https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/23/20-years-ago-today-ipod-chang...
They either needed that many because they were selling that many.
Or bought way more to stop others from buying.
So how much you need is a forecast, or more precisely, a range of forecasts that depend on what you and your competitors will sell. Your order will say "I commit to buying x and want an option on y more" and a larger x gets you a lower unit price for the first x you buy.
If the vendor's production capacity is within your forecasts, or near it, why shouldn't you just commit to order everything and get a nice low unit price? You'll lose if your forecasts are very wrong, but then that's true whatever you do. It sucks for your competitors, who did not order according to their own forecasts.
These are separate things (getting to the point of large scale production and blocking your competitors), e.g they could have played fair with the same initial success without excessive overstocking, allowing their competitors to continue competing and letting market forces decide, and letting suppliers gradually match current demand.
In short, there is no advantage to overstocking to such an excess other than to block your competitors. But you can only do so once you have a foot in the door and enough money to do so.
What I recall is them being production limited over and over again because their best wasn’t always good enough to stay ahead of demand. Nobody has talked about them hoarding.
Blocking competition was a benefit, but not the goal.
Apple is obviously not going to buy less so their competition can have more when Apple needed the supply.
The fact that it's one of severel effects and one of several motivations does not make it unintentional, or even necessarily just a side effect.
It could just as well be simply one of multiple fully considered effects, and surely was.
General business intelligence: You do NOT want one of your 'verticals' (companies that you need to buy supplies from, or companies that you sell your product to) to turn monopolistic; after all, once they are a monopoly they can really squeeze you out.
This holds even if you are also nearing a monopoly or are an effective monopoly (in that you're the only one that can supply it at the quantity and quality required).
There are mitigating circumstances, but most of them don't look good for apple:
* TSMC is stupid. Don't knock it - I've seen companies go for the quick buck, then get killed by the monopolistic monolith they enabled and be surprised.
* TSMC laughs in the face of this and simply isn't taking an apple near monopoly on chips particularly seriously. I can definitely see that - the risk is presumably that apple gains massive increases in marketshare of PCs/laptops and smartphones, but TSMC presumably doesn't think it'll be so high as to risk the situation that TSMC can produce more chips than non-apple buyers could buy. In other words, that apple's total 'TSMC fab capacity' needs won't go anywhere near 50% of what TSMC is likely to ever be able to manufacture.
* Apple is putting pressure on TSMC. TSMC knows this is a risk and doesn't want to, but apple does want this to happen and is making some shady deals so that TSMC does the math and decided that the gains in dealing with apple exceed the losses*odds-it-will-happen of the squeeze if apple is a monopoly buyer for TSMC (as in, of dubious legality and certainly of questionable morality, but then, it's apple, a company. Waiting for companies to act morally is silly, you write laws and set up societal systems to incentivize them to do so instead, companies are amoral (not immoral - they just don't really know what it is, by design).
Your comment seems to suggest it's a smart move for TSMC to just sign one giant deal with apple and be done with it: You can send the lawyers and salesfolk to early retirement, get some money upfront, guarantee 100% sales of all your fab capacity with a party that is unlikely to renege or declare bankruptcy.
It's not. It's a dumb move. Either the C-level execs at TSMC are missing something pretty fundamental or more likely we don't know enough to realize that there's sufficient weights on the other side of the balance to counteract the downside of enabling the monopoly on verticals.
Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new node (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot of capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don’t care about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
Let’s be realistic: what would have been the alternative for TSMC? Leave Apple’s investment out of the table and waste time bringing their new process online without it? AMD or Qualcomm would not be in a much better position right now. Or TSMC, for that matter.
What is the end game you’re afraid of? Apple takes its business elsewhere? To whom? Wouldn’t this leave TSMC with paid-for facilities they could now use to produce chips for other customers at a discount?
From TSMC's perspective, the entry level market isn't where they make their money. You can make entry level devices on old processes that have a lot of competition. It would be really bad for TSMC if Apple were to monopolize the high end of the market, because that's what uses the advanced process nodes TSMC makes its money from.
> Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new node (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot of capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don’t care about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
Except that they do care, because they're competing in the same market. Apple is currently making a lot of hay out of the fact that the M1 is more power efficient than PC laptops, which is attributable in no small part to the fact that they're on TSMC 5nm when everyone else is on TSMC 7nm or worse.
If nobody was on the newest node, or Apple was making products that didn't compete with AMD/Qualcomm/Nvidia/Intel in the market, the others not having it wouldn't matter. When the device customer is going to prefer the best one, and the one on the best node has an advantage, it does.
> what would have been the alternative for TSMC?
If Apple isn't signing some kind of exclusivity deal requiring TSMC to give all of its new capacity to Apple, build more of it using their own money so that when it comes online, there is enough for more than Apple. If they are demanding exclusivity, inform antitrust authorities of this.
