While this is obviously a fluff piece, its interesting to note that, what started as a management fuck-up - how the iPad Pro schedule was mismanaged - ended up with the management pushing the engineers to work harder while the reward went to the people responsible for the mess in the first place.
Choice quotes
"Apple had a problem". The blame always seems to be shared. How about - The management fucked up the release schedule.
"That gave most of Apple’s engineers more time."
"It gave a little-known executive named Johny Srouji much less."
So this makes it seem like it was harder on the executive than the people doing the actual work.
> ended up with the management pushing the engineers to work harder while the reward went to the people responsible for the mess in the first place.
Unfortunately this is how it almost always works in business. I'll never forget the times I've worked harder to make a newly created deadline only for the management to gain a reward and nothing for me. Who cares I worked until 2am every day for weeks while they left at 5pm because they "weren't coders".
I'm sure most in the tech industry goes through this and it's not healthy. Yeah yeah I know you're salaried so you shouldn't expect more but when management gains more because they imposed new deadlines for you to hit, it creates resentment among the developers and eventually an exodus.
I've seen it happen 3 times so far in my career. You'd think I'd learn my lesson but it's hard finding a place that actually rewards both employees and management (or rewards none of them which would be more fair in someways and worse in others considering only the top executives benefit at that point).
> Who cares I worked until 2am every day for weeks while they left at 5pm because they "weren't coders".
> Sorry, ranting a bit.
Rant away! I don't want to hijack this thread, but there's a story I like to share with people when they become new managers. It's from Herb Ryman, one of the first Disney Imagineers.
"The year was 1953. Walt [Disney] said, ‘Hi Herbie. I’m over here at the studio. I wonder if you could come over here. Just come the way you are, I’ll be out front waiting for you.’ I was curious, and flattered that he picked up the phone and called me. I had no idea what he wanted.
He met me out front and shook my hand saying, ‘Hi Herbie, we’re in the Zorro building.’ So we went in, and I asked what this was all about. He said, ‘My brother Roy has to go to New York on Monday morning. He’s got to talk to some bankers there. You know bankers don’t have any imagination, none at all. You have to show them what you are going to do. Roy has to show them what this place is going to look like.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to see what this place is going to look like, too. Where have you got all this stuff?’ I thought maybe it was in the other room. Walt said, ‘You’re going to do it.’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’ There was a brief pause. Walt paced back and forth- we were alone in the room.
He went over to the corner and he turned his head around with his back to me and said, ‘Will you do it if I stay here with you?’
I wish I could remember where I first came across it. I had just read Lee Cockerell's "Creating Magic", and I went into a sort of deep dive for leadership lessons from Disney. This coincided with a fit of nostalgia for 1980's EPCOT, which drove my wife a bit crazy. You can blame the Horizons Resurrected project for that. It was Disney practically 24/7 for a couple months there.
I don't know if the Yesterland blog post is the one you came across, but they do a good job cataloging the different retellings of the story and even include some of the artwork Herb put together that weekend. Definitely worth a read.
When I was at SEGA I was the Producer for the Menacer. It's was a clone of "gun" that Nintendo had called the Super Scope. I had to develop 6 games in 6 months with the hardware also being designed at the same time.
We were near the end, made our schedule, when I was called into a meeting. My schedule had been cut by 2 weeks. I ran out of the meeting and called 4 software development companies, the 2 hardware teams. We pulled together and finished with the new deadline.
The day I signed the paperwork for release, I was told the reason my schedule was cut was because a senior VP was going on vacation and he wanted to take the product with him to show his grandkids. He didn't want to show them something that might have bugs...
Pretty neat. I had Menacer as a kid and a friend had Super Scope. Neither really got a lot of games, although we liked Terminator on yours just for the cool robots and dark theme, I guess, and the Battleclash SNES game. We spent a lot of after school afternoons taking turns trying to get farther in both, perfecting our skills. Elemental Gearbolt was really good later on, but that was another generation ahead, I guess.
I designed two sets of games. The first set was thrown out because I assumed I had access to our current licenses, like Joe Montana, and I didn't. The only game that made it from the first set was my favorite, and still is, "Ready, Aim Tomatoes!". Named by the always amazing Haven Carter in marketing. The original designers from ToeJam & Earl did that game. They took a basic concept from me and blew it up into something that was great fun.
