Google bets a billion dollars on custom silicon in quest to – sort of – chase Apple
“Google officially closed its $1.1 billion deal with HTC Corp., adding more than 2,000 smartphone specialists in Taiwan to help the search giant chase Apple Inc. in the cut-throat premium handset market,” Shelly Banjo and Mark Bergen report for Bloomberg.
“The deal will help Google design more of its own consumer hardware and could set it up to wade deeper into special-purpose chips — like Apple,” Banjo and Bergen report. “Google’s most recent Pixel model came with a new image processor to improve the device’s camera. More of this ‘custom silicon’ will come in the future, Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh said in an interview. ”
“For Google, a bigger step would be to create its own ‘system-on-a-chip’ — the main processors inside phones that Apple now inserts into its devices. Qualcomm Inc. provides the bulk of these chips to Android phone makers, and Osterloh said Google will keep working with the supplier for the foreseeable future,” Banjo and Bergen report. “Still, by designing more silicon itself, Google could cut business for other suppliers.”
“The Pixel phone sold 1.5 million phones in 2017, up from 1 million the year before, according to Counterpoint Research,” Banjo and Bergen report. “If Android partners aren’t alienated by Google’s entrance, they are at least uneasy. After the Pixel arrived, some major Android manufacturers, like Samsung and Huawei Technologies Co., began to roll out more of their own services on their phones. Other Android manufacturers ‘know why we’re doing this,’ Osterloh said. ‘Quite honestly, Apple is doing really well in developed markets.'”
MacDailyNews Take: “Apple is doing really well in developed markets” because only Apple sells real iPhones, not a slew of knockoffs running an insecure kludge that Google originally intended to be a BlackBerry clone but hastily rejiggered to mimic iPhone once Steve Jobs showed them what to do.
With no plans, still, for their own SoC, Alphabet has already lost this race.
Thankfully for Apple, Steve Jobs had the wisdom and foresight to recognize the need for custom silicon and the advantages it would deliver.
Apple’s A11 Bionic chipThere’s no substitute for owning and controlling the primary technology. — MacDailyNews, November 15, 2017
With each passing year, and especially with iPhone X, it becomes increasingly clear – even to the Android settlers – that the competition has no chance of even remotely keeping up against Apple’s unmatched vertically integrated one-two punch of custom software and custom hardware. The Android to iPhone upgrade train just turned onto a long straightaway, engines stoked, primed to barrel away! — MacDailyNews, September 13, 2017
Vertical integration – hardware + software – trumps off-the-shelf conglomerations every single time. See: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — MacDailyNews, May 31, 2017
