Hacker News Reader

Comment by caycep | Hacker News Reader

the sad part of this is that volume/priority at TSMC shifting from consumer chips that get sold to you and me, to corporate chips which likely will get sold to OpenAI/Amazon/MS or some other corporate datacenter, means that the un-democratization of computing power is well underway....

mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...

(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).

View on HN

non Apple consumers were already used to this clown fiesta since AMD processors had late access to SoTA nodes for the very same reason.

And possibly other types of hardware also had price bumped or used outdated chips because Apple has to build their iPhone/mac n+1.

That's why you see some folks actually mocking Apple about the situation. They were already affected.

If anything this might force a market-wide fix in the medium term.

Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore.

Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their software strategy is so unpopular with everyone. The hardware advances are doing them more harm than good at this point.

TSMC is a for profit business. Why would they care about the moral virtue purity of the applications running on their chips? Seriously illogical statement

Oh, they definitely don't. I'm just pointing out that Apple can afford to forfeit the latest nodes without sacrificing anything important, whereas Nvidia cannot.

Apple can't sleep on chip advances either.

Intel seems to be very competitive again when it comes to laptop battery life. If macbooks again get the reputation of sluggy and overheating that's not great for sales.

...using TSMC fabs...

if 18A gets going and is good, I am sure Apple will purchase capacity

For laptops, maybe. For iPhone and iPad, more power is the last thing Apple should be focusing on.

I mean sure it is fun to pick one company and hate it, but this is not the point being argued here.

But the point here is that a few companies are outbidding everyone else, hoarding shittons of compute and putting it into their data centers, to rent to people. This is effectively taking compute ownership away from consumers and centralizing compute i.e. un-democratising.

Apple outcompeting other companies to put their products into the hands of regular people is vastly different.

If consumers cared about compute ownership then they wouldn't be buying iPhones. This feels like a fairly natural progression of things, albeit a bit disappointing to Apple fans.

I kind of wonder what happens when/if the bubble bursts - will there be some glut of used inventory like after the first Dotcom bubble when remnants of fiber buildout from Qwest and the like were being sold off pennies on the dollar? or will there be a long term corporate despotism of compute from an oligopoly of companies?

Regular people don't need state of the art chips to doomscroll tiktok and take instagram selfies.

But perhaps Apple needs them to power translucent UIs and Siri.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com