📱 Apple Introduces the M4
At the last Apple Event, the company introduced a new iPad. Why is that relevant news?
- The accompanying commercial did not have a single living being involved, yet Apple had to apologize for hurting feelings. Are we really that sensitive?
- For the first time, Apple’s ARM chip was introduced in an iPad, not in a Mac first
- The iPad being the thinnest Apple device of all time now, brings some Jony Ive vibes back
Ok, all of that is gossip. But there is another story behind the M4.
Let’s start with Apple’s reasoning behind “Apple Silicon”. When you think of CPUs, you might think of gaming computers, laptops, and servers. In those markets combined, Apple is a small player with approx. 10% market share in the desktop market (and arguably 0% in the server market). However, nowadays smartphones and tablets outperform entry-level desktop hardware and are shipped in two orders of magnitude.
Flashback to the 90s: The rise of the home computer. After the success of the 286, 386, and 486, Intel’s “Pentium” processor became the best selling CPU of that time, and it was timed very well: In essence, it marked the era of the personal computer. At that time, CPU companies had to produce their own chips. There was no TSMC in Taiwan. And speaking of manufacturing capabilities, Intel had a lot of it, giving them a competitive advantage in terms of unit costs. The x86 CPU (the “Pentium” being the 586) is a “complex instruction set computer” (CISC) and could be produced by Intel’s blue men at low unit costs. The Intel CPU competed with “Reduced Instruction Set Computers” (RISC), which were simpler to design and easier to produce. The only problem: The manufacturers like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, HP, IBM, (and Apple) and others didn’t have the production capabilities and aimed for a market of high-end workstations. As a result, they needed less chips and ended up with higher unit costs despite the simpler architecture.
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