Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
>Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sleek like the flash-based music players of the time but that held as many songs as the hard drive-based players at the time (the flash ones would only hold between 10 and 20 songs depending upon how you compressed the music).
>Rubinstein told Jobs that the components necessary to make a small music player with a lot of storage didn’t exist yet. This was in late 2000, according to the story, which is well-documented in Walter Isaacson’s book.
>However in February of 2001, Rubinstein was in Japan meeting with Toshiba when the following scene played out, according to Isaacson (page 384 of "Steve Jobs"):
>At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it. When the Toshiba engineers showed it to Rubinstein, he knew immediately what it could be used for. A thousand songs in his pocket! Perfect. But he kept a poker face. Jobs was also in Japan, giving the keynote speech at the Tokyo Macworld conference. They met that night at the Hotel Okura, where Jobs was staying. “I know how to do it now,” Rubinstein told him. “All I need is a $10 million check.” Jobs immediately authorized it. So Rubinstein started negotiating with Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he began to look around for someone who could lead the development team.
>"Exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make" is the key takeaway here. Fast forward to later in the year – October 23, 2001, to be exact – and Apple would roll out a $400 pocketable MP3 player that could hold a thousand songs thanks to a hard drive no other company could use for competing products. The scroll wheel was pretty cool, too.
Source: https://techland.time.com/2013/10/23/watch-steve-jobs-unveil...
Enabling podcasts was a big deal though. I’ll give them that.
Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm.
It also did everything you’d need regarding MP3s. You could rip CDs, organize and burn them, have the lyrics and album artwork show neatly while displaying a cool set of animated waveforms…
I miss it dearly. The fact that it became a behemoth and later Apple Music was a tragedy.
I think your Apple bias is clouding your memory.
Apple certainly didn't invent the Spotlight UI. Quicksilver did it before on OS X, and my memory is hazy, but it also might've been inspired by another app.
iTunes also didn't invent the search-as-filter paradigm. I remember using something similar on foobar2000 in the early 2000s, and it might've been available even before in some Winamp plugins. Again, hazy memory, and it's difficult to track down these things now with any certainty.
I'm not arguing against your love for iTunes, but I think you're overstating its influence on software design.
I’m not claiming iTunes invented it, but it was the most influential implementation.
And before Quicksilver there was LaunchBar, which pre-dates OS X having originally shipped for NeXT. I believe I starting using LaunchBar during the OS X public Beta, and I still use it.
You can download all of the old version of LaunchBar including for NeXT:
What apple does is perfect that design. iTunes didn't invent search-as-filter or the general UI layout, but it certainly perfected it.
But at the time, iPod + iTunes + Mac was a better combo than anything else available on the market.
I disagree entirely, for reasons that should be obvious once we examine the actual state of the market at the time. Storage was not the thing that made iPod successful.
The microdrive had existed for several years by then[0][1], developed originally for digital cameras. Like most storage technologies, it was growing in capacity as time went on. I don't think "technology gets marginally better with time" counts as a "tech revolution", nor do I think the microdrive counted as a consumer storage technology that was previously unseen by the time the iPod launched. A physically larger 1.8-inch microdrive (with consequently greater capacity) also does not count as a revolution... it's like making a bigger montor and being surprised that you have more screen real estate.
I also find the anecdote you replied to confusing because surely Apple would have known what a microdrive was before this meeting. That part of the anecdote makes no sense. IBM had their own 1GB microdrive by June of 2000, so even if Apple had exclusive rights to Toshiba's larger 1.8-inch microdrives, that seems entirely irrelevant, contrary to the "key takeaway" that the anecdote posited.
Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution.
As it turns out, Apple didn't even have a storage capacity advantage[2], in direct contradiction to the anecdote posted upthread.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive
Hard to build a consumer device with a MSRP of $399 if one of the components is over 60% of that cost. Competing firms estimated the total BOM for the original iPod at more like $200.
They were also surely looking at the potential trajectory of storage improvements too -- by the time the 4gb microdrives had been released in 2004, Apple was already shipping 40gb iPods and selling them for $499.
>> Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution.
Regardless, it turns out that it wasn't even a capacity advantage, since the Personal Jukebox[0][1] was released in 1999 and offered 4.8GB of storage in a package that weighed 300g instead of the 185g of the 2001 iPod. A difference in weight, sure, but... modern smartphones are often between those two weights, so a few extra grams would have been fine and the Personal Jukebox would have flown off shelves, if storage capacity was the defining feature.
Just telling a compelling anecdote doesn't make it accurate. Apple had other advantages at the time, including the scroll wheel and iTunes, as well as brand recognition. Based on the evidence of what existed at the time, I do not think storage was the compelling thing that made iPod more of a success than the Personal Jukebox.
[0]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/520590/evolution_of_the_mp3_...
iPod was not successful because it was the only thing offering high storage capacity. It wasn't the only one. iPod was successful because it offered a touch wheel, iTunes, and Apple's brand recognition. As you point out, it also had very good build quality. None of these things have to do with some exceptional storage capacity.
Apple's brand may not have been as good as Sony in the music space, but Apple was still a very well-known brand, even if they were struggling at the time.
Comparing the iPod to junk that happens to match on one spec or another tells us nothing.
Elsewhere... as in the comment that I replied to? Which you then replied to me?
I was literally in agreement with the "elsewhere" that you're referring to. Your comments are confusing to me. Storage capacity was not the thing that made iPod successful, even though the anecdote at the top of this thread is trying to make that argument. There were a number of other factors that were more important. That's what I said and that's what the "elsewhere" also appears to have said. That's exactly what you just said too, so you're literally agreeing with me, but you want to argue for some reason.
Still, "Apple" was a much better brand than {someone no one has ever heard of}, which matters for something like the Personal Jukebox.
This is of course true, but not relevant.
The personal jukebox was a junk product. Nobody would seriously imagine that the reason it didn’t win against the iPod was the brand.
Now imagine it the other way around - if apple had released the jukebox, and ‘remote solution’ had released the iPod.
Startups with no brand succeed all the time, if they have a great product.
They probably would have both failed, in that case. Apple for delivering a product that wasn't good enough, and Personal Solutions for having no brand recognition and no retail partnerships/network.
> Startups with no brand succeed all the time, if they have a great product.
Launching a physical product back then wasn't as easy as launching a Kickstarter and eventually transitioning to an Amazon listing. Just having a good product didn't mean you knew how to get it into the hands of customers. Things are much easier these days, and even so... lots of good products still fail to reach market for reasons that have nothing to do with the product itself.
Rubinstein saw the drive and realized that the price level and size was perfect for their product idea. And he had buy-in from the higher ups so they could negotiate a certain volume and price that made the project feasible.
That doesn't mean another company couldn't have been successful with a smaller 1GB drive (seeing the success of the smaller iPods later on) or a physically bigger 5GB drive (people were still carrying around walkmans and CD players).
