be significantly lower than intel chips, so I expect either increased profit margins, aggressive pricing, or the addition of expensive high-end technologies the competition can’t match at a reasonable price point, or a combination of these things at various levels of the line up. e.g. aggressive pricing at the entry level, increased margins at the mid-range, killer-tech at the high-end.

The really expensive aspects of making chips, i.e. processes development, manufacturing, etc. are carried by TSMC, not Apple, and distributed across their full range of customers, incl. AMD and others.

It will be interesting to see if Apple, when the inevitable physical boundaries of shrinking structures are reached, will opt to establish its own chip plants to have full control, or if the technology will become sufficiently commoditized that Apple will farm out chip manufacturing to a variety highly competitive companies to further squeeze costs, as they do now with assembly.