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Comment by bsharitt | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that Apple is back to high levels of customization in its PCs. If I'm remembering correctly, one of the big motivators to move to x86 was to be able to use more commodity stuff through out the system, rather than the all the custom work required to design PowerPC system. I recall initial speculation that Apple's x86 machines would be pretty much fully custom chipsets and designs that just happened to have an x86 CPU, but then when the release systems came out, they used Intel chipsets and were pretty ordinary from a PC hardware standpoint.

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The biggest motivator to move to Intel, as stated by Steve Jobs in 2005 (paraphrasing from what I remember), was that the power to performance ratio was bad on PowerPC. All the lead that PowerPC had had over Intel vanished.

And given that IBM wasn’t interested in servicing Apple’s needs for consumer level chips (and Motorola, the other company in the PowerPC consortium, was struggling to scale up manufacturing), Apple’s pro machines like the PowerMac were struggling to keep up and improve. One PowerMac model with PowerPC G5 (IIRC) was even released with liquid cooling and had some customers complaining about leaks.

The driver for the processor switch was actually Apple’s inability to get the right kind of chips it wanted on scale. As others have mentioned, the in-house design and the ability to get its chips manufactured for iPhones on a large scale triggered a big wave (of competitive advantage) for Apple. We’ll only see more of this as time passes.

Yeah, I remember Jobs saying they wanted to put a G5 in the Powerbook but couldn't do it because the chip was too power hungry.

Based on my understanding of the issue, the main difference between now and then is scale. Pre-iPhone, Apple didn't have the scale to make their own chips economically; now, with the massive success of the iPhone, they're able to do this.

Their major value proposition is that they're able to build software-differentiated hardware, so building their own chips is extremely valuable to them.

Custom motherboards is an expertise Apple has built up over the years with the iPhone (of course they also do custom CPUs as well there!).

A huge portion of bugs and power issues on a modern PC stem from poor hardware drivers. Cutting out the middle man and just writing all the drivers themselves may very well be a net win for Apple if they want to keep a reputation for working hardware.

Then again they have gotten have their lighting out for display working quite right.

Apple have been making logic boards since the beginning.

The inclusion of custom silicon isn't new either.

Nor are in-house drivers for commodity equipmemt, as the move from NeXT Computer, Inc. to NeXT Software required it.

As you point out, by ceasing to rely on third party IP in that custom silicon they reduce the complexity further still.

100% in-house widgets have been on the whiteboard at Apple for a long time.

It is scaling out much better now thanks to large number of iPhones and watches sold. It is very difficult to do this on the scale of desktop computer sales.

That Stopped during the rise of the iPhone and iPad when they made the A4 chip. Once they figured out how to vertically integrate that during Jobs. After the death of Jobs and the appointment of Tim Cook we just see that vision taken to the end of which we have now.

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