Apple A12X: 4 Big, 4 Small cores

[Thala]

I wouldn't be surprised if the A11 Fusion chip has a much superior implementation of the big.little architecture than the one ARM has. Actually, its quite likely as the controller is sophisticated enough to use little cores to significantly boost performance in multi-threaded code.

I do not think there is evidence for this. In contrast i can get significant speed-ups when using all 8 cores instead of the 4 large ones when running multi-threaded code on Snapdragon 835 - which does not even feature a DynamIQ implementation.

 

[Qwertilot]

Any idea how the iGPU stacks up against AMD /Intel? Or even NV's mobile gpu's?

If they do move it'll be much more likely down to that & other similar things than the raw cpu speed.

 

[PeterScott]

Any idea how the iGPU stacks up against AMD /Intel? Or even NV's mobile gpu's?

If they do move it'll be much more likely down to that & other similar things than the raw cpu speed.

Apple said equal to XB1S, which has 12 CUs, so better than Intel IGP, about the same as Raven Ridge APU, and closest to NVidia GT 1030/MX 150.

 

[USER8000]

Damn, someone's got some sour grapes.

Those GB4 numbers are turning heads. Personally I don't like GB4, especially since it supposedly allows for the CPU to "cool off" between bench elements to avoid throttling. Which is why I would love to see something like PovRay or Blender compiled for iOS and run on the chip instead, just to get an idea of what would happen when the A12x is forced to run a sustained load for more than a few seconds.

Taking a step back, though, we still have to realize that:

Apple won't (currently) sell this chip to anyone outside of tablet buyers
Apple won't ship this chip with anything more than 4 GB of RAM (bleh)
Apple apparently has no interest in the server market at all, and very little interest in the workstation market. Incidentally, Intel makes most of their money in the server market, and AMD is looking to chew up a lot of that market.

Apple is a $1 trillion+ company that could potentially stomp flat any CPU market they wanted with 2-3 years of dev effort built on expanding the scope of the A12x (or a successor). That is a ton of performance/watt - probably. The question is a matter of whether or not they will bother. Apple is having a lot of fun making a ton of money selling platforms and services, not moving in on other markets. If they wanted to, they could leverage their ability to produce entire platforms to roll out laptops; desktops; and even servers based on some modified A-series CPUs with expanded RAM and I/O. They have the developer community, they have the internal resources, they have the power. It's just a matter of having the will. If Apple keeps pushing forward with technological process, the software will follow. You can't deny it, and neither can I.

For the time being, I can't/won't toss my 1800x for an iPad Pro because it doesn't run the software that I want it to run. I also hate the closed nature of iOS. It can't work as my daily driver. It won't. And for that reason I'm going to continue to buy AMD products for the time being, and continue running Win10 so long as MS survives. It will take Apple killing the x86 development community for me to switch to anything else. Hopefully, by that point, there will be ways to circumvent the Apple bootloader locks and put something like Linux on whatever A-series chip finally puts the nail in the x86 coffin - or I'll have to look at some competing design from Huwaei or (preferably) Qualcomm.

As for your list of who is or isn't doomed, I have no idea how you came to those conclusions. Only Intel and AMD are really threatened by Apple - the rest, not so much. Apple may actually blaze a trail for Qualcomm, Mediatek, Huawei, and anyone else following in their wake. They're all a part of the ARMy. Nintendo is already technically using an ARM design (er, sort of), and MS can follow suit if they so choose. MS makes sense since they're now in bed with Qualcomm.

LMAO. I am from the UK so I am actually quite warm and fuzzy that an instruction set from a Cambridge university spinoff is doing well. I also knew people who worked at ARM.

However how you are ignoring the sour grapes that many here seem to have against Intel,AMD, Nvidia or even poor Nintendo. Look at the first page of this thread - it's a classic,nobody can compete nonsense. Even saying that the switch and Nintendo is replaced by the new iPad.

It is getting tiresome at every Apple launch that suddenly no other companies should bother because Apple. It's getting close to Tesla level now,where no other EV company should bother and any issues suddenly have a legion of fans defending it all.

Some are in a hardware enthusiast bubble. It does not work that way.

On the first page alone many were predicting all these companies were in trouble. Despite all this doom and gloom peolpe ignore the latest Apple results posted here which show decreasing and flatlining sales. You are getting too caught into hype.

Think for a second - even if Apple made the best thing since sliced bread it will have a much limited impact on anything since they sell complete products mostly to the public.