It's unfortunately common that once you're salaried, your compensation is capped at $X/yr for 40hr/week of work but it's reasonable for managers to demand extra hours above the 40 without increasing compensation accordingly. Rereading my last employment contract, the stipulation was I was paid assuming 40hrs/week, but the office expectation was 40 was a floor. 50-60 was more the norm. The whole salary exempt from overtime thing gets to be annoying quick.
Part of me thinks I should start invoicing employers for time spent at work over the 40hrs, charging an overtime rate, or something to increase compensation in exchange for the lost time, or modifying the contract accordingly if there's not an alternate compensation mechanism like comp time offered. The one employer I've worked at who was good about this let you disappear from the office if you hit your 80hrs for a 2wk pay period.
There is another side to this though: I am salary and I can work 6 hour days. My boss won't bat an eye. I can come and go when I want. I can take 2 hour lunches, whatever I want.
Obviously there's a limit, and this is highly dependent on where you work, but I love being salary vs being hourly.
Good luck getting anywhere on this front with without both working in an in demand field and having a competing offer in hand when you ask for (demand) a raise.
> Rereading my last employment contract, the stipulation was I was paid assuming 40hrs/week, but the office expectation was 40 was a floor. 50-60 was more the norm. The whole salary exempt from overtime thing gets to be annoying quick.
That's only because if you refuse someone else will step in to take your place under those terms. Collective bargaining can be a powerful aid with things like that.
I worked at a place where you were ranked and promoted based on how much of your life you were willing to sacrifice to clean up management schedule estimate fuckups and bad technology choices.
It's your choice to continue working at such places.
I'm lead developer of a project that was just submitter to Apple review an hour ago. This week haven't been easy, but both my direct manager and company CEO were in the office with us, even if they really didn't have anything to do. And needless to say, they ordered food in around 20-21 for everyone. And this has only been one week.
> It's your choice to continue working at such places.
To some degree. The problem is every place you talk to there is a "well there could be crunch times when we're busy and you'll have to put in extra hours but those won't be frequent" conversation which seems okay at first. Then you join and you find out they're fighting fires almost every week and depending on the fire management may get compensated whereas developers do not.
It's not always an easy thing to avoid. I've seen it at big companies and start-ups. Start-ups typically seem the worst with this type of thing in fact, at least in my experience.
Is there anything you could do to get yourself some extra peace of mind?
When writing software, I almost always reach first for Erlang these days—not because it's the most performant platform, but because it allows for an architecture where individual Erlang processes (tasklets/green threads) can crash and be restarted producing only events in a log that I can debug at my leisure, rather than waking me up at 3AM to fight a fire.
If I were a CEO (and I have been, but only as a single founder, so I've never felt that "others depend on me to not go hungry" feeling), I'd be looking for similar wins in that dimension: fault-tolerant strategies allowing me to know that nobody's going to go hungry because of one mistaken assumption, so that I can sleep at night.
If I was doing consulting, I'd try to productize it; if I had a product, I'd try to sell it to enterprises; if I had enterprise customers, I'd try to get them on a yearly pre-payment schedule; if I was in one vertical, I'd try to "clone" my product for other verticals with their own brands and marketing; etc.
Are you looking for these? Or are you prioritizing growth: trying to, effectively, sprint for three years, rather than figuring out how to run a marathon?
I'd very much like to know more about your setup, which libraries you've picked and what your server arrangement looks like. Any chance I could learn more about what you've done?
Yep, that's how it goes. I tend to think of working in corporate America as a giant shitstorm, but sometimes you can stand underneath a tree or huddle inside a bus shelter for a little while. It doesn't change the nature of the storm at all, you can just find a respite for a few minutes. Then the tree gets snapped in half or the bus shelter gets torn down and you have to find a new place to stand. Repeat.
Regarding Apple's SoC bet, this is just crazy. In tech, this type of long-term strategy is unheard of. Who can bet what will still be here in three years ? five years ? 8 years is a long, long time. And they consistently made correct choices: be the first on ARMv7(then with samsung's chip), on ARMv8 (nobody belived in ARM 64 bits then), be the first to bet on powerful GPUs (and the crazy impact it has on the whole SoC).
I hear they have been designing their own GPU for many years now, and I'm quite (half)surprised they haven't released anything yet: one does not simply acquire the 30-year expertise of Imagination in such a short timespan.
NVIDIA tried going in the mobile SoC business, and after 5 generations and billions burned they finally gave up. What Apple did (and keeps doing, by putting Samsung, Qualcomm to shame[1]), is mind boggling. They are even approaching Intel's perf-per-watt[2] ratio.
