“Apple’s products are undoubtedly well thought out, well crafted, and highly innovative,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “While many claim that because Apple sometimes doesn’t have a feature that its competitors have, good engineering is the art of making the right set of trade-offs for any given product.”
“While competitors like Samsung are more than happy to cast a wide net to see what works, Apple focuses its energy on a handful of well thought-out designs to be released on a yearly beat rate,” Eassa writes. “That being said, there is something that Apple really needs to do as quickly as possible: dump Samsung completely as a supplier.”
“While Apple has moved away from buying NAND, DRAM, and (to some extent) displays from Samsung, it is still Samsung’s biggest semiconductor foundry customer. Indeed, Apple sells about 200 million iOS devices per year, each of which comes powered with a Samsung-built applications processor,” Eassa writes. “At the end of the day, Samsung is Apple’s fiercest competitor, and enabling that competitor in any way, shape, or form seems to be unwise. Apple today really has no choice, but in the future it would be good for Apple to move away from Samsung and toward a pure-play foundry like TSMC for a variety of reasons.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve been saying for quite some time now.
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Where do you find this crap?
Apple is a corporation that makes consumer and professional electronics products.
Samsung is a multinational conglomerate, of which consumer electronics is a part of their business.
I think you guys made up the name.
Cook is a supply chain guru. He’ll make moves (incremental or otherwise) only when it makes sense.
Unravelling the Samsung relationship is complicated. Cook will do things when it’s to Apple’s advantage.
Yes, I’m sure that if he had the chance he would dump them overnight. Clearly you don’t want to do business with someone that you are constantly fighting in court. My guess is that they have been working very hard for at least two years to rid themselves of the Samsung dependence.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks they haven’t been trying to rid themselves of Samsung entirely are delusional.
First and foremost Apple is going to source its needs from the firm the can provide the quantity and quality Apple demands, within a price structure that Apple is comfortable.
Notice that I listed price last. Price is important, but comes in third to the first two considerations. There are firms that can satisfy one or the other of the first two considerations, but none that can satisfy both, and without both Apple would have to give on quantity, or quality. Giving up on either one diminishes Apple’s products, and Apple itself.
The problem is that there are very few companies in the world willing to invest the enour ous amounts of money required to do all the things that Samsung can do for the razor thin margins that Apple is willing to pay. You guys are just way more emotional about this than Apple. For example, their Point of Sale equipment at Apple Stores ran Windows CE for years.
Apple focuses on making the best product, not “beating” competition. As long as Samsung parts allow Apple to make a better iPhone, Apple will buy them.
Given how many state-of-the-art components Samsung produces, it is highly unlikely that Samsung won’t have some best-of-industry parts to sell Apple in the foreseeable future.
Prediction: Apple will still be buying some kind of Samsung parts in 5 years, probably 10. This is not what keeps Tim Cook up at night.
I agree.
They should use Intel. They have the best chips on the market. I still can’t see why Apple is using Samsung’s chips, when Samsung is clearly ripping off Apple, and getting into all these lawsuits.
Intel only makes its own designs; that may change in the future. It would have to if they wanted Apple’s business for iOS devices.
Intel doesn’t have the best *mobile* chips on the market, though. And Apple isn’t using Samsung’s chips, Samsung is producing A7 chips based on Apple’s design specs. And Apple is relying on Samsung because, unfortunately, alternative foundries still can’t produce the quantity and quality that Apple needs.
Intel has apparently shown an interest in producing ARM chips though, and if any company can rival Samsung in sheer capacity and quality of chip production, it is Intel.
Apple still needs Shammy for the massive scale. We are talking about hundreds of millions of devices in a few year’s time (or less). Like it or not, Apple and Samsung are tangled together like the US and China. Stopping the trade is would be tantamount to war, and it would be ugly.
On the other hand, I think Apple should do whatever it takes to crush Google. That company still hasn’t righted its moral compass even though Schmidt was (quite belatedly) demoted so long ago.
Apple Maps exists because a competitor got in the way, Google though Apple wouldn’t do anything they did, Samsung will out in three years, and Apple Maps will be better than Google within 2 years, in addition Apple search is coming. All things in time Grasshopper!
Apple has only been moving away from Samsung for the last few years now.
jesus talk about being a day late and stating the obvious… i hope no one is taking investment advice from these people.
as FinFETs are proving very difficult for the entire industry (except Intel),
Intel makes the best chips___ Not mobile, regular computer chips.
I’m a big fan of the ol’ Amiga, and it’s custom chips.
Why doesn’t Apple make a COMBO chip?
An AMD/ARM or Intel/ARM chip could run iOS, AND OS X (11).
One chip !
( It’s two, two, two chips in one.)
There are already chips that combine 386/ARM .
Response, from anyone. Someone out there should like it because Apple is already working on that, … I hope.
Could be made by Intel, or TSMC.