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Comment by sydney6 | Hacker News Reader

> I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack.

But CPU/GPU aren't the only chips Apple is sourcing from 3rd party. Think wireless modems like WiFi, LTE, etc.

Close, but Apple already produces it's own WiFi/BT chipsets (the S1/S2 etc SOCs in Apple watches for example, and the W1 chipset in AirPods and new Beats headphones), and is rumored to be working on an LTE/GSM chipset.

I think Apple is intensely interested in controlling the entire stack.

Produces? Are you sure you don’t mean designs?

Apple is as yet fabless, correct. By choice, clearly, as they have enough cash on hand to build and operate more than anyone else on the planet if they wished.

Why? A lot of these parts are commodetized. Are they really getting that much better battery life from their own stuff?

For performance. They can outcompete against others by moving to bespoke hardware. My iphone x cpu is ~ 13” MBP in performance, which is bonkers.

W1 chip seems to have better performance and power than any other chip. A10 A11 seems to have better performance and power than any other chip. I see a trend..

With the W1, battery life and bluetooth that actually works as it should have from the start.

Apple claims the W2 chip is 50% more power efficient than existing Bluetooth/Wifi chips on the market, and is 85% faster than the W1 chip for data throughput.

Existing Bluetooth hardware has so many hardware and software bugs that it would [hyperbole] a [large thing]. Apple should absolutely control the BT hardware/software stack, there is no other way they can offer the Apple Experience without it.

Absolutely! That's why the Apple Watch, for example, is an unqualified success compared with any other wearable. Qualcomm, which is the only real rival in that space, hasn't come out with a new wearable-sized SOC in forever, leading to the downright abandonment of many wearable product lines from pretty much everyone except Apple.

No, that success is because apple is literally a fashion brand. How many people do you think that wear apple watches could even tell you what hardware is inside it? Sure, it runs smooth, but that's not why they have it on. Nobdy is streaming hd video or running heavy applications on it.

Isn't wireless hardware in general more like a IP/Patenting/Licensing issue?

Not if you want to do it better than the competition. We already have a zillion radio chips that all do about the same thing. If Apple (or any other company) wanted to be 'better', building a better design to do the thing in a better way (think efficiency, power, speed etc.) would give a unique advantage that cannot easily be copied by a competitor. Same goes for the RTOS (or lack thereof) that you need to run those. For some implementations, a softMAC vs. fullMAC makes sense.

If Apple were to make their own LTE modem, does that mean we might get one in a MacBook Pro?

Apple's watch now has a W2 chip that does Wifi and Bluetooth, and maybe even LTE (which is how they crammed it into such a tiny device).

Slowly but surely, they've put together all they'd need for a computer. Their T2 chips in the current iMac Pro handle encryption and NVME storage on the SSD's, as well as the camera image processing, Secure Enclave, and the SMC.

I don’t know what the current status is but they have definitely looked at making their own baseband chips before.

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