What Apple managed to pull off was making a device that was easy to get music into (with iTunes) and easy to use (with the clickwheel) and, yes, compact and with good design and marketing.
"A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499."
Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product.
It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.
As others have pointed out here, there were other competitors offering larger-than-1-inch hard drives like the ones Apple used.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, a portable MP3 player with about 5GB of storage was actually introduced about 2 years before the iPod.
Based on the available evidence, storage was not the defining feature that made iPod successful, which is the claim that anecdote was trying to make. The iPod was successful for other reasons, regardless of how emotionally compelling that anecdote tries to be.
PDAs were being developed at the same time as the iPod and probably have a much better parental claim than the iPod. The first smartphones -- the ones before the iPhone -- were basically PDAs with cellular modems, and utilized the similar OSes as their non-modem-bearing predecessors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
I had an HTC Wizard, specifically the Cingular 8100, which came out two years before the first iPhone.
But none of those early predecessors achieved anything even close to the scale of the iPod.
I'm not arguing that Apple is the sole responsible for miniaturization of technology, but selling dozens of millions (and eventually hundreds of millions) of their gizmo certainly helped fast-forward the industry. Things would have happened a lot slower if it weren't for the iPod.
I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 years later, but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods ?
For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.
That's because the labels were engaging in pricefixing and blacklisting retailers who did not go along with their scheme. People suspected it but nothing really happened until the FTC stepped in.
Even then the result was basically a slap on the wrist and most people had begun using P2P instead.
Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.
Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very easy.
With the iPod, I would then just borrow people's iPods instead of CDs.
I didn't get into - and actually still don't subscribe to, a music service like Spotify. A few years after starting above, I would still just buy CDs from touring bands (these were bands driving cross country in vans and playing condemned warehouses, so safe to say their stuff wasn't being traded as mp3's, and if they were, they would have LOVED it). I remember buying some music off of iTunes Music, but I tried to not, as sharing their the system I had didn't work well - or even across my own devices.
MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key?
I think archive.org found a bunch of it, but some of it was deleted.
And the iTunes app itself came out 9 months before the iPod.
Apple had a big marketing push “rip, mix, burn”. iTunes had excellent support for ripping CDs and burning them to CD. I used iTunes for creating CDs for years and didn’t get my first iPod until 2006.
I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating.
I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped because it was just easier to use them. Good UX can trump many other factors.
Maybe I've just done the exact same thing, perhaps I was wrong to read an attempted correction into your comment and you just thought you were adding some interesting additional information to the conversation. In which case my bad, and sorry. But I think unlikely you'd share that as random "fun fact" extra info rather than replying to a misunderstanding of the previous comment's point.
I never said it was. The point was not a comparison of iTunes to streaming - but the proposed UX enhancement iTunes provided mapped a way that was even simpler than pirating per u/HarHarVeryFunny, which made it worth it at the time to switch from pirating in their mind.
Streaming made this even easier in my opinion, and was the catalyst that prompted me to stop. Granted - when I was a teenager, I simply didn't have any money even for iTunes purchases - but when Spotify came around, I had just gotten my first job, and made the switch then.
Sadly now I feel like the UX and recommendation system of netflix/disney/hulu/etc. is genuinely worse than just pirating. I still pay for spotify though, its feature full, fairly cheap, and delivers all the songs in the world into my pocket
Although, I do keep Disney+ for my child, and Peacock because I still watch the Office a lot.
Of course, anime is a bit of an oddball when it comes to piracy sites, the lack of legal enforcement combined with (from what I've noticed) that a disproportionate part of the audience are developers means there are some really good sites out there.
If only it were so.
Piracy is free. How do we beat 'Free'?
'Easy'.
Low cost but easy may still come out cheaper than "free" if you place sufficient value on your time.
The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.)
iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod; but the iTunes Music Store was not. iTunes was, at first, a CD ripping program (and library manager for music ripped from CD.) To buy music for your iPod, you'd go to the record store, buy a CD, put it in your Mac, rip it, and then load it onto the iPod.
And while, yes, music piracy slightly predated the iTunes Music Store, there were a lot of people buying iPods in that era who had fancy Mac computers, but just plain didn't have internet service to their homes, and so for whom music piracy wasn't really a possibility†. 2001 was an interesting time; Internet access was still very unevenly distributed, and in ways that had nothing to do with economic conditions. Rural areas might have phone lines so bad that even a 28.8kbps modem wouldn't work over them. The rollout of ISDN was only just getting started, and was limited to regions with less red tape (much like fiber rollouts in the last decade.)
† Well, okay, a different form of music piracy was probably happening in these Internet-starved areas: if you were willing to shell out for a CD burner for your Mac (not an internal option, rather an external SCSI-over-Firewire one), then you could also use iTunes to burn those ripped songs back onto a mix-tape CD — and then you could give them to your friends, who could in turn rip them to their PCs. Shame about the quality loss in the process (given iTunes' default ripping encoding of 128kbps AAC — though 256kbps AAC was possible even back then), but it'd be no worse than what dubbing between literal compact cassettes would get you, and certainly better than what you'd get by downloading the Napster-standard 96kbps MP3. (And CD-to-CD streaming bitwise dubbing was also possible back then, too, but not with iTunes, only expensive third-party software; I don't think anyone but professional bootleggers had any reason to try that for music. It was more a thing for ensuring you get clean working copies of PC "must have the CD-ROM in to play" games.)
It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous.
Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 95/98 etc, and by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.
The firewire port was largely because IIRC USB 2 didnt exist at launch of iPod - transferring 5GB via USB 1 was painfully slow, the trick the iPod could do at the time that no competitor could was sync 1000 songs incredibly quickly.
> iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod
This isn't the case, iTunes was released before the iPod- before iPod "Rip/Mix/Burn" was a big marketing strategy for the iMac. The iPod did follow quickly though. Many of us had substantial libraries in iTunes before the iPod landed. Wikipedia suggests it was iTunes 2.0 that brought iPod support.
Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!
I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.
For what its worth, Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...). That tells you a great deal about the state of CD-ROM in the late 90s. Office 2001, CD-ROM release only. There are many other examples you can point to. The PC game industry was ~100% CD-ROM or optical media in 2001 too.
> If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.
While yes, this is true, most people didn't buy most software. I think you may have lived in a bit of a tech bubble. At the time, "retail-boxed PC software" was a thing only PC enthusiasts bought!
In that era, outside of a few coastal US cities with great Internet connectivity, most home PCs were used permanently disconnected from the Internet, with only the software that came loaded by the OEM (which is why, to this day, OEMs still feel an obligation to do that.) This is also why
> Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...)
...because, if you look at PCs after 1996, they all had enough hard-drive space to ship with OEM-preinstalled copies of Microsoft Office. And they almost always did.
