A look inside Apple’s relationships with Intel and TSMC

Former Apple chip supplier Intel has faced a lot of challenges since Apple ceased to be a client. It struggled to win back some of Apple’s processor manufacturing business, but seems to face one fundamental challenge — trust. That’s the very briefest gist of an extensive and outstanding report today from Culpium, which gives us an insider look at the relationship between the firms. It’s particularly relevant, given that the Trump Administration has announced that Apple agreed to work with Intel in the future. (TSMC is Apple’s current supplier and that relationship seems very solid.) The root of the challenge The problem with Intel, according to the report, is that a lack of trust drove Apple to seek an alternative processor supplier in the first place. The report discusses some of those challenges, including Intel’s failure to keep the pace with Mac chips, which is why the M1 chip astonished the industry, because it gave Apple the performance it had always sought. How we got here The root of that release was mobile, of course. Apple’s A-series chips were built for mobile and eventually transcended to become M-series Mac chips. Intel turned Steve Jobs down when he asked it to make …

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