> What is the end game you’re afraid of? Apple takes its business elsewhere?
Suppose Apple monopolizes the high end market. They take 75% of it using the process advantage, then take the rest as the network effect from that crushes alternatives. They're now your only customer for the newest process nodes, so they squeeze your margins to zero. At the same time, they buy Global Foundries and pour money into it until their process is better than yours, and you no longer have the money to compete because you let all your other high end customers be destroyed.
It's what Apple did to Imagination Technologies and tried to do to Samsung.
Similarly intels process issues showed up when they started trying to make xeon before the desktop processors.
Because your angle completely miss capacity and resources planning. As the 30 years old joke goes, most expensive Fab in the world isn't the leading edge Fab, it is the Empty Fab. And then there is the initial capital and order guarantee. As a matter of fact, it is nearly the same across all industry supply chain. Insert Pizza Doll, Sausage Rolls, Paper Towels, or the recent pandemic event Toilet Paper, and your skill set from production line are all the same.
It is not Apple is without risk, so to speak. They will have to fill the Fab orders, even if somehow no one buys any iPhone. It just happens Apple has never had this problem. Compared to Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia which all have their fair share of flops and market did not react as they expected. Or you could end up like Nvidia where they had three quarter worth of GPU stocks sitting channel during the BitCoin crash.
Getting Apple ( or the largest customer )'s order filled with a price premium is and will always be the simplest and effective way for the business.
And there is a huge market in GPU, HPC, AI, and Cloud Computing along with forever increasing chips in all segment. TSMC isn't really beholden to Apple like Dialog or PowerVR IMG.
That said, Apple probably just invested money in their 3nm in exchange for priority (or similar) and maybe TSMC is being a bit short sighted.
Apple is very far from monopolistic market share of smartphones and even much further away with Laptops. Apple with their intentionally overpriced products caters to a branded premium segment. They are not even aiming to take the mass market of low to mid level smartphones that makes up most of the market outside the US
I would also not be afraid if I were TSMC, especially as this is just about the new 3nm process that is catering to the highend market and doesn't eliminate the existing business.
Your comment reads a bit like there could be a distopian world where a shortage of 3nm results in Apple becomeing the only option for phones and laptops
Obviously TSMC doesn't care about VC's, but the same reason why VC's prefer a large number of small customers still applies.
This is intriguing and I would appreciate if possible to get any sources to read up on this?
I think the caveat/variable is "all else being equal or close to equal."
If having 10 customers will net you $10 total per month, and having one large customer will net you $100 per month, it is really hard to justify going with the $10 customers. But if those 10 customers will net you $10 EACH per month, then the 10customers is a better situation.
When people see small number of large customers, the implication is you are basically just running an outsourced dev/consultant/staff aug shop. Less product vision and ability to "scale".
Especially for a new untested company no customer is sure they actually need yet
This depends on your business strategy: having a single or few customers makes you much more dependent on their whims and their negotiation power. If you have more customers you are in a better position for pricing negotiations.
To me this says as much about Intel as about Apple. When Intel has a new chip or a bin that has small yields, they can’t supply a large customer. But MacBook had maybe a third of the market share it has now, so that’s a relatively small niche you can supply while you boost your yields.
And AMD and Qualcomm want more access to it than they have so they complain to the press. This is the supply chain folks.
Arguably, bleeding edge silicon fabs are natural monopolies. Pushing transistor sizes down to atomic scales entails non-linear increases in costs to get decent yields. That's why there are very few fabs at the bleeding edge any more.
I’m not claiming Apple respects TSMC more than Qualcomm does (but does Qualcomm respect anybody? They are practically the bad guys in any number of stories), but this is what respect would probably look like.
Speaking of Qualcomm, Apple is trying to compete with them on radio chips, so leaving TSMC probably works to that goal.
We're in the middle of a chip shortage, though.
In all, you're characterising Apple, competing fiercely in an open market, as preventing other people competing by being too good at it. That is a bit ridiculous. If AMD and Qualcomm die out as a result, it will be because they couldn't keep up, which is capitalism functioning correctly. Even under those very broad laws, the only party you can remotely fault is TSMC, and even then, they are literally just taking from the highest bidder, which is again capitalism functioning correctly.
Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind, and are now working harder than they were before to design something better. Just because capitalism in the long term usually gets competitors to converge does not mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that had been flatlining, so there is more competition now than there was before.
There was already a fire under their butt before Apple. Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing against each other. And that competition yielded architectures that are at least on par and very probably better than what Apple can do.
They can design better chips. They just don't have as much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already did before with, for example, the first generation of small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s that were just as good, had to wait for years to access the parts.
But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning for this better than they did, but you can fault these companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to supply chain strategists too.
