PCs Have Become The New Telephone -- Compressing 2020 - 2035 Into 2020 - 2025 -- Juneteenth, 2021

Before we get started, this breaking news: Apple maintains 5G market lead in 1Q21 despite Vivo and Samsung gains. Link here.  

Apple shipped an estimated 40.4 million iPhone 12 devices during the first quarter of 2021. The figure suggests Apple has maintained its grip on the global 5G smartphone market, despite indicating a 23% dip compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, when Apple shipped 52.2 million units.

Now, back to what I had planned to write about.

For background and where I track this story.

Apple may have just pivoted from a fashion company to a semiconductor/tech company. If not, Apple now has a new division.

• fashion
• streaming
• semiconductors

Where we are today with regard to semiconductors:

• Intel is struggling with 10 nm chips
• Apple made news with the 7 nm chips -- that was about seven months ago
• Apple made news with the 5 nm chips -- that was about five weeks ago
• now, Apple is making news with the 3 nm chip

Intel processor marker share may fall to new low next year due to Apple silicon. Link here. 

Apple supplier TSMC readies 3nm chip production for 2H22, link here:

Apple supplier TSMC is preparing to produce 3nm chips in the second half of 2022, and in the coming months, the supplier will begin production of 4nm chips. 

Apple had previously booked the initial capacity of TSMC's 4nm chip production for future Macs and more recently ordered TSMC to begin production of the A15 chip for the upcoming iPhone 13, based on an enhanced 5nm process. 

Today's report outlines a more long-term plan for TSMC, stating that the new 3nm chip process will offer 15% performance boost alongside 30% improved energy efficiency and will enter mass production late next year.

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Laptops Will (Have?) Become The New Telephones

From The WSJ: why PCs are turning in to giant phones. Apple is dragging Microsoft, Google and the entire PC industry into the 21st century. A story we won't see on Microsoft-NBC. From the story:

Longer battery life is directly related to squeezing more computing power out of fewer watts of electricity, and Apple is leading the way there, says Geoff Blaber, chief executive of CCS Insight, a technology consulting firm. Apple has spent years amassing in-house chip-design expertise while designing its own processors, first for the iPhone. These processors are based on the instructions used by chips from U.K.-based microchip-design company Arm and compete with Intel’s x86 technology, which dominates the PC and data-center industries, and until recently powered Apple’s Mac computers. Apple used the same expertise to develop its M1 processors for the Mac.Mr. Blaber says Apple’s chip performance “has got the rest of the industry very, very concerned,” adding that the company is “orders of magnitude ahead of the competition today.”

For Apple, this translates into record-breaking performance on many benchmarks for its MacBook Air and Pro laptops, but also its iPad Pro, which uses the same M1 processor and has 5G connectivity. The M1 chip is also now in iMac, but Apple has yet to give any of its notebooks a touch screen, something found on many competing PCs.

Apple’s tight control of hardware and software means that the company has in some ways pioneered—and hastened the industrywide adoption of—microchip customization, to better run the software we use most often, says Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management at microchip giant Qualcomm. Such customization at the hardware level makes software faster than it would be if it were just running on general-purpose chips, such as the ones that for decades formed the core of Intel’s business.