Apple was an Intel customer. Talking about Apple’s role in the semiconductor sector MUST include Intel because one must explain how and why Apple decided to develop their own (first mobile, then computer) chips in the first place instead of sticking with Intel. Why is Intel not competitive? THAT question seems much more pertinent to America’s chip travails
> one must explain how and why Apple decided to develop their own (first mobile, then computer) chips in the first place instead of sticking with Intel.
Re mobile:
1. Timelines. Apple only transitioned to Intel in 2006 on their computer side, the first iPhone was announced in 2006. As a company they had little overall Intel experience. There was no "sticking with Intel" because they'd just switched to Intel concurrent with the development and release of the iPhone
2. iPod. Apple's prior mobile devices were already using ARM processors. That's a lot of experience and existing supply chain connections to take advantage of.
3. Mobile Intel chips sucked. They drew too much power and were not suitable at that time for a mobile device like a phone (already more power hungry with the wireless components compared to something like an iPod).
Right. So the story of how Intel lost the world’s single biggest customer goes as far back as that and raises the question of why the world’s leading, at the time, chip maker couldn’t or wouldn’t make mobile chips.
Also, when Apple switched to ARM for their desktops the core motivation may have been to bring everything in house. But they gained a momentous advantage in the market because the chips they made were so much better than Intel’s. Again, explaining what happened to Intel to make them lag the cutting edge should imo be the key question, not why Apple made a rational business decision (albeit possibly an unethical one. Shareholder capitalism has entered the conversation.).
I don't think chip design conversation, particularly for mobile, really have much to do with the semiconductor production conversation. Sticking with that theme when Apple was doing their own mobile CPUs with ARM Intel's semiconductor fab capabilities were industry leading.
I think Intel probably deserves a mention in the article but that line of question feels like the wrong angle of approach for it.
Intel was the last company to have domestic leading edge fabs and they used to be one of (the?) highest volume producers by wafer count so they're a pretty big part of any conversation about US semiconductor manufacturing. Another is AMD and their fab spinout as GlobalFoundries, and why GF stopped at 12nm.
You say Intel’s semiconductor fabbing was leading when Apple started to do their mobile processors on ARM. In wafer tech that is probably true, I don’t know. But clearly Intel wasn’t making power efficient mobile chips. Either because they didn’t have the design capability or didn’t consider the segment worth it. There’s an interesting article in that alone.
My only point is that the story of Intel’s disorganized retreat is at least as relevant as Apple’s march forward
Intel's relationship to power efficiency is really odd. They only started doing heterogenous/big.LITTLE in 2020 despite ARM based SoCs using it for more than a decade to great advantage. It's not as if portable, battery powered devices was a surprising application to Intel, we've had laptops for decades, and so leaving such strong efficiency gains on the table for years is quite confusing.
This is, again, the difference between an article talking about chip design problems (which America certainly doesn't have) and semiconductor production problems (which America does have).
If you say Apple is America's semiconductor problem, that's a bit stronger than just "the focus is on another company". The focus is on another company to the exclusion of all else, and that exclusion is creating a rather distorted picture of the actual situation.