As far as I know, they aren't making screens, batteries, memory, and lots of other components, so they are yet to fully control the supply chain, but they are one step closer.
However, I wonder how the business scale of building their own processors is going to work for the.
Will the A4 move into the iPhone products?
If the iPad isn't a huge success, that processor is going to cost them more than having bought from a chip supplier.
The iPod/iPhone lines already do that. Now that Apple has the flexible battery technology it's no real surprise--the battery is probably nearly as big as the iPad.
Was that actually stated? I thought they were just saying that use would last 10 hours and then made the separate statement that you could watch movies for an entire flight.
And Apple says my iPhone has 12 days of standby time. Ha. I'll wait for the reviews to believe anything about the battery life (as I do for all CE devices).
Technically Apple says playing video, surfing the web or listening to music. It sounds like 10 hours of use to me, probably some of each. It has a 25 watt-hour battery. Nothing huge, for comparison the MacBook Air has a 40 watt-hour battery. They don't break out what the iPhone/iPod Touch have.
In the iPad specs page you linked, footnote #4 states:
"Testing conducted by Apple in January 2010 using preproduction iPad units and software. Testing consisted of full battery discharge while performing each of the following tasks: video playback, audio playback, and Internet browsing using Wi-Fi. Video content was a repeated 2-hour 23-minute movie purchased from the iTunes Store. Audio content was a playlist of 358 unique songs, consisting of a combination of songs imported from CDs using iTunes (128-Kbps AAC encoding) and songs purchased from the iTunes Store (256-Kbps AAC encoding). Internet over Wi-Fi tests were conducted using a closed network and dedicated web and mail servers, browsing snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages, and receiving mail once an hour. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Battery life depends on device settings, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPad units; actual results may vary."
Processor is always a harder to produce part and there is only handful of suppliers. Not true in case of screens, batteries, may be also memory.
Why they choose their own product instead anyother? May be its better, at just 1Ghz 10" interface is super fluid. 10 hours of video on single charge. And owning supply chain doesn't only mean more profit. Now they control features and tweak chips to their own needs much more easily.
"Processor is always a harder to produce part and there is only handful of suppliers."
That's how ARM started. The designers of the Archimedes computer looked round for a powerful but cheap CPU and couldn't find one, so they decided to build their own. They had a very small team, so by necessity it was a simple design - but that ended up being its strength.
There is such an overhead when dealing with an external company. Integration projects are rarely fun. I postulate that having your hardware designer report to the same guy as the chip designer makes the process much more streamlined. No waiting for contracts / bizdev, being scheduled with competing projects, et cetera. The powervr chip in A9 could be configured to support OpenGL (non-es), but the TI Omap series has it set up for OpenGL ES instead. Now, if you are apple, you could probably get TI to change that for you... but then you're talking about contracts & process management and integration once again. Wouldn't it be nice to just set directions and have it done?
If they have the volume, which they probably will, more profit. This will allow them to do more R+D and eventually not give a portion of their profits to Intel for the big chips.
Chips are plenty powerful enough to run apps (for the standard consumer). Now the race is to be the most efficient chip, and since that's a fairly new race Apple should have a good chance at it.
Efficiency isn't a new race. What's happening is that the desktop market segment is learning efficiency to meet the demands of the developing performance mobile segment, as traditional mobile is learning performance to also take that segment. That's a race that has been developing in the semico designers for around eight years, give or take, but product has only been available on the store shelf for a year or so.
You have to earn a return on all the additional assets you have by going vertical. The Street will punish you if you just buy companies to make more "profit" but your return on assets decline.
Real reason is probably tweaking designs to their needs in a way that competitors can't access.
Yes. This is like a chicken processor who also owns a feed mill saying that he controls the supply chain. In actuality, he delivers a load of feed to somebody else's chicken farm and then picks up the chickens a few weeks later.
However, I wonder how the business scale of building their own processors is going to work for the. Will the A4 move into the iPhone products? If the iPad isn't a huge success, that processor is going to cost them more than having bought from a chip supplier.
What tech does the new processor really bring?