But most people of that era weren't buying new PCs. Most people of that era still only had the same PC they bought possibly nearly-a-decade prior, to be the fancy electric typewriter for their kids' book reports. Because nothing was demanding quite yet for them to upgrade. Because they weren't keeping up with new software. It was a "cycle of stagnation", per se.
It was only once Internet connectivity started improving in rural areas, and the web started developing multimedia killer apps with resource requirements that made old PCs feel slow, that the rest of the world started catching up, looking around, and wondering whether they indeed needed a new PC. (And even then, there was a lot of pushback, from a crowd who had up until that point got by with for years with the same first PC they ever bought; who was entirely unused to technology that changes out from under them. Especially when it was a teenager who wanted access to these killer apps — their parents often didn't get it. "Why do we need a new PC? The old one still works! This is like replacing a refrigerator that's still refrigerating!")
In short, this is why everything other than the iPod, in this era, was still using parallel. Consumer electronics people knew that for every one Silicon Valley technophile who has home broadband, there were 100 teen girls in Kansas with no Internet running Windows 98SE, who might nevertheless be swayed to buy an MP3 player — perhaps to then load it with music ripped from tapes using the PC's line-in jack with a program (distributed on an accompanying floppy!) that does some awful kind of low-bitrate but low-CPU-usage streaming compression.
It wasn't just that it took until 2003 for Apple to secure the IP rights necessary to launch the iTunes Music Store. It really just wouldn't have made sense in 2001. Too few people online to buy music to make sense of the licensing fees. But the adoption curve was clear (and clearly exponential); so Apple started work early, and got the deals done by 2003, when it would start being a profitable venture. Other companies, meanwhile — ones with large IP-rights-holders as partners — had tried the same thing years earlier! But those companies couldn't turn a profit. (At least outside of the few very special "even grandmas here are ahead of the rest of the world" markets of the time, like Japan.)
> Ask anyone who lived this period
To be clear, I'm probably older than you. I'm describing what I saw around me, at my house and my friends' houses and my school and my parents' offices and so forth, as someone who lived in a somewhat-rural area [town of ~50k people] from ~1995 until ~2007.
Floppies were only used to share small documents and maybe some split(1)/Hacha splitted software from cybercafes into some floppy stacks.
And to boot from floppy on unsupported PC's.
Bear in mind that most Pentium MMX based PC's had a CD drive. Even the ones still running in 2002 were CD based.
You are way off here. Lets check a contemporary source to understand the public sentiment at the time:
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight"
Weird Al - 1999
You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.
Yes, all that is true... for people who were frequently trying to do anything "interesting" with their computers. Most people didn't try to do anything interesting with their computers! Most people — your average plumber in a small town in Ohio, for example — bought a computer for "productivity" (i.e. running Word); never played a single game on it other than the ones that came with Windows; and forgot it existed basically 99% of the time. Eventually, maybe they got AOL because of the free trial CD/floppy, and checked their email once a month. (But not more often than that; they didn't want to tie up their phone line!)
For these people, buying a piece of consumer electronics like an MP3 player, that forced them to use their computer to populate it (or, indeed, to do anything other than using Word), was a confusing incursion into what had previously been an analogue affair of tape dubbing, suddenly surprising them that the machine they thought would be just fine, had suddenly "gone bad" (i.e. gone obsolete) despite having been left mostly untouched.
> You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.
You are aware that in plenty of places that theoretically had the capacity for Internet connectivity, there were still many people who didn't bother to actually get Internet access, because they had no use for it, and that (unlike today) nothing out there demanded they get online to e.g. file their taxes, right?
Or that, even for many people "with Internet", they were still essentially using a captive portal experience (like AOL) at that point, with no web browser, FTP client, or anything else that would ever lead them to try to download a piece of software or anything else 1MB or larger, right?
Also, you know there are places outside the US, right? And that consumer electronics manufacturers care very much about selling into non-US markets? Look at global Internet penetration in 2001. Think about what you'd have to do to sell a consumer electronics device to someone in India or Indonesia in 2001.
My point wasn't that any of these factors pertained to the specific technosphere bubble that Apple released — and still releases — its products into. My point was, in fact, the opposite: that Apple is distinctive among consumer electronics manufacturers for a product marketing strategy involving addressing only that technosphere bubble. Everyone else used to target the lowest common denominator — that Ohioan plumber with the "antique paperweight", or even whatever someone might be using as a computer somewhere in Nigeria or the Philippines at that time.
If you really want to put this to bed, just look at any vintage PC magazine from 97 onwards archived on archive.org, and pay attention to the adverts, which are a literal snapshot of what people could buy at that time. Good luck finding a consumer desktop PC at any price from the Windows 98 era onwards without a CD-ROM.
In 1998, most PC magazines even had demo CD-ROMs stuck to the cover, such was the wide penetration of CD-ROM drives.
In 1999, yes, maybe a 486 with Windows 95 could be barely usable, but most basic software required a Pentium with MMX because of multimedia and optimisations. That's it. We already were in the Pentium II era, not owning a K6 or Pentium MMX would outclass you in a breeze for any serious task.
AMD and VIA CPU's were really cheap and by 1999 having a machine with a Pentium MMX-like specs with a CDROM was the norm because of that.
And OFC by 1999 DOS was pretty much dead and everyone switched to Windows 95 at least.
Yes, there were people and nerds like me in 2004 totally being able to use FreeBSD/Linux under a 486 with 16MB of RAM to play downscaled MP3's, nethack and surf the web with Lynx. But for sure we weren't the target of commercial software vendors.
By the year 2001, the minimal computer specs skyrocketed for everyone since 1997.
I had the internet throughout the rest of the 90’s, dialing up via a series of external modems. 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and eventually a 56k modem. I downloaded MP3s and played them with SoundJam MP (which Apple bought and reskinned as iTunes).
That computer was so slow (75MHz PowerPC 603) that it took nearly all of its resources to play an MP3. However, my next computer was a B&W Power Mac G3 (released in 1999) running at 400 MHz.
The difference was night and day, way more than the 5 times implied by the clock speed. Around that time I also got cable Internet (6Mbit) which was far faster than 56K dialup (yes, more than 100X faster).
By the time the iPod came out I had more music than could even fit on the 5GB hard drive. I waited till the 3rd gen and got the 40GB model.
I honestly don’t think my experience was atypical of computer enthusiasts at the time (the type of people who read Slashdot and later HN). It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.
(Professional electronics, on the other hand, could make all sorts of demands and assume a very specific niche audience, because they were incredibly high-margin. There used to be a big difference between professional vs consumer electronics in terms of not just what parts they used, but what connectivity standards they could assume.)
> It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.
And, uh, you know... poor people. Blue-collar poor people, who don't care much about computing. But who would really would like to listen to some music as they take the bus to work.