Most ARM based products are sold by non-Apple companies. Many are low margin and cheap to make.

All this doom and gloom is hilarious. People seem to forget most of the important infrastructure in the world is not running on fast systems let alone iOS or Mac OS. Most defence and commercial stuff too.

Countries like China are making massive advances in indigenous chips,etc which long-term will have a much bigger impact.
Why? Cost and lack of export restrictions. Whilst you are worrying about SuperPi and geekbench China is quietly supplying more and more of the tech world's infrastructure and chips. People need to be following that far more closely over the next decade. Companies like Huawei are fully vertically orientated like Apple and came out of nowhere. They are second only to Samsung now and don't even sell in the US.

Look at RISC V even? Many of you seem to be even oblivious to this too,and so many companies are jumping on this.

It's just a shame that Apple and Samsung hype is getting worse and worse now.

 

[moinmoin]

However how you are ignoring the sour grapes that many here seem to have against Intel,AMD, Nvidia or even poor Nintendo. Look at the first page of this thread - it's a classic,nobody can compete nonsense. Even saying that the switch and Nintendo is replaced by the new iPad.

As we all know Nintendo is doomed since 1889.

 

[Carfax83]

However how you are ignoring the sour grapes that many here seem to have against Intel,AMD, Nvidia or even poor Nintendo. Look at the first page of this thread - it's a classic,nobody can compete nonsense. Even saying that the switch and Nintendo is replaced by the new iPad.

Some of you are in a hardware enthusiast bubble. It does not work that way.

I have to agree. As someone that's a hardware enthusiast and a gamer (I have no software or hardware engineering experience), I can't believe the amount of fanfare I'm seeing on these forums concerning Apple's latest and greatest SoC. Yes, it has amazing performance per watt and all that, but to say it's overtaking, or going to overtake Intel is just pure baloney to me. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how an explicitly mobile chip like the A12x can even come close to a Core i7, so I did some research on it and from what I've been reading, it seems as though Geekbench as a benchmark leans heavily towards mobile computing rather than desktop. Add to that the fact that the A12x is on 7nm and Intel is still on 14nm, makes Apple's SoC look a lot better than what it really is. I also read that Apple's Intel based laptops tend to use low speed DDR3 which could skew the comparison in favor of the A12x even more.

Until I see Apple put an ARM based SoC in a laptop and it outperforms an Intel equivalent in heavy computing apps and games, I'm going to call it wishful thinking. The same for Apple's claims about their GPU being as capable as the Xbox One S's GPU.

Fine Print:

I'm not a fan of Apple so the above remarks may be biased

 

[LightningZ71]

I don't see everyone else as doomed. I see Apple solidifying its control over its product stack at the expense of its suppliers. While AMD may only have at risk some of their video card/logic sales to Apple, Intel does have a non-trivial chunk of volume to loose. They can only look in the mirror and blame themselves for their lack of innovation and product development over the last 5 years. Apple has to realize that, for 90% of what their customers do on a notebook, they have more than sufficient performance in their own A series SOCs to replace everything in their notebook and consumer grade computer line. The ONLY thing they might have issues with is the top end Mac Pro lines as they likely can not currently sustain the level of performance that those systems provide and is needed by their customers. I don't see them solving that in the next two calendar years. At best, I suggest that, in the A13 series, there may be an A13P for performance product that uses the same basic architecture of the A13 lineup, but instead of having low power cores, it'll have 8 of their full power cores combined with larger and deeper caches and a higher capacity and bandwidth DRAM controller. That would get them "in the ballpark" for XEON/EPYC level capability, especially if it contains glue logic for multiple processor to be used in the same system. None of that is trivially easy, of course, but its also not really trailblazing new territory either. They have deep talent and pockets to acquire the IP that they need. Once they get there, they will be free of any development constraints that Intel has put them under, and free to realize profit all the way down their product stack. They no longer have to sell at lower margins to hit volume targets to satisfy purchase agreements from their suppliers, and instead get to optimize their capacity for their own production targets and ASP goals.

One thing that has been plainly obvious for Apple is that they have no intention to fight in the lower cost markets for scraps of profits here and there on volume margins. Instead, they know that they are offering a "luxury" item that is desired. They have to maintain their ability to keep that impression. You get there, in the luxury market, by not only being competitive on performance, but also keeping prices high so that your products have a certain amount of scarcity to them. Most of us on here want, at some level, apple products, but a lot of us are unwilling to pay their asking prices as we know that we can get equivalent performance out there at much lower prices. I see that as a plus for Apple corp as that makes their products aspirational, which can boost their ASP in the market.

