by Jason Snell
‘How Apple won silicon’
Over at iMore, Rene Ritchie points out Apple’s huge advantage in hardware design:
When it became clear iPhone and future products would require custom silicon, the story goes Steve Jobs set out to find the best chip designers in the world. That’s now evolved into the hardware technologies org, led by senior vice president, Johny Srouji.
One of Apple’s strengths over the years has been to decide when it needs to take its destiny into its own hands—and when it doesn’t need to bother. Its homegrown processor designs are an important bulwark against its competitors. For single-threaded processes, the iPhone 7 is faster than the just-released Samsung Galaxy S8. (Not so for multi-threaded processes, so the ball’s back in Apple’s court.)