[mbell]

> Apple does a lot of work in hardware and hardware manufacturing, both areas which are pretty capital-intensive and might not lead themselves as easily to the startup world.

There is some truth to that but it's not the custom chip manufacturing that drives it. It's not even what I guess I would call 'excellence in material design' that drives it. Really it's a combination of the choice to not cut corners on hardware combined with the scale and market position to support the cost.

As an example a lot of has been made in the past about Apple's charges, both laptop and iDevices, they are small, sleek and powerful for their size. There isn't anything special going on there from an electronics perspective, they didn't invent new types of power conversion, they just didn't cut every possible corner to reduce cost and they had the budget to allow custom parts when off the shelf didn't fit. I don't mean custom IC's here I mean custom metal fab, maybe custom caps that are 'normal' other than being shaped a bit differently, etc. Apple has the volume and price point to let them do this when the vast majority of companies don't.