It's easy to mistake causation with regard to Apple's decisions. Did 64-bit became popular because it was better ? Or did 64-bit became popular because Apple chose it and it became a marketing term ?
>> be the first to bet on powerful GPUs
Sure they are the first to bet on expensive stuff - they have the most margin and sales, a more profitable ecosystem - so it's easier to justify the risk of more complex coding(by an app developer), etc.
>> I hear they have been designing their own GPU for many years now
From what i hear, they use the best of Imagination , while locking it out of the industry. But i would be happy to learn otherwise.
And i'm not saying Apple didn't create an impressive chip, but creating impressive chips is much easier than sustaining a good business for them.
Also ,the real power of the chip is for marketing - one critical tool in building luxury brands is a story about unique creation ,creating stuff that nobody else can do ,etc. So that's a very valuable story.
I don't see why it would be more complex coding, I'm pretty sure the move to ARMv8 was transparent to most developers (as it should be).
They use the best of Imagination because of the ambitious goals, and because no one is even trying to push the boundaries; I'm not sure they have exclusivity on the designs, they just have a better SoC integration team, while TI choked on OMAP5 after the years of delay.
Another bet for which they were the first: UFS PCIe storage, on mobile. The storage performance crushes all competition, it's sad.
Honestly, most people don't know what a SoC is, so no, it's not a marketing ploy, even if Apple is marketing company. It's a (huge) technical bet.
Yes, and they don't need a stake in the company, as long as they are responsible for more than 10% of the revenue of the company, they basically have a say in the roadmap.
If they ever chose to release their own GPU, they'll be sure to sell their stock on the same day the device using it is released.
"Srouji was nicely rewarded for his efforts. In December he became the newest member of Cook’s management team and received about 90,000 additional shares of Apple stock, which vest over a four-year period."
Wonder what his team got that pulled of the needed engineering 6 months early? I'm sure they missed a lot of family life.
Not what I heard from a friend that now works there... He consistently got raises (and some stock) when achieving things, and says he really shouldn't be complaining since he now makes almost triple than what he used to make at his previous job. But maybe he's the exception.
Either nothing, or $1k-3k spot bonuses. The leads might be able to complain in a few months / hint at leaving and get a significant raise or more RSUs.
I find myself trapped by the opposite issue. If someone asks me "Is this possible?" then the literalist in me feels compelled to answer "No, very little is impossible with enough time and effort". What they really mean is, of course, "is this feasible within our current constraints?" or shorter "is this an option?"
Free or almost free capital, due to central bank policy, has given large corporations like Apple practically infinite runway to develop expensive products that solve hard problems.
In the past, this type of work might have been limited to a smaller set of government-funded researchers, for example defense contractors.
Considering there is so much we don't understand it's possible those gates could artificial depending on what's being worked on. Or maybe there is a workaround we haven't figured out yet.
I'm optimistic that many things people say today that are impossible will eventually become possible. Except time travel to the past; that shit just hurts my head :)
People don't say that anymore, because we are already building really tiny things. Sure when your using ~10^20th atoms in a transistor there is a lot of room to grow. In 2008, researchers made transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide. Where do you go from there?
People want to say 3d, but we already make chips in several layers and heat is an issue.
What time frame are we talking here? We're constantly learning about how more stuff works. Physics has had plenty of changes[1] but perhaps you're only speaking to very specific theories that have not changed such as relativity? In which case yeah it hasn't changed much but there is also a disconnect between relativity and quantum mechanics and it seems a pretty large majority of scientists think there is a unified way to make them one theory so obviously our understand of both is not entirely accurate (though our observations with relativity are pretty spot on).
> Where do you go from there?
Hard to say since I'm not a physicist or hardware engineer but I've seen lots of interesting talks about scaling down more and more when we didn't think we could before. Ultimately there may be a size in which we can't get any smaller with conventional processor architecture but that doesn't mean we can't build new ones. Optical based processors, built in a 3D way, allows for far more overlap than transistors since light passing through each other doesn't interfere with one another[2] so that looks really interesting.
Quantum computing also promises great speed increases which perhaps could eventually be scaled down to closer to quantum sizes than traditional computing.
I think everything is getting much harder than the breakthrough before it but we seem to keep going and I would be surprised if we end up completely stopped due to hitting some physics block. We'll find a workaround!
Quantum Teleportation does not involve matter moving, it's simply a clever name for a far less interesting process than you might think.