As I said in my original post, Apple was doing something very exceptional within the space of consumer electronics, by selling a consumer device (not a professional device!) that actually assumed a niche market (computer enthusiasts, who had thus purchased a recent Mac) rather than being "for everyone."
For a device that only played music and only worked with FireWire-equipped Macs, the original iPod was not an "everyone" device, it was a luxury product for music enthusiasts.
I don't remember ever using Firewire for anything.
Are you saying it was only Firewire?
Quite possible if I dug enough, I could find my iPod. It wasn't one of the very first ones, but it was monochrome and hard-drive based.
Mine was a 4th generation monochrome - in other words, 2004ish. Had to have been USB. I don't think there were any Firewire Macs before 1999, and I don't think I ever got a Mac after that point, or that ran OS X.
They made it easy to add your existing collection to digital, and also import a library from the friendly pirates.
Then they made it easy to buy new music, after people were in the ecosystem.
iTunes was released in January of 2001, 9 months before the release of the first generation iPod in October 2001.
Doing a little digging, this was the model: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/creative-nomad-jukebox-zen-xtra... 4.4 x 3 x .86" bigger than the original Sony Walkman. It had much larger capacities and was outside the Apple ecosystem, which was an absolute feature at the time. Itunes was horrid.
USB Speeds weren't that big of a factor, though YMMV depending on the user. With the larger capacities of HD based players, you loaded once, which took some time, and then topped up with new additions which was not a big deal. My particular Nomad model had USB 2.0 though
USB 1.1 was 12mbits/s -- that is 1.5MB/s. Firewire was 400mbit/s.
Accounting only for bus speed, filling up a 5GB iPod would have taken 54mins[0] for USB 1.1 vs 1.6mins[1] for Firewire 400.
[0] 1000MiB/1024MB * 5000MB = 4,883MB / 1.5MB/s = 3255s
[1] 4,883MB / (400mbit/8) = 98s
Apple even made dual Firewire/USB cables to allow the (Firewire) charging brick to be used while syncing.
Yes, I know, survivorship bias, but apple has a history of not releases products unless they think they're good enough (for their own definition of good) and if apple hadn't had found a way to make it store enough songs to be a differentiator we probably would never have heard of the iPod, nor would we be talking about it today
No, it doesn't. It shows that something made a big difference, but that thing absolutely does not have to be the amount of storage.
Keep in mind that 1.8 inches was not remotely the smallest hard drive size at the time. The 1.3 inch Kittyhawk microdrive was released by HP in 1992, the 1-inch IBM microdrive in 340MB was released in 1999 and the 1GB in 2000.
And yet, if you want the best chips by the thousand/millions you run to TSMC
I highly recommend checking out the other videos by that YouTube channel as well.
But the manufacturers just thought they were ahead of the market. Given this iPod story from 2000, maybe they were.
All that stood in the way: random temporal mechanics and genetics
What kind of real-world impact are we likely to see on the 3nm chips for the new iPhone and M3 macs? These figures seem outstanding and generationally impactful if true.
To be clear, you don't get all three.
Also, are these Apple's numbers? They are better than what TSMC say (1st gen) 3nm silicon provides:
> N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
'70% logic density gain' sounds like 'reduce area by 35%' to me
The only one that might not line up is 'reduce power consumption by up to 50%' vs 'up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology'
...but you have to know what's being compared before deciding the numbers do (or don't) make sense
Typically, sram (cache memories for example) doesn't scale as much as core logic, and interconnect (connections between the cores, DDR, etc...) almost don't scale at all.
This is highly dependent on the design of the SoC, but the core logic is rarely the largest of the three, so you will not see a 35% reduction of the total area of the chip: only of the areas the most densely packed with logic. What you could have for example is a 35% more powerful neural network accelerator in the same area as the previous generation. But you will not have 35% bigger cache.
N3 is a stop-gap as TSMC is behind on their N2 GAA process. It's not so different from Intel's 14nm++++++ where it was dramatically better than before, but still not enough.
No, but improving density still makes it smaller (for an otherwise-"identical" offering) :)
Can you elaborate?
Start with processor pipelining, branch prediction, speculative execution, etc
Then move to multiple CPUs/CPU cores
A practically-linear program (ie hardly any unpredictable branching) can be run ~5x faster on a 5-stage-pipelined CPU than an unpipelined CPU
Liekwise, parallelizable tasks can benefit from multiple CPUs/cores, whereas non-parallelizable tasks will not (much)
And then you have performance-per-watt vs raw hertz count: today, most people seem to care more about performance-per-watt than raw "performance"
Ie, ceteris peribis, a 30w 4 core CPU at 1Ghz is going to be more favorably viewed than a 100w 6 core CPU at 1.8Ghz - you can throw 12 "low power", "slower" cores at the problem for ~10% less power draw than the "high power", "faster" cores
Then you can also look at the relative efficiency of different CPU platforms and/or microcode changes in a single platform: that was the major selling point of Apple's anti-Intel ads 15-20 years ago - the PowerPC was "faster" than the Pentium because it was "more efficient" at several families of tasks (even though the raw clock speed of the PPC was typically lower than the comparable Pentium offerings)
This comes up with the Apple M-series CPUs vs the Intel chips they replaced - they may not be "faster" (in raw ghz), but they're more performant
Hope it's obvious, but no, they are not Apple's numbers—this is a rumor about unreleased products.
Actually you do. The branding is called FinFlex, but the upshot is that you can use different FETs for different parts of a circuit. So some critical timing bottleneck blocks could be built with performance optimized FETs and other blocks can optimize for low power.
The numbers from TSMC for N3E are +18% speed improvement at same power, -34% power reduction at same speed, and 1.7x density improvement.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-outlines-3nm-roadmap
>Also, are these Apple's numbers?
Ha ha. That's funny. Does Apple ever release any numbers prerelease?
You probably also take photos, where Apple automatically applies some Machine Learning tricks.
And wherever Machine Learning is used, more can be used. One day they could put an entire ChatGPT on the iPhone.
That sounds great except I never use siri...(in car commands being the exception).
[1] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ry...
[2] - https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
Where is AMD's competitive chip that came out July 2021?
If you need further evidence of this pattern, look at Nvidia's ridiculous 40-series cards. More expensive than a used car, but they were able to secure TSMC's 4nm node and annihilate everyone else. Apple did the same thing with M1, and it looks like that's what they're gearing up for with M3.
> Battery life was a good few hours shorter than the M1
They do not care about this:
> ...but it was also manufactured on 7nm versus the Apple's 5nm
Power envelopes are reported in very misleading ways by companies, in practice it is not even close. The way they report stuff is having their cake and eat it too: the benchmarks results assume boosting their frequencies above the base one, while the "power envelopes" advertised are on the base frequency. It becomes quite apparent when you run them on battery, where M1/2s continue performing the same as plugged in, and amd/intel laptops underperform, while also not even lasting as much as apple's on battery.
