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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

It’s hilarious how Apple has become the number one chip maker in the world. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called them a lifestyle company…

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It's a bit of an unfair statement but I do see where he's coming from. Apple make consumer phones and laptops, professional workstations, wearables, headphones, and TV/Home products. We've yet to see an M series chip for products in any of the following fields:

Cloud Computing, Computer Vision, Data Center Solutions, Edge Computing, High Performance Computing, IT Infrastructure, Network Connectivity, Robotics, Security, Broadcasting, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Government & Public Sector, Health & Life Sciences, Hospitality & Restaurants, Industrial, Manufacturing, Retail, Smart Cities, Transportation.

Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm make devices or design IP for every single one of those sectors. Apples' portfolio is streamlined to just "lifestyle sectors"; stuff people directly interact with in their every day lives. How can you call them the number one chip maker when they don't compete in any of those markets, and even in the one they do they're only superior in performance per watt; not sheer performance benchmarks? Until we start seeing M2 chips in everything from server racks and satellites, I'm inclined to side with Gelsinger on this one.

> How can you call them the number one chip maker when they don't compete in any of those markets,

Because they produce north of 300 million SoCs every year. They may not end up the number one chipmaker every single year but they're in the top ten and depending on other companies' demand vs Apple's demand may end up number one.

If we're talking about manufacturing volume as the sole definition for "number one chip maker", then the idea that Apple might be first is frankly laughable. If we discounted pure foundries (TSMC, UMC, Global Foundries) they'd struggle to scrape top 5 at the best of times. Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and the like work in the range of billions, or near enough. Currently Intel has 76.7% of the laptop chip market share alone; that's before you start considering their server, edge, and network markets. If we start including trailing edge chips, from the likes of Texas Instruments, Micron, Broadcom, etcetera, then Apple would be a small drop in the pond. Even if Apple ate up the entire consumer market, they'd still struggle to compete with the rest of the industry on volume.

I don't think people appreciate the obscene number of leading edge chips that go into the industrial sectors. I've seen more chips go into a single Industry 4.0 factory than I have to an entire states Micro Center inventory.

Number one in performance / watt? maybe? sales? Well no. According to the web[1] total chip sales in 2022 excluding arm amount to 374 million units. Server chips being 36.1 million units. Apple's biggest quarter in 2022 was 7 million macs in Q4[2].

[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3688288/amd-gains-share...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

Why are you excluding iOS devices?

For anyone curious, iPhones ship 234 million a year, Watch around 60 million, iPad another 20 million. Not sure about Apple TV but let's assume that's 0. That's over 300 million CPUs a year.

I doubt the total chip number for the industry though - Intel alone ships ~100M. But it's clear Apple is very likely the largest manufacturer of CPUs.

* Correction: MediaTek shipped 350M units in 2020 and Qualcomm shipped 319M (due to the Trump embargo on China). So Apple is up there competing with manufacturers that sell their chips to anyone who will buy, but it may not necessarily be the largest.

>But it's clear Apple is very likely the largest manufacturer of CPUs.

Manufacturer? Where are Apple's fabs located at?

Not TSMC, that's for sure. TSMC is using ASML machines to etch the transistors, so by your logic ASML is the biggest CPU manufacturer

>so by your logic ASML is the biggest CPU manufacturer

No? How?

The logic is pretty simple

Chip designers are fabless companies: AMD, Apple, etc.

Chip makers are companies that physically manufacture those CPUs, so TSMC, Intel, etc.

There is edge case if chip maker has some designs that are created in another company's fabs, but is it relevant for this discussion? I dont think.

Correcting yourself, two thumbs up. Margins per CPU shipped? My first, thought was APL at least 7x MTK but i must be so far off here.

Yeah margin per processor shipped is a different question, and Apple probably does very well here.

Yeah. How you count things is very subjective to where you draw the line. As for margins it's hard to say because Apple doesn't sell chips independently so their profit margin on a chip is withdrawn from however they want to distribute the profit margins for the entire product and Apple does not provide a breakout a sufficient level of granularity into the financials to understand that.

It's not surprising, anyone who sells iPhones is going to need a lot of chips. Gelsinger wasn't half wrong anyways - outside the consumer hardware market Apple is a no-show.

Yes, but in consumer hardware, their silicon outperforms the competition.

Yep. Ray-ban's optics are world-class as well, but that doesn't exclude them from being called a lifestyle company.

Zeiss would have been a better comparison.

Iphone and Macs are obviously huge in the enterprise market though.

If I had a dime for every lifestyle product that was "obviously huge in the enterprise" I could fund the next WeWork in a cash deposit.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3644494/2021-the-year-...