 

[USER8000]

Whilst US and South Korean tech companies are becoming obsessed with margins and increasing margins and prices,they are handing most of the rest of the world to Chinese companies. The issue is by the time they start realising it,it will become too late. It is the same thing when Japan entered the scene,and then when South Korea did the same to Japanese,US and European companies. It's complacency.

Plus how much is the endless money tree of increasing prices being maintained by personal debt in the US and Europe?

Apple sales are decreasing overall as they increase prices. As the devices cost more people keep them longer. Then the price further increases to compensate.

Look at what has happened in the past in the tech industry.

They are bigging up all the benchmarks so they can justify the price increases. It's not working in terms of sales. Read the Anandtech article:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13540/apple-announces-q4-fy-2018-earnings-revenue-up-sales-not

They are now not going to report sales numbers. So as sales drops more hype online. I wonder why??

 

[Qwertilot]

Apple said equal to XB1S, which has 12 CUs, so better than Intel IGP, about the same as Raven Ridge APU, and closest to NVidia GT 1030/MX 150.

Thanks Not remotely bad, not quite overpowering either.

It is, of course, plausible to imagine it going that way. Apple are surely much the likeliest company to do something fancy with ram integration to really up the bandwidth the iGpu gets.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Look at the first page of this thread - it's a classic,nobody can compete nonsense. Even saying that the switch and Nintendo is replaced by the new iPad.

Um, by the third post, we already had people saying that it wouldn't . . .

It is getting tiresome at every Apple launch that suddenly no other companies should bother because Apple.

I barely see any of these threads. Barely. Any. We get maybe 2-3 threads every time Apple releases a new A-series CPU, and we got less noise for A11 since A11x never hit the market/never existed.

Seriously, those GB4 scores are HIGH. My own 4 GHz 1800x struggles to hit 5k single-core. The multi-core score is "only" 29k. This chip can burn upwards of 180w going full-tilt. Yeah it's GB4 and I'm not a huge fan of it - we really need to see some other non-mobile performance metrics on the A12x (which I've already said!). But damn how did those scores get that high on a little mobile chip?!?!?

Despite all this doom and gloom peolpe ignore the latest Apple results posted here which show decreasing and flatlining sales.

Apple is seeing flatlining sales on phones and tablets. Yet they just rolled out the equivalent of a Smart ForTwo that can tow 5k pounds and beat some of yesterday's sports cars in the Nurburgring. Producing a better mobile CPU won't really bring around iPhone/iPad sales other than to help them keep existing lineups refreshed - it's about what else Apple could do, should they so choose. Hey if all they do with A12x etc. is just keep throwing them in phones/tablets then nobody has anything to worry about!

You are getting too caught into hype.

You are ignoring the fact that this sub-10w mobile CPU can now seriously challenge some higher-power desktop quads, and a lot of Apple's own x86 mobile CPU offerings.

Think for a second - even if Apple made the best thing since sliced bread it will have a much limited impact on anything since they sell complete products mostly to the public.

For now! Remember those flatlining sales you talked about? Might be time for them to open up some new markets.

Most ARM based products are sold by non-Apple companies. Many are low margin and cheap to make.

I guess you're ignoring the Kirin 980 and Snapdragon 1050/1080? And hell even the Snapdragon 850?

All this doom and gloom is hilarious.

Intel is in real trouble. They can't improve their performance due to process stagnation and uarch dependency on new process tech. They're vulnerable - everywhere.

People seem to forget most of the important infrastructure in the world is not running on fast systems let alone iOS or Mac OS. Most defence and commercial stuff too.

Huh? Who is talking about important infrastructure and defense gear? We're talking about A-series chips being a serious threat to everything in the laptop and desktop market.

Countries like China are making massive advances in indigenous chips,etc which long-term will have a much bigger impact.

None of China's "indigenous" chips have ever come close to touching Intel's main product lineup. China's latest local efforts have been collaborations with AMD.

Whilst you are worrying about SuperPi and geekbench China is quietly supplying more and more of the tech world's infrastructure and chips.

I don't even . . .

Companies like Huawei are fully vertically orientated like Apple and came out of nowhere.

You mean that company that is producing the Kirin 980 I mentioned above?

They are second only to Samsung now and don't even sell in the US.

I can get a Kirin 970 SBC and run Linux on it right now. In the US.