We’ve been reading for decades that ISAs don’t matter that much anymore, and yet everything that needs good battery life is ARM. Intel was the undisputed manufacturing kind for 40 years or so. Things change.
Seems like node size for the price beats everything else which is what we're talking about here.
Apple's anticompetitive practices are not particularly compelling evidence of some inherent architectural superiority.
I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.
You can see it in the smaller performance gains of 4nm A16 chips vs 4nm A15 chips from Apple.
Obviously there's many caveats here based on how each person uses their device. But the broad takeaway is - a 45% reduction in power consumption by Apple's chips doesn't result in a corresponding increase in battery life. We'll only know when the final product is shipped.
I've seen this comment over and over again, everytime an increase in processor efficiency is talked about and yet those gains usually do result in a very noticiable improvement on battery life.
The real life luxury of just being able to toss a 14" macbook pro that weighs almost nothing into your bag and have a savage development machine with up to 96gb of ram, no fan noise and minimal heat, great battery life, is very valuable.
I've started noticing all the processes that really bog my intel mac down. Indexing, running out of ram, builds, etc.. I was pretty pessimistic about macs for a while, but it feels right now like when they started putting retina displays in them. My previous mac couldn't even smoothly play a 1080p YouTube video very well.
Yeah, it struggles with YouTube videos and fans are spinning in vacuum cleaner mode. But it didn't in 2019. I feel OS and software updates ruined it. Not what I expect after only about 3 years of use. (obviously it wasn't cheap either)
Oh well, still gave Apple my money, just hope it's a special situation with the chipset transition and not the regular lifespan from now on.
Not saying you're doing that or that they are otherwise great machines (they're not) but they can go from being a steak grill back to being a relatively serviceable computer just by switching the charging port.
Pretty sure you have it backwards, it's charging from the _left_ that causes more throttling.
In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude.
There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
What we get is a result of nobody on the entire stack giving a shit. It's not a technological limitation.
With a tiny bit of attention to performance you can do insane things
About text editors... you can use blazing fast editors if you want like cli-base ones, notepad++ or sublimetext... If devs are not using those to code anymore there may be reasons, right?
That's a bit of an exaggeration. What stack's hello world takes 10 minutes to build?
Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.
You’re doing something extremely wrong if this is the case.
Or more likely, the people complaining about “10 minute” web app compile times are just repeating hyperbole they found in other cynical comments.
We can all agree software is not as resource efficient as it used to be on the whole.
Beyond that we’d have to discuss specific examples and benchmarks.
I could be wrong. I often am. But I suspect that Electron consumes far more resources in the minds of HN users than it does in most computers.
However the differences are real and have been measured. [1] [2] You are welcome to argue that the performance work isn't worth prioritizing, but don't fall into the trap of claiming the performance gap doesn't exist.
--
Eclipse ran better on my $600 laptop in 2012 than pycharm runs on my 6 core 2019 macbook. Also, on my macbook, high cpu activity causes constant pops in my audio, which is just a thing that happens with macbooks that people just ignore apparently.
It is apparently an iron law of the Universe that all available computing power must be wasted.
Typing in Sublime Text is always fast. Except for the first line which is the title of the tab. After that, it is fast.
I often switch to ST to type, then copy and paste to the slow app.
It's kinda nuts.
Because it sure seems like this exact comment is a tinnitus-like constant ringing noise amongst the tech community.
I'm already in the minority because I do all my work in Sublime Text so I might be completely wrong about all this, but this is how I suspect it will play out.
But I only use python and no demanding software like docker.
Sublime Text was always faster than all of these (and still is) but that’s not why people are picking text editors.
Tauri is great for certain use cases but it’s not even close to a replacement for Electron at this point (having used both).
Optimizing for speed above all else is the kind of thing that appeals to a subset of programmers, but most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough. Products like VSCode are more than fast enough for all but a few people who like to count milliseconds.
Personally, I think VSCode has massive adoption because it's free and it's easiest to configure which both appeal to newcomers. The other camp that like VSCode are the nomads who like to work in the cloud. The senior devs I've met generally prefer either Jetbrains or Sublime, depending on if they like a maximal or minimal setup. And then there's the hardcore camp who can get on with Vim and Emacs. I don't know how the latter do it personally, I've tried multiple times to get something similar in functionality to Sublime/VSCode with them and it is always a monumentally frustrating fuck about.
> Tauri is great for certain use cases but it’s not even close to a replacement for Electron at this point (having used both).
I agree but it will definitely be ready within 5 years.
> Optimizing for speed above all else is the kind of thing that appeals to a subset of programmers, but most people just don’t care about at all as long as it’s fast enough. Products like VSCode are more than fast enough for all but a few people who like to count milliseconds.
I do agree with this to an extent but another reason I'm a big Sublime Text fan is the interface. I really appreciate the lack of screen clutter compared to VSCode and especially compared to Jetbrains.
People care about speed. Even non-technical people. Every non-technical person I know that has bought a new computer even though they already had one was because of performance. People care about performance so much that they are replacing their whole device! That costs a significant amount of money and comes with a real hassle of transferring their data.
I think people use VSCode over Sublime because of its features, not because they don't care about the speed. It's certainly what got me to migrate from Sublime to VSCode. Sublime is so much faster, but it just doesn't do the things that I want my editor to do. I would instantly switch away from VSCode to a faster alternative if it actually had the subset of VSCode features I care about.
In VSCode the search gets refined as I type, the results are in a sidepanel and clicking on a result will change the main editor's view to that location in that file.
In Sublime I have to first define which files are even subject to the search. There are options to add folders or to search all currently open files, however a bizarre omission of searching all the files in the currently open project, which is what I almost always want and how VSCode works by default.
Then I have to type out the search term, which is sometimes needlessly precise - because in VSCode thanks to the incremental search I sometimes already see that there are no results or just a few results when I've typed in only a small prefix of what I was going to.
Once the search is done, in Sublime the results are opened as a pseudo-file in a new tab and clicking on a result switches away to a different file tab. It works, sure, but it's very inconvenient for cases where I want to quickly click through a bunch of resulting files to see which is the one I actually wanted. Lots of switching back-and-forth between file tabs, as opposed to VSCode where it's all done in a single view context with the results always visible in the sidepanel. This is especially annoying in Sublime when a search result is in a file that I already have open but is very far from the search result pseudo-file tab. This means that to get back to the search results I can't even just switch the file tab, I need to first scroll through the open files tabs to even find the pseudo-file.
So in short, I guess I would describe Sublime's search as a sort of middle point between using grep and VSCode. It's serviceable, but annoying and wastes my time.
Sublime 100% does this because I use it everyday. You just have to use command + shift + f, type whatever you want and hit enter and it will search all files in the open project by default. Only time it won't do this is if there's something in the "where" input from a previous search.
