“As we ponder what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs, I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a veteran Silicon Valley CEO who knew Jobs,” Erick Schonfeld reports for TechCrunch. “This was just after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple. We got to talking about why Apple is so well-positioned in the post-PC era, and this executive zeroed in on something you don’t hear too often. ‘Steve Jobs told me he has 1,000 engineers working on chips,’ he said. ‘Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything.'”
“The number was startling when I first heard it. I knew that Apple started building its own chip design team in 2009, but figured it had to be a few hundred people at most, not 5 percent of Apple’s non-retail workforce. (Apple employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, 30,000 of them in its retail stores),” Schonfeld reports. “Apple started designing its own chips because Intel and AMD were still stuck in the PC era. Apple needs chips that are powerful enough, but also very low power.”
Schonfeld reports, “Battery life is one of the most important features of a mobile device. Apple’s latest A5 processor, which first appeared in the iPad 2, will now power the iPhone 4S as well. Not only is the A5 twice as fast as the A4 in the current iPhone 4, but it slightly improves the battery life with 8 hours of talk time (versus 7 hours).”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Carl H.” for the heads up.]
An almost 14% increase in battery life is slight?
Hahaha take no notice. Someone’s just a little bitter that other tech companies can’t manage a “slight” improvement in battery life 😉
Not just 14%, 14% on top of battery life which was already good.
I love chips!
Crunch all you want. Apple will make more!
Haha 😀
+1 🙂
With Apple chips you can’t eat just one!.
“I once went three days without breathing.”
Apple bought two semiconductor design firms in the latest years, with a total 500 engineers.
Plus, Apple for decades had hundreds their own chip engineers.
So this 1000 people figure might be quite close to be true.
I wonder if this 1,000 figure includes those Apple engineers working with Intel to help design *their* chips.
You know one thing has got to have Microsoft scared as rabbits is the day (it will happen) where Apple has a real break through chip design that truly changes everything, and Redmond can’t get it cause Apple owns it. By controlling the whole widget as they have, the wisdom of that approach alone will soon turn MS onto an also-ran. Even the simplest geek can see that it’s the only way breakthroughs and future tech can evolve quickly, thoroughly and simply with this top to bottom control. Apple greatness continues unabated with the spirit and teachings of the great Steve Jobs. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
1000 engineers working on chips and only one woman trying to keep up with the dip.
1000 engineers working on chips…
In other words, 1000 dips working on chips.