Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

When Apple introduced its 64-bit A7 processor in September, 2013, they caught the industry by surprise. According to an ex-Intel gent who’s now at a long-established Sand Hill Road venture firm, the competitive analysis group at the imperial x86 maker had no idea Apple was cooking a 64-bit chip.

And:

The industry came to accept the idea Apple has one of the best, if not the best, silicon design teams; the company just hired Esin Terzioglu, who oversaw the engineering organization of Qualcomm’s core communications chips business. By moving its smartphones and tablets — hardware and software together — into the 64-bit world, Apple built a moat that’s as dominant as Google’s superior Search, as unassailable as the aging Wintel dominion once was.

Interestingly, yesterday we learned that Google hired away one of Apple’s chief SoC designers to work on chip design for Pixel.

I think we might be seeing another moat built, this time across the fields of Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Vision (MV), and, more generally, Machine Learning (ML).

And:

As many observers have pointed out, Apple just created the largest installed base of AR-capable devices. There may be more Android devices than iPhones and iPads, but the Android software isn’t coupled to hardware. The wall protecting the massive Android castle is fractured.

Lots more to this. Fascinating read. Apple is making some foundational investments that will leverage their blazing fast chip designs and machine learning to bring object recognition, machine vision, and augmented reality to life.