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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

Counter argument is that is NVIDIA friendly to their supply chain? I have to think that maybe they are with their massive margins because they can be - their end buyer is currently willing to absorb costs at no expense. But I don't know, and that will change as their business changes.

Your underlying statement implies that whoever is replacing apple is a better buyer which I don't think is necessarily true.

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Nvidia is famously a pain to work with. Apple vowed never to use their chips, Microsoft and Sony can't get them to make any GPU for their consoles.

The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.

> The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.

And thats probably because Nintendo isn’t adding any pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really mature processes for Switch chips/socs.

And also the Switch 1 was just the hardware for a nvidia shield tablet from nVidia’s perspective, without the downside of managing the customer facing side and with the greater volume from Nintendo’s market reach. (Not that it wasn’t more than that for consumers or Nintendo, just talking nvidia here)

EVGA outright gave up on selling GPUs rather than continue working with NVidia.

> Apple vowed never to use their chips

I thought that was mainly due to bad thermals. I always got the impression that (like Intel) Nvidia only cared about performance, and damn the power consumption.

Nvidia sold defective GPU's that affected every 2007-2008 MacBook Pro. It was a manufacturing defect and every chip was guaranteed to fail. It was a bad look for Apple that cost them millions having to replace logic boards. The defect wasn't corrected for several years leading to some people having multiple logic board replacements.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

They, and everyone at the time, were kind of forced to switch to lead-free solder by RoHS. At that point, there probably hadn't yet been tests showing the results of constant thermal cycling, so the brittling effect was unknown. Apple was particularly affected as an early adopter because of their PR stance on environmental issues.

Refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong was the real problem. But that's just a reminder that companies don't care about you. Brand loyalty is a quagmire.

Nvidia refused to honour a gentleman's agreement that they were on the hook for recall issues with their GPUs. Steve Jobs didn't like that. One bit.

I think that works out tremendously well for Nintendo, especially when you look at the Wii-U vs the Switch.

I shot a video at CNET in probably 2011 which was a single touchscreen display (i think it was the APX 2500 prototype iirc?) and it has the precise dimensions to the switch 1.

Nintendo was reluctantly a hardware company... they're a game company who can make hardware, but they know they're best when they own the stack.

> EVGA Terminates Relationship With Nvidia, Leaves GPU Business

> According to Han, Nvidia has been difficult to work with for some time now. Like all other GPU board partners, EVGA is only told the price of new products when they're revealed to everyone on stage, making planning difficult when launches occur soon after. Nvidia also has tight control over the pricing of GPUs, limiting what partners can do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evga-terminates-relationsh...

So not favorable to apple as a buyer.

Funnily enough Apple and Nvidia has old beef with one another, this especially led them to sever ties:

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/07/11/investigation-confir...

If your customers are known to be antagonistic to business partners, the correct answer is to diversify them as much as you can, even at reasonable costs from anything else.

That means deprioritizing your largest customer.

Fair I feel like that also speaks to nation+states trade policy.

Also theres the devil you know and the devil you dont know.

Yep, you can be close allies with a nation and have many shared interests, and even a trade deficit with them as we in Britain did, and then they stab you in the back with tariffs.

At these scales everyone is antagonistic, it comes with the territory.

That's what MBA schools teach you.

That's also a lie, it's only antagonistic when one of the sides is controlled by a psychopathic asshole, and it being antagonistic is a serious drag for the gains of both sides.

What company at these scales isn’t run by a psychopathic asshole? It also comes with the territory.

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