I find the VSCode search results packed in like sardines and like the greater amount of context you with Sublime tab which generally means I get to find what I'm looking for without having to click through to check. I've got a keyboard shortcut set to jump between the entries which makes it feel a bit snappier to cycle through results as well. All personal preference at the end of the day though.
I will admit there doesn't seem to be as much in it as I thought there was.
The instances in which Tauri is faster are when you write your business logic in Rust and your frontend logic in JS.
Simply switching to Tauri will not instantly speed up your app.
> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs
which I felt can't be true because my laptop is ancient by modern standards but still usable. Not as snappy as I would like it to be, but also not terrible or unusable.
I’m starting to see less software support, though. I should put Linux on it.
This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and everything is fast.
The exceptions are anything that loads over a network. Spotify, Slack, and others can feel “slow” when the content is loading from a backend over the internet, but obviously that’s not the fault of the UI
Or tried to help students use an electron IDE on a computer with 8Gb and a 2 ghz 10 year old processor that their dad saved to buy secondhand to help his kid not need to work overtime at the factory to keep food on the table?
Electon is only fast on developer and gamer tier hardware.
Try running this stuff on the hardware steam says is the average gamer and see how fast it actually feels.
Is the codebase getting de-optimized with time? Is it badly architectures extensions? Is the JS runtime becoming slower?
People definitely don't optimise their Electron apps as well as they could for time reasons, normally not too bad if you're running 1 Electron app, but if you're running several then it becomes more obvious.
Tbh it's a old/new software design principle I guess. We all hear the stories of some 386 machine in the basement running some fortran program that hasn't been touched in years; whereas modern JS-based codebases are expected to be constantly updated. I've worked in JS my whole career & it's very rare to see a project that's one & done like software used to be.
Maybe old software did get updated, but in long release cycles, version 1, 1.1 etc. Now JS-based software is updated (sometimes) every day!
Qualcomm is a for profit, they are not forced to be bad, being bad mean less profit, they are just inefficient and had a different strategy, they saw competition coming and they panicked, they are not used to innovate they prefer milk their customers with small and insignificant upgrades every once in a very while as well as making use of their influence with the deep state to kill any weak competition (Samsung's Exynos)
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was a hot turd. In contrast, "plus" variation, which was the exact same chip but manufactured by TSMC instead of Samsung, got significantly better performance/power numbers.
(BTW, I think you're getting downvoted into oblivion because of the "deep state" nonsense. The rest of what you said is reasonable.)
It happened with Japan, look at them nowadays [2]
It also happened with Europe, Alcatel and Nokia, look at them nowadays [3]
For some reason, only Microsoft can get away with bribing foreign countries [4, 5]
We seen the extension of it with the ban of chinese's 5G and multiple tech companies, including huawei, wich later unveiled novel EUV patents [6], they maybe knew what they were cooking
TSMC's developing story is also quite revealing, with US officials suggesting sabotaging TSMC [7]
"deep state" nowadays has negative connotation because the government wants it to be that way ('it's a conspiracy' argument), look, it works [8]
And it's not just with tech, there are some suspicious stories in other industries, car [9] and metal manufacturing [10] for example
After all these stories, seeing Samsung having to drop plans for a homemade chip with advanced homemade fabs instantly ring bells, specially when the house was tainted with similar stories [11]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/04/18/s...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent#Lawsuits
[4] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_...
[5] - http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/microsoft-brazil/
[6] - https://www.techspot.com/news/97072-huawei-patents-euv-litho...
[7] - https://eurasiantimes.com/us-taiwan-should-destroy-its-semic...
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_State...
[9] - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Carlos_Ghosn (i couldn't find english coverage)
[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Pierucci
[11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kun-hee#Scandals_and_contr...
(Apple, of course, still blows both of them out of the water.)
Maybe the same with iPhone.
I generally care about process node as the main feature of a computer.
But I genuinely believe 4k is the upper limit where you stop seeing benefits in increased resolution for a monitor. Our eyes do have limits after all! I have pretty good vision and 4k is enough, and at that point I'd prefer focus on other aspects of picture quality like color accuracy and higher refresh rate.
It's already annoying enough how large a screenshot of your monitor comes out (just tested on my desktop and it came out to 10MB). 8k is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
I think it depends on how big the monitor is. You're probably right for 27" monitors. But running a 43" TV as a monitor, the pixel density is quite a bit lower than I'd like.
I've currently got a 32" one running 1080p, from a normal viewing distance I can't see any pixels at all. Going beyond that and having to render 4x as much already seems super gratuitous. 8K is just completely ridiculous unless you're projecting a DnD game board or something that will be viewed up close.
You might be if it had a higher pixel density. There are plenty of people who run 2, 3 or even 4 smaller monitors next to each other at close distances. That could potentially be replaced by one much larger 8k monitor in the future.
I am old enough that I've started to wear reading glasses to counter my age-related presbyopia, but if I had an 8K monitor it would probably sit less than two feet from my face just as this 4k monitor does, and I would make use of every pixel.
I sit 16-20 inches away from my monitor. I don't really think I sit further from this monitor than smaller monitors I've had in the past. Or a laptop on a stand.
As other people point out, I use it like multiple monitors that are seamlessly glued together with a tiling window manager (MacOS so Rectangle).
I run it at native resolution, like it's 4 1080p monitors glued together with no bezel.
I can definitely tell reading text is exactly like reading from a 1080p monitor compared to my retina display macbook screen right next to it.
A 43" 8k monitor for $750 or so would be an insta-buy for me.
From what I understand, even 4k is usually a waste for a living room TV when viewed across the room from a couch. People just don't have the visual acuity to really tell the difference.
But I can easily tell the difference between 4k and 8k when a 43" TV is 16" away from me.
I get that companies want to make money so the new tech is going into big TVs. But at some level, it's very strange to me.
I imagine the benefits of 8k only really start showing on 80"+ screens.
I've seen a number of resolution charts like the one here[1]. But I suppose I forgot how different peoples' setups can be.
Sometimes across the room is 6', sometimes it's 15'. And for sure, screen size and eyesight can make a big difference.
---
1. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-r...
AMD's Llano (2011) supported dual/triple(1) displays on release and Trinity(2012) brought support for up to four displays at once.
(1)You could do triple displays on Llano, but it took a particular set of boards using Dual-Link DVI to drive two monitors IIRC.
This is very confusing imo
Putting a very fancy lens on a 0.3MP sensor doesn't give you higher resolution photos.
Retinas degrading is a factor of age.
My plan is to buy a 65" or 75" 8k TV and use it as computer monitor. I'll have a screen that is as big as my desk.
A display of that size will allow me to have my IDE, source control, terminals, log files, the app that I'm developing, my email, the CI dashboard all visible at the same time.
Of course I'll mainly use the bottom center of the huge display, but I think it will be a completely different experience when you no longer have to cmd-tab between apps but can just glance up/left/right to see what's going on.
