This article appears to have been written by someone who heard about Apple's chips and, since it was new to them, decided it was actually new.

Respect to Apple, but internal ASIC teams is nothing new in a lot of the tech industry, and I don't mean Google's TMU stuff or the Annapurna team at AWS. Those guys were following a long trend of ASIC teams in companies - e.g., ALL of the networking industry except Arista has been running this way for the last three decades.

I mean, after the 68k era, the _entire Unix workstation market_ - IBM, HP, DEC, SGI, etc. - was entirely built around in-house ASIC teams building their own CPUs.

I find it exciting, but what it really is, at the end of the day, is verticalization so that they don't have _as deep_ of a margin stack on their CPUs. Microsoft and Sony have gotten a series of custom CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, etc. over the last twenty years without owning the whole stack or losing the ability to apply optimizations. That's been common forever.

Apple is doing an amazing job. It started with acquiring the PA Semi team and has grown from there, they've been amazing and consistent about it and it's awesome execution and _sticking to the investment profile required_, but .. eh, the article just seems utterly unfamiliar with any broader context.