<story><title>Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/09/apple-1000-engineers-chips/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raganwald</author><text>What I find interesting about Apple designing their own chips is the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Apple&apos;s value proposition with Macintosh is that by owning the entire experience--hardware, OS, even distribution to the store--Apple can deliver an optimized product that is superior to products where company H makes the hardware, M makes the OS, and CC distributes the resulting PCs.&lt;p&gt;Designing chips is the logical extension to this model. The chips are designed with the end product in mind, and everything works together to deliver the product&apos;s value proposition.&lt;p&gt;Other manufacturers end up hostage to whatever chips Intel and AMD feel like selling to everyone. They are hostage to whatever OS features Google feels like adding to Android, whether I integrates with the chips or not.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a given that Apple will &lt;i&gt;necessarily&lt;/i&gt; succeed with this strategy, it requires an ability to juggle multiple balls at once, a very rare trait. There&apos;s a reason most businesses try to do just one thing well and commoditize everything else.&lt;p&gt;But it is certainly beautiful to watch them try to sail the opposite tack.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/09/apple-1000-engineers-chips/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xxcode</author><text>the text of the article doesn&apos;t seem to explain how the assertion is made. Until last year (when I left apple), the PA Semi team (which is the A4/A5 team) was about 20 people (and they were hiring 3-4 more), so this is somewhat difficult to believe, but I might have outdated information. The designs are mostly modified arm designs.</text></comment>