Look at RISC V even? Many of you seem to be even oblivious to this too,and so many companies are jumping on this.

Yeah, no. Nice thought, but no.

It's just a shame that Apple and Samsung hype is getting worse and worse now.

Who is hyping Samsung?

 

[IntelUser2000]

They are now not going to report sales numbers. So as sales drops more hype online. I wonder why??

Yup.

If you reveal that you are having record revenue but slightly declining sales, people might catch onto the fact that they are increasing ASPs to increase revenue.

You get there, in the luxury market, by not only being competitive on performance, but also keeping prices high so that your products have a certain amount of scarcity to them.

The thing unique about Apple is that their volume on Smartphones, despite being very expensive is very high.

Seriously, those GB4 scores are HIGH. My own 4 GHz 1800x struggles to hit 5k single-core.

The Coffeelake 8559U gets 5300 in Geekbench 4 ST.

 

[Nothingness]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how an explicitly mobile chip like the A12x can even come close to a Core i7, so I did some research on it and from what I've been reading, it seems as though Geekbench as a benchmark leans heavily towards mobile computing rather than desktop.

You should redo your research about Geekbench, the last version is better And anyway Anandtech published SPEC CPU results which not even Intel fanboys can claim is a mobile benchmark.

Add to that the fact that the A12x is on 7nm and Intel is still on 14nm, makes Apple's SoC look a lot better than what it really is.

This just shows Intel failed at delivering viable 10nm. Following your logic no one should ever have compared against Intel chips because they used to have the best process for years.

 

[Jan Olšan]

SPEC is not a mobile benchmark but arent the tests heavily bound by memory/caches and not by execution power? IIRC they favor architectures with shorter pipelines, caches with lower latencies and so on. And architectures for PCs that are built to scale to higher clocks and thus have costlier branching impacts, cache misses (as well as cache hits) are going to do worse.

Also like Geekbench, SPEC tests compiler in addition to CPU, but I'm not sure that skews results in it much in this case. It does in Geekbench, where Windows builds consistently have worse score than MacOS. And that probably means iOS is also inflated, contributing to the high scores of Apple stuff. But I think Android on ARM also benefits.

 

[Carfax83]

You should redo your research about Geekbench, the last version is better And anyway Anandtech published SPEC CPU results which not even Intel fanboys can claim is a mobile benchmark.

Per the reviewer's remarks:

The following SPEC figures are declared as estimates, as they were not submitted and officially validated by SPEC.

Look I agree that the A12 and A12x SoC is fast as hell, but lets not get carried away here.

This just shows Intel failed at delivering viable 10nm. Following your logic no one should ever have compared against Intel chips because they used to have the best process for years.

Yes, I have to agree sadly. I fully admit I really have a strong dislike for Apple and the cult like appeal of their products. I find it almost distressing that Apple's CPUs are even remotely approaching Intel in performance in anything, and I'm fervently hoping that when Intel does release its 10nm+ CPUs, they firmly put Apple back in their place!

 

[Arachnotronic]

You should redo your research about Geekbench, the last version is better And anyway Anandtech published SPEC CPU results which not even Intel fanboys can claim is a mobile benchmark.


This just shows Intel failed at delivering viable 10nm. Following your logic no one should ever have compared against Intel chips because they used to have the best process for years.

Great post.

 

[tamz_msc]

^Submitting a validated SPEC run is a matter that has no bearing on the fact that anybody can run the benchmark itself to compare different products as long as consistency is maintained.

SPEC is not a mobile benchmark but arent the tests heavily bound by memory/caches and not by execution power? IIRC they favor architectures with shorter pipelines, caches with lower latencies and so on. And architectures for PCs that are built to scale to higher clocks and thus have costlier branching impacts, cache misses (as well as cache hits) are going to do worse.

Some of them are, while some of them aren't. h.264 encoding is one of the benchmarks in SPECInt and that is a valid use case to compare against for different architectures as it is a very common real-world application.

 

[Nothingness]

Per the reviewer's remarks:
Look I agree that the A12 and A12x SoC is fast as hell, but lets not get carried away here.

The main issue is that mcf was changed to let it run on iOS. You can still use individual results, in particular gcc (because icc can't cheat on it) and compare it against Intel results. A12 result is higher than what I get on my i7-8650u, which runs at >4.0 GHz for single thread benchmarks. And that laptop has fan.

