alt Hacker NewsMy warm take is that Apple is leaving a lot of money on the table by not investing in creating an independent supply chain for their chips and building their own cloud. They arguably had the first mover advantage when it came to general purpose arm compute; all they had to do was flood the market and make it easy for anyone to rent it. Not only would they corner a part of the market but perhaps ease demand pressure on other chip manufacturers too.
Replies
At this point, I’m sure bankrolls a significant amount of R&D in new MSes and build-out capital, in return for guaranteed capacity on the first production lines. I’m not sure the extra juice of outright ownership is worth the squeeze.
(As much as conglomerates are fun…)
My guess is that they have challenges scaling the production anyway (6-16 weeks wait time for Studios), and also they would leave money in the table if they just released chips. I would assume that once they scale the production they will get back to the server game - MacOS server racks, or something more inventive like MacOS supercomputers running on a ton of prev gen chips ;)
They don't get enterprise, A/UX, mkLinux, OS X Server, Mac Pro tower, all gone now.
Swift's main reason to go open source and have good Linux support was naturally for app developers to be able to use it on server side, which naturally wasn't going to be macOS.
I macOS wasn't required for developing iDevices apps, they would surely sell even less desktops.
My guess is that it's already hard for them to get as many chips fabricated for their devices, which is still their main source of income so far.
Maybe their chip team is already on the work, or already made, a server chip for AI purposes used internally, and doesn't have to talk about it yet.
They'd be left maintaining their own macos server again while everyone else uses Linux for their server farms.
Apart from straight up buying TSMC's or Samsung's fabs I don't see a way of building a vertically integrated high-end chip supply chain for Apple. At least not on timeframes measured below a decade. And on those time frames the current supply issues will probably be resolved by companies who put all their effort into it instead of just tweaking their bottom line.