Apple, every mention
992 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Apple
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 513David Rosenthal 333Morris Chang 27Ben Thompson 22Brendan Eich 16Mark Zuckerberg 12John Bathgate 12David Senra 10Mitch Lasky 8Steve Ballmer 6
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Apple comes up
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 13:44 Morris Chang Apple came later, yeah.
- ▶ 52:06 David Rosenthal So that takes us to Apple.
- ▶ 52:09 Ben Gilbert Could you share with us how you end up meeting Apple?
- ▶ 1:00:35 Morris Chang Take Qualcomm, I'm quite sure that they use, uh, you know, the most advanced, uh, and, uh, or even Apple, I think they use.
- ▶ 1:00:46 David Rosenthal If you think about all the chips in an iPhone, you know, the A-sixteen pro is built on the leading edge, but there are many, many other chips in there.
- ▶ 1:08:10 Morris Chang The name slipped my mind for a while, for a second, yeah, which, which is a very important supplier to Apple.
- ▶ 1:08:50 Morris Chang I don't think she understood the, uh, significance of, uh, of, uh, Terry Gao coming to dinner, bringing a vice president from Apple.
- ▶ 1:09:17 Ben Gilbert And you had been trying for months strategizing with the business development team, how do we go win Apple's business?
- ▶ 1:09:47 Morris Chang Apple is a very close mouthed company.
- ▶ 1:10:03 Morris Chang That's what I knew about Apple, even then, and I knew, I know the same thing now, you know.
- ▶ 1:11:13 Morris Chang Ah, Terry to just bring any, ah, Apple vice president to my home.
- ▶ 1:11:38 Morris Chang He was the chief operating officer of Apple.
- ▶ 1:12:35 Morris Chang And, you know, uh, Terry, obviously, she grew up on Chinese food, and I would imagine that, that the Apple guy that he bought, uh, would also like, uh, Chinese food.
- ▶ 1:16:30 David Rosenthal And Apple was considering Intel.
- ▶ 1:16:34 Morris Chang No, Apple, uh,
- ▶ 1:18:26 Morris Chang Now, Apple, Jeff Williams, wanted 20.
- ▶ 1:19:48 Ben Gilbert You're asking Apple, which could be your biggest customer ever, this is for 28, right?
- ▶ 1:20:01 Ben Gilbert Is it worth it to land Apple as a customer?
- ▶ 1:20:08 Morris Chang Uh, because when we figured, uh, a very big market for 28, uh, and therefore, uh, when we planned to increase vastly our capital spending, we didn't have Apple in mind.
- ▶ 1:20:28 Morris Chang We didn't include Apple.
- ▶ 1:20:31 Morris Chang Apple came strictly as a present surprise.
- ▶ 1:20:43 Morris Chang We didn't have, we didn't include Apple in our 28 planning.
- ▶ 1:20:48 Ben Gilbert But it's still the question of are you, are you willing to go do this huge distraction and spend on the order of ten billion dollars over the next few years doing 20 nanometer for Apple when you weren't planning on doing 20 nanometer at…
- ▶ 1:23:25 Morris Chang I mean, this Apple thing came after we had already decided to increase, uh, capital spending, uh,
- ▶ 1:23:39 Morris Chang And now, you know, Apple, ah, requires even more capital spending, and we have to figure out where the cash is gonna come from.
- ▶ 1:24:37 Ben Gilbert Or you could only fill part of Apple's order.
- ▶ 1:25:20 Morris Chang I looked at the numbers, and just as you said, I decided to take half of what Apple said, what Apple said they needed.
- ▶ 1:30:13 Ben Gilbert And so then back to, at this point, early, 20 11 with Apple, you go to them and say, uh, we are prepared to serve half.
- ▶ 1:31:11 Morris Chang Apple, myself, and talked to Jeff Williams.
- ▶ 1:36:28 Morris Chang All right, but I think that, uh, the financial discussion with Apple had already happened when Apple, when Jeff Williams called me in February of two, we're talking about two, 11, yeah, and he said, ah, it was a very short conversation.
- ▶ 1:37:43 Ben Gilbert Apple's Mac line was all Intel.
- ▶ 1:39:55 Morris Chang Um, but again, you know, uh, as I just told you, I wasn't all that worried because, uh, you know, my, my reviewed in my mind all the characteristics, uh, that, uh, uh, Apple is, uh, looking for in a supplier
- ▶ 1:41:43 David Rosenthal And in fact, TSMC makes all of Apple's chips.