How far away are you going to sit??
A 75" TV is going to cost you a lot of money for a very ineffective display. It's so large that you'll probably have to physically move several feet to see the edges, meaning that realistically only about half the screen is usable.
I currently have two 27" and three 24" displays on my desk. I already physically move to focus on specific tasks (eg. I have email on a vertical monitor on the side, so when answering emails I'll roll over a bit to the side with my chair).
With a TV, I could have one big seamless area instead.
The one thing that does worry me about the TV is the lack of tilt at the top -- everything in the top half of the monitor will be hard to see because of the angle.
When I work with pen and paper, my entire desk is full of stuff, a dozen sheets and books, printouts and diagrams, all visible at a glance.
I don't see why I should limit myself to a much smaller area when working digitally.
“I generally care about battery life as the main feature of a computer.”
?
This was true from the late 2000s to about 2017 but in the last four years or so computers have gotten much, much faster.
Obviously, it is workload dependent. If all you use is a web browser then you may not notice. If you use a computer for any sort of parallelizable processing work the last four years have been transformative.
For workstations, performance has doubled in single-threaded applications since 2019 and since more cores are standard you can see up to a 10x increase in performance. For servers the performance improvement is even greater.
I do synthetic aperture radar processing and image generation and can get through 10x the amount of data in a day than I could in 2019. That's just CPU stuff, for GPU stuff it's even more-- I can do stuff now that was impossible in 2019 due to VRAM limitations.
There have also been specialized accelerations included in CPUs like the JavaScript optimizations Apple baked into the M1, which definitely do make a noticeable difference if all you use a computer for is web browsing.
The N3 shrink doesn't help SRAM one bit, but it does give them more room to improve the CPU.
Is it that they’re basically saturating the entire production capacity with their orders?
In short, Apple is set to purchase every wafer that TSMC produces when they launch their N3 node. How long for should have, but hasn't, been specified. It's safe to assume that by "entire supply" they mean "until TSMCs next node", at which point TSMC will take orders from other companies for their N3 node.
Is that really safe to assume? Maybe the original paywalled story is more precise with language, but the use of "all available orders" and "100% of the initial N3 supply" seems so vague to me. Could initial mean first month of full scale production?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-15th-gen-arrow-lake-...
It’s also possible they bought/earned exclusivity on the product. Maybe they funded or helped the R&D, in which case these things wouldn’t exist without apple so it makes sense they should get first access.
Sure others could have outbid hypothetically so it is on paper fair but Apple has a lot of cash.
So the reason is that no-one can afford to out bid them.
I think that would better be described as "market cap", which is certainly a much bigger number than "cash on hand." The latter is basically liquid assets, which I think is a much more important metric when we're talking about outbidding competitors for fab space (among other things).
> "Cash on hand can be defined as cash deposits at financial institutions that can immediately be withdrawn at any time, and investments maturing in one year or less that are highly liquid and therefore regarded as cash equivalents and reported with or near cash line items"
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on...
Apple's net income has been at least $20bn every quarter for the past two years[1]. Both Intel and AMD make a small fraction of that[2][3].
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/net-inc...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/net-income
Intel has their own foundry, AMD is quite happy with whats a fairly recent move to 5 nm. Graphics card manufacturers are more concerned with selling off old cards than making new ones.
Apple isn't going to get very good yields out of 3nm and will likely only get to put it in a few products for now, but for a few months they get to say they'll be the biggest baddest company on the block, which is what apple marketing is all about.
Qualcomm gets the entire mobile market either way, and for desktop/server manufacturers apple isn't an option. Apple 3nm doesn't directly compete with amd/intel, so why worry
At the same time, chip shipments have dropped like a rock as everyone braces for recession. Nvidia allegedly even tried to cancel most of their N5 orders because they didn't think they could move the chips.
Apple is pretty much the only company willing to pay large amounts into a risky market. There may not have even been any serious bids aside from their own.
The above is just capitalism at work - the richest company in the world investing in the world’s most expensive toys. Apple has ~5x the market cap of NVidia and Apple can predict their usage of silicon, whereas NVidia’s market is more volatile.
Whether the above is monopoly power is arguable.
I also would strongly suspect that TSMC has political requirements embedded in the contracts. For example Taiwan needs phones that are secure against China (security against state level attacks), and Apple can meet needs that other fab users cannot. There is no doubt in my mind that TSMC are using Apple as part of their silicon shield: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Taiwan+Silicon-Shield
Well, the question are the yield rates... but even low yield rate can be enough if the product can be priced expensively enough.
I'm not really talking about whether they'll be too ignorant to recognize the impending existential risk and take action, but these companies are much more than just ASML customers that know how to use lithograph machines. They have layered stacks of mind boggling processes, expertise and experience.
Will this new technology be so revolutionary and disruptive that all their advantages are rendered obsolete insofar as competing in this new arena.
I guess if anyone could answer any of these questions they wouldn't be sitting around here talking about it on HN :)
Then some dies (or chiplet) will probably grow and consume more electricity: I am thinking GPUs... if they can be fed enough data fast enough though. Look at apple Mx dies.
That said, I have still no idea of the geometry of a transistor on a die to get an idea of how far we are (and I am not even talking about ion dopping not working properly anymore).
NOTE: I am an amateur, so please don't take any of that as actionable fact.
Intel expects to shrink from 4 to 3 to 20A and finally 18A. Apparently, decent progress has been made on 20A, so at least 3 shrinks should be expected. TSMC has a roadmap to 2nm, and they expect to slow down after that. Samsung has plans for 1.4nm. My guess is that one major player to fall out around the 20, 18, 14 angstrom area. My present thought is that this will be Samsung. I think expect one or two shrinks before Intel or TSMC falls away. One more after that, and then some other technology may need to step up to the plate.
I had long thought that something like gallium arsenide would replace silicon allowing for higher frequencies, but cost might be prohibitive. The world after the shrinks may just be a logic and efficiency war.
That said, all of those metrics seem huge to what EUV HighNA can do: I remember near "perfect" 7nm "lines" in photoresist.
I wonder what is the resolution of the motors to align all that (I guess piezo electric). And interferometers for alignment, x-rays??
(nevermind that modern chips are a hybrid of different feature sizes...)
"Cornering the market" typically refers to controlling supply of a product to restrict supply to the larger market and drive up price.
A TSMC acquisition would only be subject to anti-trust if Apple restricted access to supplies that their competitors currently have access to. Buying/owning the means of supply for your competitors isn't subject to anti-trust. Apple would gladly continue supplying chips with TSMC. Their are fabs created for older features that Apple doesn't use that are core to TSMC's profitability. They're not going to cut that overnight. Especially under a COO-CEO like Cook.
The monopolistic practice of acquisition would be to hamstring your competition. In this case, the acquisition would be based on synergy.
