Someone will buy them, whether it's Apple or a competitor. Patent libraries are worth fortunes, and we're still in the phase where companies want to suck up any patents they can.
Just bought a dozen shares in their company.
Apple abandoning Imagination Technologies to design their own GPUs
I wonder if it's fear or just righteousness that lead them to write that.
Probably just plain anger, actually. :)
I wonder if it's fear or just righteousness that lead them to write that.
Probably just plain anger, actually. :)
It's a very carefully constructed legal and economic weapon being deployed, nothing to do with something so awfully human as emotions.
They're signalling the market not to overreact, as Apple may not drop them as a supplier in the quoted timeframe, and even if they do, Apple will be paying them a hefty settlement.
Dear future customers, look at how we threaten current customers (now this ought to get us MOAR customers for sure?!!!)
Under normal conditions, I couldn't imagine that either. But conditions aren't normal (what you know about the conditions is so darn vague that it's relly impossible to tell what the conditions are).I can't imagine a situation where a patent ceases to exist simply because the registrant is no longer based in the EU, especially since you don't have to be from the EU to register a European patent. I also can't imagine that the patents aren't registered independently in the USA and every other reasonable territory too.
The sparse (and possibly misleading) information that we're given about the Brexit is something like: Either they manage to make an agreement with a treaty on how each of the 20,000 laws and conditions are to be handled by the deadline in exactly 2 years minus a week or so (which is basically impossible in only 720 days!), or it's the middle finger, everything is null and void for them, iron curtain, big shame, and shunning, but they still have their 50 billion (something like that?) debt to pay.
So... just assuming it's really like this (that, too, is something I can hardly imagine, but it's what you are being told) it is not impossible to think that it's middle finger for British EU patents, too. As in, all EU patents are of course still valid, but British EU patents are... well, bad luck for you -- unless you filed for a UK-only patent as well ahead of time.
Which would of course mean they likely still hold US patents, but they're not worth much in that context, I guess.
It doesn't matter if a patent becomes invalid due to a technicality in the UK, first off you typically apply for a patent in many countries not just 1 when it's important, there are companies to help you make sure your patent is valid over most of the world, second even if somehow it "became void" they could always re apply for the patent and have plenty of proof of first use/discovery, it would even be BENEFICIAL to them as the new patent would expire later. This is really a non issue.
Personally I'm not happy at the continued consolidation of power in the industry. But on the other hand I'm not convinced Apple has any idea what it's doing these days or who its audience actually is, so this may well implode.
This, pretty much.
Since Steve left the ship, Apples action seemed more and more random. Sure, they still have their coffers filled, and more than enough fans to carry them through many years of hardship if they aver start sinking.
But with every new missstep, theyr shiny laquer chips in more and more places.
The iPad Pro was lauded as the best thing since sliced bread by diehard apple fans, and it seemed to have found a niche market with some people actually able to make use of the abomination.
Yet it failed to really fight back the onslaught of the Windows 2-in-1's, because to do that, a proper Mac 2-in-1 with an x86 Chip and fully fledged MacOS would have been needed. And as much as you can say the same about Microsofts Surface line, not going with Wacom as digitizer is never going to go down well with professional artists, at least for some years until your digitizer tech has matured enough and proven itself in the market.
The Mac Pro Bucket... well, Apple itself has apologized for the badly chosen form factor. Not so much for not supporting and updating the thing as often and as much as their mobile lines though.
Updates for the iMacs also do not come often enough... but most importantly, there is a gaping power hole in the lineup iMacs and Mac Pros.
There have been more than enough misssteps with their laptop line.
As far as I am concerned, the only thing keeping Apple in business in the PC market is the shiny looks and build quality of their Macs, as well as the well liked OS running on them.
On the mobile side things look rosier, still, I haven't seen a lot of "innovation" save ill-thought out me-too actions like the iPad Pro. The only innovation with that was to actually pimp out a mobile device and sell that to customers as a competitor to fully fledged 2-in-1 Computers.
By now I question what the advantage of IPhones and IPads are compared to the myriads of variants you get for Android. Hate the Android OS as much as you like, but many of those devices can compete with apples devices in features, power, and build quality, at sometimes much better prices. So the only advantage of apple in that space is its name, and maybe the choice of OS.
One thing to keep in mind though is that apple seeks growth and high profits... the PC market is shrinking (explaining why so little is invested in actual Mac development in the last years), the high end mobile market is nearing saturation (explaining why Apple does not seem keen on dropping big money at innovations there)... that is why we hear all this talk about secret projects (Apple TVs (as in actual TV Sets, not that little settop box), Selfdriving cars). Apple is looking for the next big profit market after its current ones are shrinking or saturated.
