You can buy your smartphone chipsets off the shelf or you can design your own.
Apple prefers the latter, and the teams of semiconductor engineers it has assembled are the envy of the industry.
Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies and the voice of Techpinions, is the only analyst I know who has worked as a semiconductor software engineer. He’s toured the Asian supply chain and he believes Apple has an edge in proprietary, custom-made silicon that even Samsung will be hard-pressed to duplicate.
Got a half-hour commute ahead? Let Tim Bajarin’s grown-up son give you the lay of the land.
Here’s the link.
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Ben also addresses the long view. Apple plans three years from start of design to selling 100 million iPhones using latest silicon. The modular approach does not allow this long-tern optimization. This keeps Apple ahead. Except for Huawei, no other SmartPhone maker can copy this. It would take Samsung or Google several years just to get started and then three years later to reach the market.
No it is not ‘disruptive’, nor needle mover, nor all the the buzzwords.
But the future is Android and iOS. iOS has an enduring advantage, better silicon. VCs call it a moat. Most WS analysts don’t see it all.
Apple’s software-intensive systems (“it just works”) has been a big advantage, but with both Windows and Android getting better, Apple needs to reverse its trend of at best standing still (but I’d argue Apple software has gotten noticeably worse over the last 5 years.)
(Recently I’ve seen a bug whereby a video playing in Safari hangs the system, and eventually logs me out. NO EXCUSE for that.)