Apple's semiconductor plans have always been something that's been interesting to watch develop over the last few years. I was wondering what they were going to throw Mansfield on ever since they appointed his replacement and just designated him as basically someone who was going to work on a special project.

Sounds like a thrust towards driving Apple deeper into the bottom of the hardware stack to me. Apple currently is very good at setting up good solid deep relationships with hardware suppliers and designing lots of stuff to make things work together. But they've been pushing further and further down the stack ever since the PASemi acquisition. I wonder when they're going to start building fabs.

It seems like if you've got >$30B sitting around, devoting a VP to making a new team and are worried about your competitors controlling your supply chains for memories and other core technologies...

I guess we're going to find out. If I'm right, the earliest indicators will probably be hiring the types of people you'd need to spin up serious fabs.

ARM on desktop, perhaps? No one has ever designed a desktop-class chip with ARM architecture, so that's one 'ambitious' direction one could take.