Bloomberg:
At the center of all this is Srouji, 51, an Israeli who joined Apple after jobs at Intel and IBM. He’s compact, he’s intense, and he speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French. His English is lightly accented and, when the subject has anything to do with Apple, nonspecific bordering on koanlike. “Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time,” he says when asked about increasingly thin iPhone designs. “The chip architects at Apple are artists, the engineers are wizards,” he answers another question. He’ll elaborate a bit when the topic is general. “When designers say, ‘This is hard,’ ” he says, “my rule of thumb is if it’s not gated by physics, that means it’s hard but doable.”
Those of us old enough to remember the anemic processors in Macs of the past can marvel at the power of the present day chips. It can’t be overstated how important Apple making their own chips is and, therefore, how important this guy is.
Uh, last I checked, Intel was still making the chips that power Macs.
Good read, but I got caught off guard at the end of the article.
Toward the end they’re talking to Johny Srouji and pulling quotes every few sentences, then they throw this quote in:
“If I was just arguing hardware and not Apple’s marketing, I would say Samsung has the best processor,”
From someone that’s never been mentioned in the article up to this point and is never mentioned again, who doesn’t work at Apple, has nothing to do with Apple’s chip design or chip design team, and has probably never even met Srouji. Just a random quote from some random analyst at a consulting firm.
Then it goes right back to quoting Srouji. It seems intentionally misleading, as if it was put there to make readers think it was a quote from Srouji and not some random outsider.
My reaction exactly. Apple should re-consider their co-opearion with Bloomberg in the future.
And the next generation of Macintosh laptops is 18 months late. Apple’s move to Intel was inevitable given the market forces (although to this day I wish they had chose the DEC Alpha over Power for the 680×0 replacement), but just as with Google Maps Apple is locked into an unreliable partner that may not have aligned incentives.
I’d like to see the next Macbook Pro with an A9 coprocessor – that would catch Intel’s attention.