I would guess before Apple implodes they will restructure the company, fire the guys currently in the lead (get rid of Jony Ive already... as much as people like his designs, his designs are the biggest reasons why Apples Macs are so power constrained as of lately, safe the notebooks (in which case ALL laptops are power constrained because of form factor)), and get back to work on actual workhorses again instead of toys for people with too much money, and toys-that-are-decent-enough-for-work-if-you-compromise-on-power for people that just got attached to Apples ecosystem.
At that point Apple might actually see growth again. Unless selfdriving cars ARE a big thing in the future, or Apple is developing the VR device to rule them all in secret (and again, VR IS a big thing in the future, and not just a niche device), and Apple can squeeze big profits out of yet another new market.
As to Apple getting into the GPU game... ehrrr. Good luck. Without a F***ckton of money of those 246B invested into the whole thing, most probably the result will be the equivalent of Nvidias Tegra chips. Nice, but hardly setting the world on fire. Best case they get a GPU that is on par with what they already have licensed... without licensing cost. But developing that without infringing on IP, and without licensing IP from another GPU manufacturer or IP holder is going to cost them big time.
So I will not hold my breath expecting anything more than a mildly competitive mobile GPU at first. And I will certainly not hold my breath expecting a Laptop or Desktop GPU. Two VERY different markets from the mobile space, with VERY different GPU developments. And in the PC Space, Nvidia and AMD have extremly competitive offerings Apple would have a long way to catch up with. And with more and more of their PC offerings ditching discrete GPUs altogether to satisfy Jony Ives lust for thin slabs of aluminium, I don't even know if developing their own PC GPU makes sense unless they also start developing their own x86 CPU...
Talk to Intel and AMD how expensive competing in this space has become lately. Given a shrinking PC market and still rather low market share for Macs, I am not sure if Apple really wants to invest big into that.
Still, IF Apple comes out with their own GPU and their own IP for the tech, that is going to be very interesting. At the very least it might give the other GPU designers something to think about, and maybe drive innovation (if not driving down prices, as Apple has never been very competitive with their prices). Even if their tech most probably will only show up in their own devices.
Nvidia, AMDAre they even a consideration? As I understood it, this is mostly about the type of GPU that will -- as SoC -- be part of the next generation of iPhones (and likely iPad).
You can't plug a nVidia or ATI card into these anyway, so I guess the only thing to worry about would be if someone who makes a complete SoC for the first time can do better than someone who has been doing this for a decade. Then again, I'll assume the guys at Apple are not complete idiots, so they will surely have hired enough expertise for their chip design department. Actually making a chip is not something you do yourself anyway, I understand (does anyone, even Intel, do that?). To my knowledge, you only need to design what you want to have on the silicon wafer, and of course, you need to order a couple of hundred thousand at the very least or it will come immensely expensive (but that shouldn't be a problem given the number of iPhone sales).
Making desktop GPUs would be a kind of silly move, seeing how you can just buy a fully functional AMD card really cheap, even more so if you order a container full of them at a time. Surely, when you buy them in bulks of 50,000 from the manufacturer they cost less than a third of the retail price (probably less).
While I rather doubt we'll see a time where any of us will stop into an electronics store to pick up the latest iGraphicsCard to install in our workstations or gaming rigs, I can't think that it is overly far fetched that future generations of iMac, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, etc could feature an Apple Coprocessor chip, possibly handling not only graphics but also low-power processing modes.
I kind of like the idea of the computing options at hand if you had the latest intel mobile chip on the board along side the current gen tablet/phone device processor, and an OS designed to seamlessly switch between usage of either on a per-program demand basis. Could even have platform specific applications designed to be able to use both at the same time, off-loading some aspects to whichever chip is better suited to the task, and both piping graphical data through the same hardware.
All you're doing is checking your email, watching a youtube video, or entering data into a fairly basic spreadsheet? Well, lets just pump all that through on the A-whatever, and we'll knock down a few of the cores on the Intel and throttle the rest back to near nothing. Open a bigger and more complex spreadsheet? Fire up all the cores on the intel and pump the data through for some serious number crunching, then go right back to mainly using the ultra low power processor for more basic calculations.
Apple has neither the reason nor ability to enter the market that AMD and NV own - even Intel decided that wasn't a productive thing to do, after laying the foundation for it. But Apple's equipped to do a lot of crazy stuff no one else would attempt. Take the Touch Bar in the new Macbooks for example. It's running a stripped out WatchOS with the same core control hardware. What happens if Intel can be persuaded to integrate an Apple GPU design in place of the HD graphics? Sure, nobody thinks Apple is going to produce a GTX 1080 killer... but an Intel 515 killer? That's well within reach.
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