With every passing year, we continue to see Apple designing powerful chips for its iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch family and of course the Mac lineup. Developing software and designing hardware allows for a seamless and friendly integration of these two elements, which is why you are able to see iOS as an optimized operating system.
While Intel and AMD are ahead of Apple when it comes raw performance, it looks like the tech giant might have found another reason to start developing its own fully functional processor; security. Since Intel and AMD chips are vulnerable to hacking, Apple will be looking to put some heavy hitting sessions towards designing its own notebook processor, but that is going to be a story for another time.
Analyst Reports That Apple Designing Its Own Hardware Allows it to Save a Ton of Money on Component Costs
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs believed that Apple should own the technologies inside its products. 2008 was the year the company acquired chip maker P.A. Semi. In 2010, Jobs unveiled the iPad, which housed Apple’s first SoC, the A4. This silicon became the progenitor for faster hardware and till now, no other competing chipset that has been released in the same year has been able to beat Apple’s chipsets.
Though it requires a ton of money to make your own hardware, there are advantages to using your own design. According to Piper Jaffrey senior analyst Mike Olson, Apple is able to cut component costs, push our yearly updates and introduce better features in devices thanks to this tight link between hardware and software.
Apple is definitely not the first company to make its own hardware but it is definitely one of the first to become successful using this approach. Like we stated earlier, making your own chips require lots of funds and you need to sell your product on a massive scale if you are going to recover that cost. Luckily for Apple, it makes what people are looking to buy and does not have a problem selling in the millions.
Apple might soon be developing its own power management chips, and the iPhone X is the first example of how the company is able to reduce dependency on others and make its own GPU. We believe that the same thing might happen with the partnership with Qualcomm, Intel and ‘soon to be partner’, MediaTek, and Apple might start to design its own LTE modems.
If that was not sufficient, the Apple Watch also features the company’s own internals and the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro sport its in-house hardware as well. Apple has been rumored to be working on three updated Mac models. These machines will feature the tech giant’s co-processors but there is no word on when we’ll be seeing the silicon that will allow the company to break the partnership with Intel. Looking at the achievements the company has been able to materialize, Intel might be forced to stop supplying Apple with its tech.
Looks like time will tell how long Apple takes to bring out its own notebook processor.
News Source: Bloomberg