- ▶ 1:44:39 Morris Chang Before this Apple thing, Apple and we, before Apple became our customer, I knew a lot of Intel's customers in Taiwan.
- ▶ 1:45:36 Ben Gilbert They do have the conflict where they also design chips, which is competing with Apple's chip designers or Nvidia's chip designers or any other.
- ▶ 1:46:46 Ben Gilbert So to, to finish the Apple story, the short answer is it worked on 20 nanometer.
- ▶ 1:50:35 Morris Chang We have not finished with Apple yet.
- ▶ 1:50:37 David Rosenthal Let's finish Apple.
- ▶ 1:52:00 Morris Chang I mean, it was a real shock when I heard that Apple had placed their first orders of 16 with Samsung.
- ▶ 1:52:40 Morris Chang And now if Apple
- ▶ 1:54:38 Morris Chang Uh, we, we developed, we had our own 16 about, uh, half a year later, and, uh, most of Apple's 60 nanometer requirements still belonged to us.
- ▶ 1:55:14 David Rosenthal Uh, Samsung is Apple's chief competitor.
- ▶ 2:26:01 David Rosenthal Enormous example of this just is Apple.
- ▶ 2:26:04 David Rosenthal Like, if ARM hadn't become such a viable CPU architecture platform, and Apple hadn't standardized, you know, their Apple Silicon on ARM,
- ▶ 2:26:04 David Rosenthal Like, if ARM hadn't become such a viable CPU architecture platform, and Apple hadn't standardized, you know, their Apple Silicon on ARM,
- ▶ 2:27:12 Ben Gilbert Um, uh, designers, you know, Apple, Nvidia.
- ▶ 2:40:00 Ben Gilbert I mean, the example from Apple.
- ▶ 2:40:35 David Rosenthal The ultimate demand for your customers' products, which in the Apple case means ultimately forecasting accurately how many customers are going to buy the next generation iPhone in order to run your business.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 2:57 David Rosenthal Founded TSMC at age 56, retired at 74, then came back at age 78, inked the deal to make all of Apple's chips, and yeah, we're gonna tell the whole story here.
- ▶ 3:18 Ben Gilbert If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making,
- ▶ 57:29 Ben Gilbert And already at this point in history, I mean, this is an important point to make, because I didn't realize this coming in, where I thought, wow, Apple really outsources their manufacturing.
- ▶ 1:04:01 David Rosenthal JV between Apple, Acorn, and VLSI Logic, which was the sort of manufacturing partner.
- ▶ 1:06:24 Ben Gilbert So today, I think Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm.
- ▶ 1:06:35 Ben Gilbert Before Apple acquired it.
- ▶ 1:13:22 Ben Gilbert And of course, the underpinnings of all of Apple's chips today.
- ▶ 1:13:27 David Rosenthal Lineage of all of Apple Silicon, probably the most valuable, defensible part of Apple today in terms of technology, was Armandec to Intel to PA Semi to Apple.
- ▶ 1:13:27 David Rosenthal Lineage of all of Apple Silicon, probably the most valuable, defensible part of Apple today in terms of technology, was Armandec to Intel to PA Semi to Apple.
- ▶ 1:13:45 Ben Gilbert So you can trace Apple Silicon all the way back to Apple.
- ▶ 1:13:45 Ben Gilbert So you can trace Apple Silicon all the way back to Apple.
- ▶ 1:13:48 David Rosenthal Yeah, because Arm was a JV with Apple.
- ▶ 1:20:19 Ben Gilbert Which means that you will see that on an Apple slide somewhere announcing the next iPhone, talking about how it's a three nanometer process.
- ▶ 1:20:26 Ben Gilbert They'll take all the credit for it, and...
- ▶ 1:25:33 Ben Gilbert So, David, you mentioned that 150 nanometers or so from several years back, and we know now that the M-ones are made on this five nanometer process.
- ▶ 1:28:24 Ben Gilbert And at the end of the day, if you want to make the M-II, the M-III, you know, the A-Eighteen X-Bionic, whatever it's going to be called.
- ▶ 1:28:24 Ben Gilbert And at the end of the day, if you want to make the M-II, the M-III, you know, the A-Eighteen X-Bionic, whatever it's going to be called.
- ▶ 1:28:24 Ben Gilbert And at the end of the day, if you want to make the M-II, the M-III, you know, the A-Eighteen X-Bionic, whatever it's going to be called.