> By 2021, this migration had become a trend. IDC claimed macOS device use across US enterprises reached 23% while iPhones accounted for 49% of business smartphones and iPads accounted for most tablets used in the workplace.

Having enterprise customers and being a lifestyle product is not mutually exclusive, especially in American business.

You're obsessed with this "lifestyle" designation. Ok, fine. Apple's a lifestyle company, whatever that means.

Apple is obsessed with their lifestyle designation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfR_Jj4grZE

They publish ads and write all their copy with the intention of framing their products as anything other than a computer.

This seems to offend you for some reason.

Apple's just doing age-old value selling, where you promote the benefits of a product rather than the features. See https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/value-based-selling

It might shock you to learn that I don't really care :)

I doubt Pat Gelsinger does either, since he's publicly stated that Intel would fab Apple Silicon chips at their ARM foundry if/when TSMC goes offline. The guy's just having a laugh by putting an awfully accurate label on a fruit that pays extra to resist labeling.

> I doubt Pat Gelsinger does either

Maybe he should start caring* otherwise he risk running Intel completely into the ground? After all Apple was one of their largest clients until recently. Then a "lifestyle company" managed to somehow design better CPUs than Intel despite that just being an afterthought for them (since apparently Apple only focuses on the "lifestyle" stuff..).

I find it so fascinating the people get really obsessed by Apple (both in a negative and a positive way).

> I don't really care :)

Well a string of your comments would imply that you could actually care less about Apple.

*(I'm pretty sure he does in non imaginary reality )

Apple should be able to design better CPUs than Intel. They've poached their chip designers for over a decade, and have been the world's largest company for years. Beating Intel's single-core IPC is so easy that AMD did it with Ryzen for a laugh - if Apple couldn't do it on RISC, they may as well have given up making chips entirely.

I own no stock in Intel or Apple. It's worth discussing to me because it exposes how insecure people are about relying on "lifestyle" companies. Even Intel is a lifestyle company for some people, and those users are equally as pathetic as the people who let Apple, AMD or Nvidia define who they are. If Apple didn't go to such extreme lengths to appear different and look accountable, their staunchest defenders wouldn't have so far to fall.

And? Companies can target multiple markets simultaneously? I mean basically every other phone or PC manufacturer has tried to become a lifestyle product Apple has just been way more successful at it...

> especially in American business.

Well more American business can afford spending an extra $1000-2000 on superior hardware* for their employees without thinking about it that much. What's wrong with that?

*comparable laptops for Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. cost not that much less for Macs. What's the difference between a Dell XPS and a Macbook in that regard? Or Dell is also a lifestyle brand?

I don't know maybe you would maybe you wouldn't.

All I know that huge numbers of employees of both large and small companies regularly use company provided Macs and Iphones for work. Are you actually disputing that? Really?

> outside the consumer hardware market Apple is a no-show.

I don’t have the data, but tech companies are often full of Macs. Sometimes I also see small businesses running iMacs.

My company is a couple thousand large and we have maybe 50 PCs in the whole org.

Indeed, to an almost comical extent. I worked at a Mac-only shop that spent 50+ engineering hours per-month debugging the Darwin runtime. Our product didn't ship to Mac either, so we were basically fanagling a Win32 + Linux server toolchain to work on a platform we didn't support.

Tech companies count as consumers, and many consume the Apple product even if it's to their detriment.

Not so much outside a couple of G20 like countries, Windows and GNU/Linux win out.

Then there are all the electronic devices that have CPUs on them and don't run any kind of Apple related software.

Hardly! In digital media, video, graphics, etc. you're usually much more likely to see Macs than other computers.

Sure, outside Intel’s market Intel is a no-show as well.

There are entire divisions of major companies that only run Mac M-series laptops.

It’s no longer the 2000s where group policy is difficult for Macs.

By what definition Apple is chip maker, let alone #1?

If AMD is a chip maker then so is Apple by the same metrics.

So, pick those metrics, they're certainly pushing large volumes, they're pushing some of the highest performance and some of the most efficient CPUs available.

So, they're #1 in power efficiency, #1 in fanless performance, #1 in Tablets, #1 in Fanless computers, #1 in Mini computers.

If you outsource chip creation, then you are chip designer, arent you?

>Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or fab) to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclusively, located in the United States, China, and Taiwan

What about other categories

Gaming, Data Center?

So if we're talking about high-end chips Intel and Samsung are both designers and manufactuerers? And Samsung seems to have mostly abandoned Exynos and is using Qualcomms SoC now. So that only leaves Intel..

I'd say that chip makers = manufacture, so TSMC too

That's like calling Tesla a battery maker. You can't buy a bare battery from Tesla or a CPU from Apple.

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