Quantum Computers are generally far less useful than you might think and go back more than 25 years.
Finding planets is hardly a physics breakthrough.
Bose Einstein Condensates reference Einstein for a reason being predicted in 1924-5.
Anyway, I don't mean physics is static, rather we have been very good at a range of timescales, speeds, and sizes for quite a while. Things you notice with a particle accelerator at 99.999x+ of the speed of light are only so meaningful.
Clarke's first law:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke's second law:
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Yes, in today's world where capital is free (ZIRP), large corporations like Apple, which also has $200 billion in cash on hand, have infinite runway to develop expensive products that solve hard problems. For better or for worse.
ZIRP != "free capital". Debt still has to be amortized & secured, and eventually your bankers or cashflow will cut you off, which means there is still opportunity cost.
"His father had an unusual philosophy: He would undercharge customers for complicated work while overcharging for easier jobs." -- Maybe this also applies to freelance coding.
“Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time.” -- If I had the motivation and guts, I'd put this on my coffee cup. But I'm sure it would make me a magnet for abuse.
I have known a freelancer who sort of did this, by preferring projects that required them to extend their skills, but not charging the client for the time they take to learn the new skills (i.e. before they start working on the actual deliverable).
The result was a lower average hourly rate to them, but it helped them stay up to date--and in some cases on the cutting edge. Why? Because it's easier to learn a new technology when there is a real project at stake. The deadline and accountability provides strong motivation, and there are real problems that need to be solved along the way--not just self-directed exercises.
I'm not a freelancer but I can see the long-term advantage of that approach. If you're one of just a few people who can do the cool new thing, then you can charge higher margins on easier projects, because you have less competition for the jobs.
Personally, I have never learned as much as when I am working a real project (i.e. paid, deliverable) that is a bit outside my current comfort zone.
“I truly believe that engineers will do their best when they are constrained by either money, tools, or resources. If you become sloppy because you have too much money, that’s the wrong mindset.”
(referring to move from 32bit to 64bit): "The new technology allowed for entirely new features, such as Apple Pay and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Developers had to rewrite applications to account for the new standard, but it gave way to smoother maps, cooler video games, and generally more responsive apps that don’t hog as much memory."
Right.
Tagging pointers on 64bit ARM does allow some new techniques for compactness but it'd be hard to claim this overcomes the doubled pointer size. Does anyone have data on how memory use was impacted between architectures for the same code base? I recall the Objective-C runtime taking advantage of this so perhaps it's only a slight tax if you rely Apple's frameworks.
Even bigger than tagged pointers is the inline retain count in the 64bit ARM runtime. This makes retain/release much faster... No more global locks and hash tables.
Considering the context of the sentence being around how 64-bit systems required app "rewrites", I'm guessing the fact that there are memory savings on devices that are running entirely 64-bit apps (because the system doesn't have to load 32-bit versions of libraries) might have journalistically transmogrified into "apps that don't hog as much memory."
PC manufacturers are in the toilet with razor thin margins because they all ostensibly deliver the same thing. Profit is where "unique" is, which is a monopoly on feature or integration X.
I think it's because they're aiming for anything they can innovate on. With custom silicon, you can optimize the hardware pathways digitally and by hand. I've heard that the gains can be worth the effort, but it's a bit out of my depth.
A number of features in iPhone are enhanced by Ax CPU and Mx Co processors: motion tracking, Siri always on, Touch ID, security enclave, 3D touch. By owning the silicons, Apple does not need to wait for such support from third party chips to give a better experience.
Agreed. Battery life (and hence power requirements) are critical to the success of a phone. Sensors are much more important. Connectivity is much more challenging. Size is critical.
Because tradeoffs. You can't have everything you want, so you want all of your hardware from the chip to the radio to the camera to be optimized for your priorities.
Given their volume, Apple could probably have outsourced design and still gotten reasonable results, but look at what happened when they outsourced their chip production to Samsung: they helped create their closest competitor.
And it helps their overall business model to keep competitive/strategic decisions under wraps as long as possible, which would be harder if someone else was apprised of their chip direction.
“Steve came to the conclusion that the only way for Apple to really differentiate and deliver something truly unique and truly great, you have to own your own silicon,” Srouji says. “You have to control and own it.”
This words are very encouraging for entrepreneurs. No matter you like Apple or not, this philosophy made Apple succeed.
> This words are very encouraging for entrepreneurs.