You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as much money as possible and were trying as hard as they could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple. There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority of Apple processors aren't even being sold on performance.
Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that selling processors is very competitive. There will never be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple unless iPhone sales nosedive.
Can you give some examples? And a time frame in which AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia can use the same tech as Apple?
Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do not like the reality of capitalism. This is like complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when Germany won it fair and square under international law. Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING, wait till you see what companies do when they decide they don't want to play by the rules!
AMD didn’t run a monopolistic business with 90%+ profit margins for years, and couldn’t have done so.
Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
They just use the same silicon for a lot of products and have good profit margins, so they can place large orders with TSMC.
> Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
We'll see what the EU antitrust commission says about that, so far there's been no legal decision in an independent jurisdiction yet.
Independent of what?
But from a physical perspective, they've never had the kind of monopoly Intel enjoyed for decades.
The courts have ruled that the iOS App Store is not a monopoly.
They do on thier secoundary markets, (esp App Store) but they are also being monopolistic with replacement parts and repair.
Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so it’s not really clear what you are talking about when it comes to repair.
But even if there was some merit to that point, it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit the legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is (or what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?). I'm not making a legal argument.
> Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them
Where can I buy the tools needed to pair serialized replacement parts with the system? Regarding replacement parts, I don't work in the repair industry so I don't have first hand experience buying apple parts, but Louis Rossmann is telling a different story, do you have a source contradicting him?
> it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
I'm responding to your claim that apple never had a monopoly on anything.
Ford has a monopoly on Ford-branded floor mats! I mean you could choose other floor mats, but if you want Ford-branded ones they got a monopoly. A large audience is not a monopoly. I may not like Android phones, but they are sufficiently good, have almost all the same apps, and plenty of people have them.
Some of the trust-busting policymakers’ discussions about tech products are painful to listen to, but it’s all trying to recalibrate anti-trust law to the rise of vertically integrated products, which have created amazing user experiences but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
Because they are wrong.
> but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
Because they are not monopolies.
If there is a problem, they should address that rather than trying to distort what is happening, otherwise they will simply make bad policies because they are being dishonest.
TL;DR iphones don't have a monopoly, the _AppStore_ has.
On Andoird the situation is a bit murkier, you technically can install software from outside Google's playstore, but you have to click trough scary dialogs(warnings about the danger of doing so), and App Stores installed that way don't have the same device permissions than googles play store have(you have to manually confirm each software update, for example). so yeah, on android it's debatable, but that's a story for another time.
Of course they don’t have a monopoly on mobile apps or app stores or phones. There are competing products.
The problem is that Apple has a monopoly in selling/distributing Apps to iphone users. This is not the case on other operating systems, technically not even on android(eg. Samsung) and has nothing to do with a "monopoly on their own products".
What the court actually ruled was that Epic didn't make a good enough case.
Also, what the court said is that Apple does have "considerable market share of over 55%", but was not demonstrated to be an "illegal monopolist".
Which sounds to me like they were declared to be a monopoly, even without getting into related scenarios that are commonly lumped under "monopoly".
> Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so it’s not really clear what you are talking about when it comes to repair.
What? They have a strong history of not doing that in recent years.
Weird read. They were declared to have just over half the market and not be a monopolist.
You choose to read that as then being declared to be a monopoly.
This does provide helpful insight into why so many people seem to claim apple is a monopoly.
- 24/7 worldwide availability, instant payment/app download
- Easy re-install after deletion, you still own the app even if deleted
from the device
- Region restriction
- Separate app pricing by region
- Revenues paid to developer from multiple region currencies without
conversion fees
- Tax calculation and collection
- Instant customer refunds
- User rankings and reviews
- App store advertising in category listings
- Video previews of the app in operation
- Packaging of media content allowing developers the ability to load game
levels as needed. This allows a user to start playing your game quickly.
- App sales statsApple’s 30% was a huge deal in the mobile software space when it hit. That’s why so many people defected. And when they started turning profits, others followed. Most of the millionaires IIRC came out of the second and third wave, before everyone and their mother were doing it and people were making money telling you how they made a million 2 years ago (tricks that didn’t necessarily still work).
I agree that it’s a shame that Apple hasn’t periodically lowered their fees. Even a couple percent would make news. However, a different group would cry monopoly (dumping) because it would have kept more people focused on IOS exclusive applications.
They did eventually bow to public opinion and they lowered the fees for small developers to 15% a couple years ago.
I keep hoping they lower the fees for everything except in-app purchases. I think it would do their customers a lot of good.
Worth noting that this covers almost all developers.
You don't need most of that, and what you do need can be had extremely cheaply at 10-50€/mo + 0.2%
Why should I pay for these things I don’t care about? Why can’t these be separate costs, which I could opt-in? Why can’t they be unbundled?