- ▶ 1:28:33 David Rosenthal Bionic.
- ▶ 1:33:25 Ben Gilbert Apple had to this point, well, building, you know, this operating system, the scaled down version of OS X, it's Unix.
- ▶ 1:33:34 Ben Gilbert They weren't designing their own chips.
- ▶ 1:33:35 Ben Gilbert They just used an off-the-shelf Samsung chip.
- ▶ 1:33:37 Ben Gilbert They got it right with saying, like, hey, we got to use ARM in these things because we need a really low-power device, so they've done actual God's work and magic to be able to bring a PC x-a-d-six operating system, create a sub-operating…
- ▶ 1:34:31 David Rosenthal You know, Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Apple.
- ▶ 1:34:55 Ben Gilbert So Apple had no notion.
- ▶ 1:38:13 David Rosenthal So, like, the Apple deal, twenty-twelve, Morris Chang, 78, 80 years old.
- ▶ 1:38:20 Ben Gilbert And I think the Apple rep on that was Jeff Williams, the classic Tim Cook's Tim Cook.
- ▶ 1:38:41 Ben Gilbert We're gonna launch, I think it was the A-Four.
- ▶ 1:38:45 Ben Gilbert And it was Apple basically saying, we think a lot of people are gonna buy a lot of iPhones in the future, and we are competing head-to-head with Samsung because they're a company that is not clear on strategy.
- ▶ 1:39:24 Ben Gilbert It was, like, when they kept stealing Apple's designs.
- ▶ 1:39:40 Ben Gilbert No, but Bloomberg reported that it was a really big risk for both companies, both Apple and TSMC.
- ▶ 1:39:47 Ben Gilbert Apple was relying on a company that was then seen as an also-ran, and the quote is, I think this is actually Jeff Williams, if we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan.
- ▶ 1:40:04 Ben Gilbert Fabs are expensive to build, and devoting 6000 employees to building a dedicated plant for Apple in just 11 months.
- ▶ 1:40:15 Ben Gilbert So that was in 2010, and then I think 2012 was the launch of the A four.
- ▶ 1:40:19 Ben Gilbert Designed by Apple, built on the PA semi acquisition, and of course fabbed by TSMC.
- ▶ 1:40:19 David Rosenthal A four.
- ▶ 1:40:41 Ben Gilbert I'm pretty sure some iPhones had Samsung fabbed A fours and fives in them, and some had TSMC fabbed ones.
- ▶ 1:40:41 Ben Gilbert I'm pretty sure some iPhones had Samsung fabbed A fours and fives in them, and some had TSMC fabbed ones.
- ▶ 1:48:16 Ben Gilbert They're the Apple of semiconductors.
- ▶ 1:48:50 David Rosenthal You think Apple doesn't want the leading edge?
- ▶ 1:48:56 Ben Gilbert Which is why, like, I love when people are like, Apple's slowing down my computer.
- ▶ 1:56:59 Ben Gilbert I do wonder if it's actually worse for a lot of people that Apple is a TSMC customer because who else has access to the five nanometer process right now?
- ▶ 1:57:07 David Rosenthal They're going to take as much as they can.
- ▶ 1:59:06 David Rosenthal Like, it's Apple's brand.
- ▶ 2:06:31 Ben Gilbert In the mid-two thousands, as Apple Inc. was preparing for the release of its new smartphone, Steve Jobs approached then-CEO of Intel, Ottolini, about providing the chips for the iPhone.
- ▶ 2:07:03 Ben Gilbert So, okay, but Jobs made what Ottolini considered a lowball offer, and Apple awarded the contract to Samsung.
- ▶ 2:07:12 Ben Gilbert It later began designing the chips itself, eventually outsourced production to TSMC, a contract manufacturer in Taiwan that had been founded, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- ▶ 2:07:21 Ben Gilbert Apple went to Intel and said, do you want this contract?
- ▶ 2:08:15 David Rosenthal This Intel move passing on being partnering with Apple.
- ▶ 2:18:18 Ben Gilbert How much do we ascribe to them versus the entire landscape of talented chip designers out there, including the like, 600 chip designers at Apple working on the Apple silicon?
- ▶ 2:18:18 Ben Gilbert How much do we ascribe to them versus the entire landscape of talented chip designers out there, including the like, 600 chip designers at Apple working on the Apple silicon?
- ▶ 2:19:22 Ben Gilbert I probably wouldn't say it is above Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, in terms of pure value creation in the world.