Sounds like an non-sequitur to me: what's the link between Apple and entrepreneurs, and why should they be encouraged? Shouldn't they be encouraged by commoditization of silicon instead? >90% of kickstarted/'maker' projects would vanish if step 1 were "have your own silicon"
I can imagine that part of his team's excellence and efficiency is due to not focusing on differences not directly relevant to technical problems:
Although Israel grapples with Jewish-Arab tensions all the time, none of it mattered in Srouji’s world. Cohn, who remains friends with him, says their different backgrounds never came up. “Technical people treat technical people based on personality and technical ability,” he says. “You don’t think about it. You just work together. The rest goes away.”
Far better than almost any other nations in a state of war, actually. Civilian to combatant death ratio was about 1:1 in the latest 2014 war, 4 times better than the usual modern wars involving first-world nations.
What a war it was indeed. Aerial bombardment of a walled city. A rocket launched from Gaza injures a few people in Israel; a bomb (no need to mention phosphorous wink wink) dropped from a state-of-the-art fighter jet destroys an entire city block.
And when Israel finally decided that it was time for the "mighty" IDF ground forces to enter the stage... nothing really happened. The rockets just continued to be launched from Gaza for a whole month. It was a really amusing "war" to watch in my opinion :D
I'm no military expert, so I don't have one. Scratch that, I do. Allow aid to reach the million or so civilians in Gaza instead of choking it from all sides.
What I do know is that Israel was forced to agree on a ceasefire with a a bunch of "terrorists". Quite hilarious.
Aid is reaching them everyday, both from Israel and Egypt checkpoints. They're also trading with both countries quite a lot. You don't think that this "siege" word actually means a blockade, do you?
The only thing that is required to be smuggled are rockets.
Really now. Please don't speak about issues you have no clue about. According to the Jerusalem Post, "Egyptian authorities have kept the border crossing almost totally closed" since mid-2013 [1]. Now, if Egypt's crossing is closed, do you think Israel would keep theirs open? Hmm. Read [2] for more juicy details.
Conclusion: Gaza is completely isolated from the outside world. 1 million+ citizens in a confined space. Long live Israel.
"Completely isolated from the outside world"? Not even close. 3000 truckloads a week. And growing.
> Now, if Egypt's crossing is closed, do you think Israel would keep theirs open? Hmm.
You seem to imply something here; as if Egypt-Gaza relations should be expected to better than Israel-Gaza. Why?
> 1 million+ citizens in a confined space.
Yeah, this is called a "country". Exactly what Hamas is, if you believe it, wants. And this "barrier" would be called a "border" then. You know, like countries have.
Yes, I and my fellow Muslims and Arabs all expect that Egypt helps its fellow humans in Gaza. We expect much less from Israel, given that it is the one who built the wall in the first place.
I apologize. You are right, Israel seems to at least let some aid through.
A country border? What kind of country lets another state build a huge wall around it and doesn't have control of the crossing points? I'm sorry but you're spewing nonsense.
How can someone stop doing something he's not doing? These wars were started by Hamas, attacking Israel. These attacks never stop, and haven't stopped since the end of the last war, there's a rocket landing in Israel wvery week or two. Thankfully, these attacks are not heavy enough for full response, but blaming these wars for someone else than a terrorist organization that is trying to provoke a conflict is ridiculous.
You say "rockets" and people conjure up the image of a smart bomb or modern American military missile.
The "rockets" that Hamas fires from gaza are little more than homebrew model rockets. They are scarcely larger or more powerful than the kind ameature models that rocketry enthusiasts fly. For some time now the Hamas rockets rarely even carry explosive payloads, and are only meant as decoys to trigger the Isreali Iron Dome defense system in a battle of attrition-- Iron Dome tracks and intercepts the rockets with more modern projectiles of it's own-- I've seen estimates that each Iron Dome response costs upwards of $20,000. I doubt Hamas has to spend more than $300 for each decoy.
This is not acceptable provocation for the kind of warfare that IDF routinely makes against Gazans.
> The "rockets" that Hamas fires from gaza are little more than homebrew model rockets.
Quite the contrary. A lot of them are not home-made, they are imported from countries like Syria and Iran. Sometimes, they end up even with Russian made rockets. And they're getting bigger, and have a wider range, each year. Here's the infographic: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00731/inlin...
I think you made an honest mistake because a lot of rockets are called "Qassam" by the media, while the name itself denotes the most basic, home-made rocket variety.
> This is not acceptable provocation for the kind of warfare that IDF routinely makes against Gazans.
