Over the last 20 years, Apple’s stock price has skyrocketed due to its renowned consumer electronics. It all began with the iMac and iPod. The iPad and iPhone followed. And more recently, the AirPods and Apple Watch.
Beyond gadgets, however, the largest U.S. company by market capitalization is much more. The custom chips that power Apple’s most popular products are designed in a nondescript room at its Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by a handful of engineers in lab coats and a couple hundred buzzing machines.
In 2010, Apple introduced its first in-house semiconductors with the iPhone 4. This year marks the end of Apple’s more than 15-year reliance on Intel as all new Mac computers are powered by silicon made by the company itself.
According to John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering, “one of the most, if not the most, profound change at Apple, certainly in our products over the last 20 years, is how we now do so many of those technologies in-house.” “Our silicon is, naturally, at the top of the list.”
A new set of risks has also been exposed to Apple by this change. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the main supplier of its most sophisticated silicon. Meanwhile, rivals like Microsoft are making significant advancements in artificial intelligence, and smartphone sales are beginning to rebound from a severe downturn.
The first journalists to be permitted to film inside one of Apple’s chip labs was CNBC, when they visited the Cupertino, California, headquarters in November. We had the unique opportunity to speak with Johny Srouji, the head of Apple Silicon, about the company’s efforts to enter the competitive market of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Tesla, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other companies.
Srouji declared, “We have thousands of engineers.” However, if you look at our chip portfolio, it’s actually extremely lean. incredibly productive.
Apple does not produce silicon for other businesses, in contrast to conventional chipmakers.
“We concentrate on the product because we’re not really selling chips outside,” Srouji remarked. “We can optimize freely because of this, and we can reuse parts across different products thanks to the scalable architecture.”