5 ms·

It's also a big risk on Apple's behalf, as the node could have serious delays/problems

stcredzero 2y ago
This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win. Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.
- PKop 2y ago
  TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market.
  - adam_arthur 2y ago
    They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them. In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years. Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)
    - stcredzero 2y ago
      Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. If this artificial advantage allows Apple to slack off in their other areas of competitive advantage, then this is bad for the consumer, overall. This creates an environment of cynicism, where there's even degraded incentive to try and beat Apple with a better product.
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        If Apple slacks off in any way, some other company can step in with innovation and consumers benefit by increased choice and innovation. We shouldn't worry when a company slacks off except when its moats are illegal. If Apple's business power were properly regulated, they'd be forced to compete more of the time and when they didn't they'd face more consumer friendly Apple unfriendly results. Fix the antitrust enforcement and we'll fix the problem.
  - stcredzero 2y ago
    TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market. Beyond some threshold, any meta-gaming of the market is bad for the market. It's like patents. When they were first instituted, they did some good by incentivizing innovation. Then, people started meta-gaming them, and used them as legal weapons to suppress competition well beyond the original intention. I don't think there's a good argument that monopolizing a feature is good for the market, even if the means that allows it is technically legal. What could be argued, is if legal remedies to this kind of meta-gaming might also be meta-gamed in return and become worse than the thing they were trying to remedy. This seems to always happen in a variety of forms.

This risk should be evaluated iteratively. It won't kill Apple if some small fraction of the time, their releases are delayed. Overall, if their record is that they have stuff their competitors can't even get their hands on, they win. Even though it's not technically illegal, there's something about this that feels unfair and bad for the market.

PKop 2y ago
TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market.
- adam_arthur 2y ago
  They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them. In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years. Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)
  - stcredzero 2y ago
    Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though. If this artificial advantage allows Apple to slack off in their other areas of competitive advantage, then this is bad for the consumer, overall. This creates an environment of cynicism, where there's even degraded incentive to try and beat Apple with a better product.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      If Apple slacks off in any way, some other company can step in with innovation and consumers benefit by increased choice and innovation. We shouldn't worry when a company slacks off except when its moats are illegal. If Apple's business power were properly regulated, they'd be forced to compete more of the time and when they didn't they'd face more consumer friendly Apple unfriendly results. Fix the antitrust enforcement and we'll fix the problem.
- stcredzero 2y ago
  TSMC being the only game in town is what's bad for the market. Beyond some threshold, any meta-gaming of the market is bad for the market. It's like patents. When they were first instituted, they did some good by incentivizing innovation. Then, people started meta-gaming them, and used them as legal weapons to suppress competition well beyond the original intention. I don't think there's a good argument that monopolizing a feature is good for the market, even if the means that allows it is technically legal. What could be argued, is if legal remedies to this kind of meta-gaming might also be meta-gamed in return and become worse than the thing they were trying to remedy. This seems to always happen in a variety of forms.