No, IDF response is an adequate minimum. You're talking about the "battle of attrition", and you're right; however, you're thinking about money, while the deal is about overall capacity. Iron Dome does it job well, but it has a limited output. When it's out, it means that those rockets will start killing people, and that's exactly the point when IDF starts destroying rocket stockpiles and infrastructure. It's tragic, because despite all IDF's efforts, it means that innocent people will die — but at that point, lack of action would lead to a larger amount of civilian deaths.
> against Gazans
And, finally, this depiction of sides of the conflict is a great demonstration of your bias. The war is started by Hamas, who wasn't elected democratically and is holding power by extreme totalitarian violence. IDF, on the other hand, is a military force of a democratic country. Unlike US or other first-world country, all israelis go to the army, so IDF is even more representative of society as a whole. So, "warfare that israelis make against al-Qassam Brigades" would be a much more fair description.
Sure. But to be fair, wikipedia shows there have been 33 Israeli deaths from rocket attacks since 2001 [1] and the last two major flareups between the two have had extremely lopsided death tolls [2]. During the last 2014 conflict, that article states there were ~100 Palestinian deaths and zero Israeli deaths (at the time). During the 2012 conflict, there were 167 Palestinian deaths, >50% being civilians, compared to 6 Israeli deaths (four being civilian). I would be happy to look at alternative sources if you have any on death tolls, since objective figures are certainly hard to come across.
That same article describes the rockets you reference, but with the added context of relative quantities:
"According to the IDF, around six rockets are being fired at Israelis every hour. However, many of these rockets are not sophisticated, and they either fail to land in populated areas or lack the firepower to cause casualties when they do: Sometimes, the payloads are removed from missiles in a bid to increase their range."
These figures aren't entirely accurate, but they actually prove my point: palestinian deaths are tragic, but the only alternative is to let even more of these rockets through, which will lead to more deaths, although on israeli side of the border. Iron Dome has a limited capability, and where the rocket attacks start to get dense enough, the only option left is to destroy the launch sites and stockpiles.
Despite the linkbait-y You-Won't-BELIEVE-What-Happens-Next title (spoilers: the executive is SVP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji, in charge of microprocessor design), an interesting article.
I worry that Bloomberg isn't sure if it wants its website to be Buzzfeed or the Atlantic.
Either way, it has tons of good original writing, which nails one of the important points to ensure your survival as a publisher. I mean, there's also these Bloomberg boxes that are a nice sideline...
that and fluff piece tone is rather annoying. I'm sure Johny Srouij is a highly competent Apple SVP considering their standards. But correct me if I'm wrong, as far as I know Apple's custom SoC's are still mostly a collection of licenced ARM IP blocks contracted out to either either TSMC or Samsung. Credit when credit's due, but the author goes a bit overboard, in praise.
Have you noticed the fact that no other Samsung chip has reached the single thread performance of the A7 in iPhone 5s? The architecture may be licensed but the chip design is not.
I was quite surprised by the analyst's assertion that Samsung has the lead. Certainly on manufacturing (especially since Apple doesn't actually manufacture them) but their chips in general?
He didn't define his criteria for "best". If it's $/core, for example, then Samsung probably is better. But I doubt Apple cares about that particular metric.
Apple has an architectural license from ARM, which allows them to design their own cores based on the ARM instruction set. They used ARM cores in the beginning, but they're designing their own cores now. (The GPU is still licensed)
Unless there are some major technical advantage in doing so, Apple is unlikely to move away from ARM. The ARM architecture license is far cheaper then the design license. ( Since you have to do more work to design it yourself rather then buying the blueprint )
And according to RealWorldTech, ARMv8 is simply a work of art.
You're wrong about the cost of the licenses. The architectural license is the most costly one. It comes with a risk to let others make implementations of your ISA ...
Notice the annotated die shot chip works provides. Even if it were true that "Apple's custom SoC's are still mostly a collection of licenced ARM IP blocks " that would constitute only a small fraction of what is in the SOC overall.
And with this I am thoroughly convinced Hacker News is Slashdot with significantly fewer of the troll comments. This is obviously pure marketing. Congrats to Apple, I am sure this does in fact win them both sales and talent.
Choice quotes
"Apple had a problem". The blame always seems to be shared. How about - The management fucked up the release schedule.
"That gave most of Apple’s engineers more time."
"It gave a little-known executive named Johny Srouji much less."
So this makes it seem like it was harder on the executive than the people doing the actual work.