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Apple to Develop Future Mac Chips in Israel
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Apple is very big on employees diversity and this is not limited to Israel. More specifically in Israel there is a shortage of engineers. Srouji had to look in Judea in order to find more talents and Rawabi being pretty much a "private" city was the best place to invest.
Rawabi is not in the "Palestinian controlled" part of the West Bank because there is no Palestinian-controlled part of the West Bank (it's all Israeli-controlled). The problem with Apple launching any endeavor in a place like Rawabi (I've been there) is that, seeing that Palestinians live under military laws, any employee's movements (and ability to come to work) can be severely curtailed at any point (anybody familiar with the Israeli permit/checkpoint system imposed on Palestinians knows what I'm talking about). This would make staffing such a facility difficult. There is a reason that the Haifa/Hertzeliya facilities have over 2000 employees whereas the Rawabi shoebox only has 60, and it's not for the lack of Palestinian expertise.
More importantly, the import of any hardware/machinery/equipment needed for R&D operations is entirely at the whims of the Israeli military governor, and are frequently banned. So it would be difficult for any company (Apple or otherwise) to rely on an R&D center that is built in an area with ethnicity-based military restrictions (to put it very very mildly). As another example, entire labs at nearby Palestinian universities (biology, chemistry, physics) are non-functional because required reagents or equipment are not allowed in by the Israeli military. I don't see how any foreign R&D facilities are successful beyond token achievements under such conditions.
As for any Jerusalem facility, any mixed Israel/Palestinian staffing will partially have the same problems, since Palestinian employees would face restrictions coming to work (depending on how far away they live) given the military permit/checkpoint system, whereas Israeli employees would not.
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It became a mega campus. Could easily be expanded more.
Apple’s Cork campus celebrates 40 years of community and looks to the future
Employees reflect on the sense of community and shared values fostered at Apple’s Cork, Ireland, campus, in honor of its 40th anniversary.
www.apple.com
Occupied Palestine has a history of backdoors and malware development as well as where Intel developed its x86 chips....would be interesting to see how that fares out as opposed to keeping R&D at home.
yeah, not a fan of Israel chip design. Not because it's not good. But, because I don't like outsourcing to other countries. But, really does make sense. Talent is there. Which is sad because you want this stuff done in US (for me as I live in US).
Also, no difference if done in China or Israel. Both can be security risks I would assume. But, everyone is doing it, I guess. Difference is that the country on the surface doesn't seem to sponsor IP theft. On the surface.
Also, no difference if done in China or Israel. Both can be security risks I would assume. But, everyone is doing it, I guess. Difference is that the country on the surface doesn't seem to sponsor IP theft. On the surface.
Didn't Apple just lose a chip designer to Samsung? I wonder if there is a way of people that will be affected. Maybe this information was internally shared sometime ago and engineers are seeing the writing on the wall. I have no knowledge of this. Pure speculation. I think someone here said they can't find enough talent in US and hence looking at Israel. Not sure.
I would without hesitation rather see Israel engaging technology that we deal with rather than say, China. - For all the right reasons.
Well, that's Srouji's home. So yeah, Apple better cater to that group as they're the ones pulling the innovation magic so far at Apple.
Apple already lost one guy to Nuvia, that is now at Qualcomm. It's a race. Whoever gets the best chip will win.
Apple already lost one guy to Nuvia, that is now at Qualcomm. It's a race. Whoever gets the best chip will win.
Not an expert, but from my observations of Chinese expats and companies in my country, they have a completely different mindset about working, loyalty, and intellectual sharing, compared to the typical western/capitalist mindset. No matter where they are, the Chinese tend to put loyalty to their country first. They're quite patriotic, and from a certain perspective, that's a good thing. But from a foreign company's perspective with high valued IPs like Apple, that might not be a good thing.
That's not saying Apple doesn't have centers in China. They just build like 2 more R&D centers there. Probably each centers are doing what the region is expert in. And the Israelis seem to be quite good in SoCs. Intel got their Pentium M (that becomes the main Core lineup) from their Israel design team.
Talent is not there (US). If the talents were there, Apple, intel, Qualcomm, etc wouldn't be looking elsewhere.
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Just how do you go about proving a negative? There may not be any published back doors but that is hardly proof that they don't exist.There are no purpose built back doors, but there are vulnerabilities.
Apple M1 chip has an 'unpatchable' security flaw, but don't panic just yet
The M1 exploit uses a hardware trick that can't be fixed via updatewww.techradar.com
Why the hell don‘t they bring their production back to the US instead of continuing to outsource everything?
Because they need to attract the best talent in the world, and some of the best talent aren't in the US, and don't want to live in the US.
I really don't understand how it's hard for folks on this thread to understand that this is extremely difficult work and that the pool of engineers capable of doing it, globally, is very very small. Israel has a lot of those folks, and a lot of money invested in training and attracting them, hence it's attractive for companies. It's really that simple.
I'd also argue, as someone who's Jewish, that there is a massive focus culturally in Judaism on education, literacy, and scholarship. In part that's from scholarship traditions from studying Torah, and in the current modern world even more so that it was refined by literally centuries of Jews being banned from many professions, forcing significant cultural investments in knowledge work we were allowed in.
It's not really religious in this aspect anymore, it's cultural, I'm not a religious guy, I'm functionally atheist, as are my parents, and hell as is a large chunk of Israel, but I'm still culturally Jewish, Judaism being a culture and ethnicity as well as a religion, and this is a big part of it. That translates well to Israel's investments in tech.
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Apple is based in the USA. I'm pretty confident to say that the USA does most of the worlds spying so if they were planning on putting in some hardware backdoor they don't need to wait for the new plant. I wouldn't be surprised at all if both macOS and iOS had software backdoors already. It's life...
Not to mention it's not like there arent major attack vectors in any tech, which are common enough and exploitable enough that trying to shim in backdoors that can be discovered by open review is not really the best strategy for compromising machines. For example this just popped up, been in the wild for years now
Also see: jailbreaking