Apple and Its ARM Competitors

Intel and AMD are facing a large number of competitors, now that ARM has become a viable alternative on the desktop and on servers. But will this competition not also hurt Apple?

Apple Silicon and Snapdragon are both microprocessors using the ARM instruction-set.

In my previous story on the dilemma Intel and AMD face with the rise of ARM, one of my readers Sergiy Yevtushenko, remarked that this should be an equally big problem for Apple:

Now, by switching to ARM, Apple opens a Pandora box. Now its main competitors in the CPU area not limited to AMD and Intel. There are also a number of other manufacturers like Qualcomm, Allwinner, Samsung and countless others who licensed ARM.

Superficially this may seem like a problem to Apple. They have all these competitors making ARM chips just like them. Isn’t there a high chance one of them makes a better chip than Apple? However there is a key difference between Apple and Intel:

Apple is not in the business of selling microchips. Apple is in the business of selling Macs, iPads and iPhones.

If Intel cannot sell their chips, then they cannot make money. If Apple cannot make better ARM chips than the competition, then they can switch to buying ARM…