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Reports Say Apple May Manufacture Its Own Chips
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it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
yawn - another ARM licence (Score:2, Interesting)
Title correction... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reports Say Apple May DESIGN Its Own Chips
The objective likely to be more proprietary enhancements [engadget.com] to their product lines that require licensing and royalties from secondary vendors who wish to manufacture and sell peripherals and products to work with Apple products. Its all about building monopolies, U.S. businesses believe competition is a bad thing.
Re:Manufacture or design? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It didn't work for microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope, not even close. Apple *designs* or works with manufacturers to create custom *designed* boards and hardware but they build nothing. They are the same chips and chipsets as Dell, which actually does the same thing and custom *designs* their gear just like Apple.
Take off the rose colored glasses please.
Re:innovation, custom chips == !hackintosh (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt that the hackintoshes are a serious concern to Apple. The fact they exists demonstrates that a certain market exists, but not one that's likely too profitable right now. It's something relatively few people are willing to do, or even have the knowledge (or at least patience) to pull off. Not much of a problem among the Slashdot crowd, but certainly among the general public. More importantly, in order to fight that off, Apple would have to transition back off of the x86 architecture - not a feat of engineering that they probably want to do again after the PPC switch.
More likely, it's for specialized chips in upcoming devices. Something along the lines of the custom-designed Intel chip that went into the Macbook Air. It's the whole argument of DRM* - you can either spend your time trying to come up with technological measures to stop people doing something, or you can innovate and make products that people want to buy by addressing an existing market (or often in Apple's case, creating an entirely new one). While Apple is certainly a very closed vendor on the whole, I think they're better off putting their resources towards innovation rather than protection.
*Yes, I'm aware of the DRM in OS X, particularly with regard to BIOS/EFI. I'd call it quite unobtrusive compared to the phone-home activation in Windows, but that's overall quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Re:Manufacture or design? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, if only Apple bought out a chip design company [slashdot.org]. Then maybe they could design their own chips.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yawn - another ARM licence (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, at my university's job tracker, Apple has had VLSI design job postings up for well over a month, with a description very similar to what the articles are suggesting.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:innovation, custom chips == !hackintosh (Score:1, Interesting)
But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs). Technologically, there's no reason why this can't happen but one must consider that Apple's hardware sales are quite profitable and that share is worth protecting.
I find this hard to believe. I doubt Apple cares about individuals building hackintoshes and using them for themselves. The amount of work to do this is considerable for most people (present company excluded) and would never amount to a tangible loss of sales since those people are obviously unwilling to pay Apple's higher prices anyway. Now for companies like the notorious Psystar that are trying to make money off the mass marketing and sale of hackintoshes, Apple already has a great tool in place for dealing with this: the US legal system. As expensive as lawyers are, I'll bet that they only cost a small fraction of the amount of money that starting your own semiconductor design/fabrication division would cost. Frankly, I've seen no indication that Psystar's hackintosh business is even making them any money. The only reason they're in the headlines so often is because of their defiance against Apple, but defiance doesn't pay the bills.
Now that I've pointed out the economic drawbacks of this approach, I'll point out the technical drawbacks. Apple already effectively has two major technical barriers that prevent people from installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. The first is somewhat incidental and unintentional: EFI. Despite the sheer old timey ridiculousness of the BIOS, nearly every motherboard shipped still uses it instead of the newer/nicer/cleaner/better EFI. Hackintoshes have to trick the OS into believing that they're talking to EFI instead of BIOS. The second barrier is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). It's basically a decryption chip that decrypts some of the binaries that are required to run OS X. The hackintosh community has managed to pull off this decryption with software.
So what's the next step beyond EFI and TPM? I could only imagine that it would be a more robust, proprietary version of TPM. This will probably just end up being emulated by software eventually, too. But the big problem with adding these new counter-measures is that it would have to break legacy compatibility with every Intel Mac that's shipped in the last few years. Apple has already hung out to dry the PowerPC Macs with the coming version of OS X, so if they were going to make this type of modification, it would have to be several years from now and if there exists a huge problem with people using hackintoshes, maybe someone smart at Apple will finally stand up and say that they should just sell OS X standalone the same way Windows is sold.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me fix that for you:
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications, as they do for Dell and just like they used to do for Packard Bell.
One more time and we'll get it right: Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications. Companies like Foxconn and ASUS also build hardware for Dell and Packard Bell, most of which was (reference) designed by engineers at Intel. Hell, for the longest time, Dell's boards had "Intel" silkscreened on them, since they were literally carbon copies of Intel's reference board and nobdoy bothered to change it.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
On the other hand, AMD's market cap is $2.9B. Apple could buy them. Then the economy of scale would work out, wouldnt it?