Samsung, a phone competitor and also screen supplier to Apple, controls the OLED market. They are not subject to anti-trust because they supply a fair market.
A more current example would be the Microsoft Activision acquisition. Microsofts defense in that is that they will continue supplying Call Of Duty (and similar high profile games) to competitors.
The Taiwanese government would block the sale if a sale could even be agreed.
They could annihilate all competition in the market except for them. Every single Android phone would be forced to use subpar manufacturing from there on out.
Why do you think the US or EU would get involved?
Isn't that kind of how it is already?
All this would do would weaken TSMC and strengthen other chip manufacturers for a couple years of absolute chip dominance. But they already have chip dominance, so it is for essentially zero gain.
They become part of apple. With a stranglehold on chips the price of apple products as a whole, or their sales, will skyrocket.
Besides buying a major supplier out and then getting rid of their other customers is value destructive.
Apple doesn't have that amount of capital to even make an offer lol.
They could never achieve it with governments and regulators, however. Like 0.00% chance. Even if the government of Taiwan allowed it, there would be a long line of other governments and regulators blocking it.
Wikipedia seem to put it at a max under $150b[0]
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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSM
it is $454B
1. Bank loans
2. Apple stocks
Completely doable.
It’s probably not seen as a bad thing internally that other rivals aren’t able to get on 3nm either, which wouldn’t be true if Apple weren’t buying up the supply.
Having said that, it would give them more negotiating leverage against TSMC, since then they would be a monopoly equipment supplier as well as a customer.
Either way, I doubt governments would allow such a purchase. It would be denied on national security grounds and on competition grounds.
But not having a fab means they're flexible to jump ship in the future if someone was ever to outpace TSMC.
Also, consider Intel's fabs, which were stuck on 14nm for years. This probably factored into one of the reasons Apple made the jump over to Apple Silicon.
Yeah, right. As if it is that simple. Just construct a building and put ASML machines inside and off you go.
> it’s simply not worth what would be an eye-watering outlay
Sigh.
Digitimes gets to be the broken clock that's right twice a day.
TSMC is still in process of ramping up production of their 3nm process (the article mentions they'll reach 45,000 wafers per month by March), so the only sensible reading of this statement seems to be that Apple are getting first X months (where X is unspecified) of production capacity until capacity has ramped up.
It'd be interesting to try to correlate this 45,000 wafers/month number to Apple sales. The only readily available info I could find is that these are 12" wafers and will cost ~$20,000 each. I'm not sure how many good die Apple are getting out of each wafer. So that's about $1B/month apple is spending on CPUs apparently.
Samsung has been having serious issues for years and TSMC is currently having serious issues with N3. Samsung's issues are too complicated and longstanding to go into but TSMC's issues are simpler and more recent. Their base N3 process (now called N3B) is a bit of a dud with apple being essentially the only major customer. The issue is with cost and yields, N3B just doesn't make economic sense for most customers. TSMC is aware of this and is racing to fix this. The fix is known as N3E which is an "enhanced" "version" of N3. The reason I put quotes around both of those words is because N3E actually has relatively little to do with N3B, there is no direct path to transition N3B chip designs to N3E, and because it features some improvements, but also some significant regressions in performance compared to N3B. The highest profile regression is the total lack of SRAM density improvements compared to N5. Sticking a huge chunk of SRAM on the chip has become very important to modern chip performance so this is a really big deal. The process is "enhanced" mostly in terms of economics, not performance, and it's coming an entire year after N3B. This has essentially delayed TSMC's "real" N3 node an entire year while also reducing its performance advantage over competitors. There's been a lot of discussions about the implications of this in the hardware space[1][2]
[1]https://www.semianalysis.com/p/tsmcs-3nm-conundrum-does-it-e...
[2]https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7048/n3e-replaces-n3-comes-in...
> Apple has reportedly secured all available orders for N3, TSMC's first-generation 3-nanometer process that is likely to be used in the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro lineup as well as new MacBooks scheduled for launch in the second half of 2023.
Note that they phrase it as: first-generation.
Maybe there's a gentleman's agreement among Apple, Samsung, AMD and nvidia that somebody's gotta buy those early wafers, but nobody can do that every single time?
Apple is the customer you want to maintain goodwill with.
Hell, there were times when Samsung was experiencing issues with sourcing their own chips for their own phones because they sold everything to Apple.
After the defect rate decreases enough then the larger chips will start to get made (GPUs, and CPUs).
If this is true, Apple is getting exclusive access for a period of time when the failure rates are highest then other customers will get their allotments down the road when defect rates are at acceptable levels for the size of their chips.
All that extra screen time will help me wait for the day that Linux is stable on the platform!
> As the thickness [of the gate insulator] scales below 2 nm, leakage currents due to tunneling increase drastically, leading to high power consumption and reduced device reliability. Replacing the silicon dioxide gate dielectric with a high-κ material allows increased gate capacitance without the associated leakage effects.
In other words, the limit hasn't been reached yet.
Also bear in mind 3nm is a marketing number which has a tenuous connection to a technical feature of the lithography. These days it's really just a number which shrinks with each generation to indicate which generation. The transistors are not actually 3×3 nm in size; they are larger.
96gb is just under the threshold where it makes a difference, for me
I feel constrained in 16GB all the time, and it's mostly due to browser memory usage, whichever browser I use (Firefox, Safari or Chrome). However there are other things running too such as Discord, Telegram, VMware, Libre or MS Office; the GBs add up. If I dare to compile something big, I have to close other things. I'm not even one of those media creators or gamers using heavy graphics!
So, I currently have a late 2013 MBP with 16GB which is going strong still. It's still great, except for RAM and battery. I'm thinking of upgrading to an M2 Max 64GB or 96GB, because I don't want to be caught short with only 24/32GB the way I've felt heavily constrained by 16GB a few years after buying the 2013 MBP.
And I want to get into modern graphics, physics simulations, blockchain simulations, terabyte-scale database engine design, neural nets and chip design more than I have been. I expect those to be memory heavy, enough that even 96GB RAM will be a design constraint. (Then again that's what I said when I bought the 2013 MBP, and in practice I ended up using datacentre servers for the heavy stuff, so I'm still weighing up the purchasing decision, whether it's worth it).
There was a general slump in the smartphone market, and Appel was the only one increasing their sales in some months.
If the launch was delayed because of technical issues then that would be another matter. I'm really not too up on the differences between phones and the specifics of one launch or another these days. When my current iPhone (which I'm reasonably sure is an 11) encounters some issue, I'll go and get whatever number is current at that time.
Do we really know what happened? Lack of silicon? high demand? logistic fails?
yep, but I bought it late in its lifecycle
It's a repairable iPhone 13. I went with an iPhone 14 over the 14 Pro because of that -- I don't care as much about the "Pro". What I care about is that I don't want the repair costs for a cracked glass to be so high that it's cheaper to buy a 2 year old used phone.