It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time
Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.
That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.
It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.
Intereresting point I will try to see if i can find more about it. I would assume apple has a lot more magic sause than just TSMCs best node and a little bit of ARM architecture addons.
And exactly how far ahead has Apple been since 2010 or so? That’s why you would assume that. ARM designs have different constraints than Apple’s designs.
Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.
I think for a while it was because they had a superior user experience that would compound with the more Apple products you acquired.
That, combined with sleek marketing and a good eye for product design, and building what was the best smartphone by far (IMO) in the world at the time it was first released, snowballed into Apple becoming the behomoth it is today.
I remember in 2018 they didn't have widgets, had like 3 different apps that had bugs, the swiping was slow after disabling animations, and everyday I was told I had to update.
And in 2018 the Pixel 2 was the Android flagship with 3 years of updates promised, with a Snapdragon 835 that was half the single thread speed of the corresponding A11 and slower in multicore with two extra cores.
Remember (not that long ago) when Apple was years ahead of ARM on performance, had vastly better support windows for their hardware and vastly better UI and UX? It is just that today Android has mostly caught up if not surpassed on a phone basis, but e.g. we still see a better ecosystem of iPhone + Watch with Apple, as well as between users.
