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Comment by tediousdemise | Hacker News Reader

How does Apple manage to blow every other computing OEM out of the water? What's in the secret sauce of their company?

Is it great leadership? Top tier engineering talent? Lots of money? I simply don't understand.

If I had to guess, their secret sauce is that 1) they're paying lots of money to be on a chip fabrication node ahead of both AMD and Intel, 2) since their chip design is in-house, they don't have to pay the fat profit margin Intel and AMD want for their high-end processors and can therefore include what is effectively a more expensive processor in their systems for the same price, and 3) their engineering team is as good as AMD/Intel. Note that the first two have more to do with economics rather than engineering.

One thing that other people aren’t mentioning here is that they play the long game. They took their investment in the iPhone and ported it over to the Macs. They learned/improved a lot in that time. The M1 has over a decade of history behind it, in a way.

They have talent, they have execution, they have data about what rubs on macs they can use to optimize really well. But they have the profits and the cash reserves to make big bets and wait them out.

I think the M1 was expected 1 or 2 years before it was released. But they waited. Maybe it wasn’t good enough. Maybe the software support wasn’t there. But they didn’t have to push it out anyway and hope for the best. They could afford to wait.

Maybe that makes them willing to take bigger risks. Maybe through history they just knew Intel slowing down would happen (it bit them with 68k, then PPC, then G3/4/5) and we’re prepared in a way only done one with their own chips could be.

I think it's mostly engineering and the cash to make things happen. You heard it today in the presentation that since they launched M1, sales have skyrocketed for Apple computers.

Hopefully leadership is really looking hard at this trend and adjusting future offerings accordingly. Consumers WANT machines with high performance and great I/O and they're willing to pay for them.

With Apple, Intel, and AMD really stepping up the last couple of years, I think the next decade of personal computing is going to be really exciting!

Put simply, it is vertical integration paired with management that is adept at playing the long game.

marketing and a forgiving audience.

You have to remember that since the 2014 retina, Apple's offerings have been a bit crap.

This is a return to form ( and a good one at that) but its not worthy of hero worship. They've done a good job turning things around, which is very hard.

Apple isn't an OEM? They don't sell products that are marketed by another company.

D) all of the above?

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