Yes, I have to agree sadly. I fully admit I really have a strong dislike for Apple and the cult like appeal of their products. I find it almost distressing that Apple's CPUs are even remotely approaching Intel in performance in anything, and I'm fervently hoping that when Intel does release its 10nm+ CPUs, they firmly put Apple back in their place!

I hate all form of fanboyism and the cult around Apple surely is crazy, but that's not a reason to dismiss what Apple achieved in CPU design.

I would really like Intel to put out another great CPU, I have to upgrade my desktop

 

[Nothingness]

SPEC is not a mobile benchmark but arent the tests heavily bound by memory/caches and not by execution power? IIRC they favor architectures with shorter pipelines, caches with lower latencies and so on. And architectures for PCs that are built to scale to higher clocks and thus have costlier branching impacts, cache misses (as well as cache hits) are going to do worse.

Also like Geekbench, SPEC tests compiler in addition to CPU, but I'm not sure that skews results in it much in this case. It does in Geekbench, where Windows builds consistently have worse score than MacOS. And that probably means iOS is also inflated, contributing to the high scores of Apple stuff. But I think Android on ARM also benefits.

1. So we should choose a benchmark that favors deeper pipes for high frequency CPUs? Why not a benchmark that supposedly favors mobile chips like Geekbench?
2. SPEC results of x86 are inflated because Intel has been cheating with their compiler to over optimize for it. So if someone has better results by cheating it's Intel.
3. Do you really think Apple pipes are short? Apple A9 mispred latency is 14 cycles, while Skylake is 16.5 or 19-20 depending on uop cache hits.

I guess no single benchmark will ever please everyone. But when most benchmarks are giving results in the same direction the conclusion is obvious.

 

[Eug]

Any idea how the iGPU stacks up against AMD /Intel? Or even NV's mobile gpu's?

If they do move it'll be much more likely down to that & other similar things than the raw cpu speed.

Sorry for the late post, but I just purchased 2017 iPad Pro 2nd generation last month. No, it's not A12X, and not even A12, but the old A10X. I went into the store and compared it side by side against the iPad Air 3 (A12) and the iPad Pro 3rd generation (A12X).

iPad Pro 3rd generation (A12X Geekbench 4 score 18400): Blistering fast in iOS navigation, perfect.
iPad Pro 2nd generation (A10X Geekbench 4 score 9600): Blistering fast in iOS navigation, near perfect.
iPad Air 3 (2019 model) (A12 Geekbench 4 score 11700): Feels about the same as the iPad Pro 2nd generation.

Later I loaded up LumaFusion (video editor) on my iPad Pro 2nd gen and was able to layer three iPhone 4K 30 Hz 8-bit h.265 HEVC videos into one timeline and add effects and then when I played it in the timeline (before doing any rendering) it played in real time with no issues. When I exported it to 4K 30 Hz 8-bit h.265 HEVC it was near real-time as well. Furthermore, the time to render was exactly the same whether I chose h.264 or h.265 or different video quality settings. The interesting part for me though for is that some reviews have compared the various models for video editing and video encoding, and apparently while A12X is the best for editing, the results for video exports were less clear. In some video export tests, A12X wasn't much faster than A10X. A10X was faster than A12 too. However, in other export tests, A12X was much faster than A10X (but A12 was not).

So while for CPU speeds A12X >> A12 > A10X, for video encoding A12X > A10X > A12.

I'm thinking that the X chips used in the iPad Pro models these days aren't just for improving traditional GPU speeds, but may have more robust multimedia encoders for video encoding, a so-called "Pro" task.

P.S. Another side point. LumaFusion cost me $20 and is quite a well-featured video editor. I was considering getting Final Cut for my Macs, but at this point I won't bother, mainly because I don't expect as good performance on my MacBook Core m3-7Y32 and because it would cost much more money (like 10-15X as much). Yes it's more powerful, but it's more complicated than I need, and actually is missing some features that editing on an iOS device can provide. It may be that in 2019 (esp. as LumaFusion gets updated to version 2), for those of us amateurs and those who do vlogging and stuff, video editing on an iPad may often actually be more efficient than editing on a Mac laptop. At this point the only thing holding back the iPad Pro is the gimped external storage support.

 

[Nothingness]

So while for CPU speeds A12X >> A12 > A10X, for video encoding A12X > A10X > A12.

I'm thinking that the X chips used in the iPad Pro models these days aren't just for improving traditional GPU speeds, but may have more robust multimedia encoders for video encoding, a so-called "Pro" task.

Or perhaps part of the encoding is done on the GPU itself?

