#BYMEspresso☕: The Origin of Apple's chip revolution
Within four years of the iPhone’s launch, Apple earned over 60 percent of all the world’s profits from smartphone sales, crushing rivals such as Nokia and BlackBerry.
Since his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs had thought deeply about the relationship between software and hardware.
Jobs didn’t have time to get all his ideas into the hardware for the first generation iPhone, which used Apple’s own iOS operating system, but outsourced the design and production of its chips to Samsung.
As Jobs introduced new versions of the iPhone, he began etching his vision for the smartphone into Apple’s own silicon chips. A year after the launch of the iPhone, Apple bought a small Silicon Valley chip design company called PA Semi, which had expertise in energy-efficient processing.
Two years later, the company announced that it had designed its own application processor, the A4, which it used in the new iPad and iPhone 4.
Apple has invested heavily in R&D and chip design facilities in Bavaria and Israel, as well as Silicon Valley, where engineers design their latest chips. Now, Apple not only designs the main processors for most of its devices, but also the associated chips that run accessories like AirPods.
This investment in specialized silicon explains why Apple’s products run so smoothly. Within four years of the iPhone’s launch, Apple earned over 60 percent of all the world’s profits from smartphone sales, crushing rivals such as Nokia and BlackBerry and leaving East Asian smartphone makers to compete in the low-margin market for cheap phones.
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