 

[Eug]

Or perhaps part of the encoding is done on the GPU itself?

To be honest, when it comes to this stuff I'm a n00b. I understand that a lot of the effects can be done real-time on the GPU, but I had assumed that usually the actual bulk of the video encoding performance would be due to a separate video encoder block on the GPU.

Am I wrong? Just wondering, and I am happy to be educated.

In some tests A12X encodes video actually over twice as fast as A10X, but in other tests A12X is the same speed as A10X.

Go to 1:41 in the video to see that in this particular case, video encoding on A10X and A12X was in fact exactly the same on the two iPads, in both the LumaFusion and iMovie rendering tests. So, it made me think they may share the same hardware renderer. Well, at least for h.264 4K renders, since I believe that is what he did in LumaFusion. I don't know about his iMovie test though. However, I will point out that when I did this test on A10X myself in LumaFusion, the render times were all identical regardless if I used h.264 or h.265 for a 4K 30 fps render, and it stayed the same too regardless of the quality settings, as long as I kept it as 8-bit. (Although the render times never changed, changing the quality settings made a huge impact on file size.)

BTW, one short video I had took a minute or two to encode on A10X to 8-bit 4K HEVC, but when I tried to output to 10-bit 4K HEVC, it said it was going to take many hours. This makes sense because Apple does not support hardware 10-bit HEVC encodes on any of their machines, whether they're on iOS or on macOS. (This is true even for Kaby Lake and later Macs, even though those Intel chips support hardware 10-bit HEVC encoding.)

 

[Ajay]

Later I loaded up LumaFusion (video editor) on my iPad Pro 2nd gen and was able to layer three iPhone 4K 30 Hz 8-bit h.265 HEVC videos into one timeline and add effects and then when I played it in the timeline (before doing any rendering) it played in real time with no issues. When I exported it to 4K 30 Hz 8-bit h.265 HEVC it was near real-time as well. Furthermore, the time to render was exactly the same whether I chose h.264 or h.265 or different video quality settings. The interesting part for me though for is that some reviews have compared the various models for video editing and video encoding, and apparently while A12X is the best for editing, the results for video exports were less clear. In some video export tests, A12X wasn't much faster than A10X. A10X was faster than A12 too. However, in other export tests, A12X was much faster than A10X (but A12 was not).

How was the battery drain under these scenarios?

 

[Eug]

How was the battery drain under these scenarios?

Dunno. IIRC, it was plugged in.

FWIW, it doesn't get very warm with video renders of a couple of minutes.

 

[bonehead123]

Riddle me this.....

When has apple ever NOT done whatever they wanted, however they wanted, at whatever pace they wanted ?

some examples:
moto/IBM to intel
gumdrop toy iMacs into slick modern AIO semi-pro power rigs
32bit to 64bit
old clunker macOS to Darwin/Next/OS X
yada yada yada

When they were ready to make smartphones a REAL thing, they did...
When they are ready to drop Intel cpu's like mushy rotten potatoes in favor of their own in-house chips, they will
IF Apple wanted to stomp all game console hardware makers out of existance, they could & they would
yada, yada, yada

Apple has smaller market share than many other, much larger companies, but continues to thrive while the others struggle and/or boondoggle their way through whatever the latest techno-tribble of the day/week/month/year/decade is .....

Say what you will about them, good, bad, or otherwise, but these are the FACTS people, there is little to be gained from trying to debate them or read anything more into it than that

 

[amrnuke]

Riddle me this.....

When has apple ever NOT done whatever they wanted, however they wanted, at whatever pace they wanted ?

some examples:
moto/IBM to intel
gumdrop toy iMacs into slick modern AIO semi-pro power rigs
32bit to 64bit
old clunker macOS to Darwin/Next/OS X
yada yada yada

When they were ready to make smartphones a REAL thing, they did...
When they are ready to drop Intel cpu's like mushy rotten potatoes in favor of their own in-house chips, they will
IF Apple wanted to stomp all game console hardware makers out of existance, they could & they would
yada, yada, yada

Apple has smaller market share than many other, much larger companies, but continues to thrive while the others struggle and/or boondoggle their way through whatever the latest techno-tribble of the day/week/month/year/decade is .....

Say what you will about them, good, bad, or otherwise, but these are the FACTS people, there is little to be gained from trying to debate them or read anything more into it than that

What's your point? Is anyone really questioning whether Apple is and has been making every effort to become a vertically integrated company, and in the process make the moves that they feel are best for profitability?