I've just read through this thread and the related one from a couple of days earlier (
Apple Personnel Moves: Former AMD Chip Executive Hired, Papermaster Finally Begins Work).
It seems to me that we're all looking for justifications for Apple's actions that involve current issues. Most suggestions revolve around Hackintosh/secrecy/iPhone ripoffs/power consumption etc. They're all concerns, sure, but none of them are about looking ahead, to where the puck is going to be.
Almost certainly Apple want more control and better design over the chips in their mobile devices - iPhone, tablet, whatever. That category is growing and developing and Apple want to own it and dominate it, and the quality of the designers they've employed promises great improvements in these products. However, I'm going to suggest that this is only half their reason for bringing chip design in-house. Sticking my neck out, I reason that the other half is embedded devices.
Embedded devices are all around us and they are, at the moment, uniformly crap. The electronics in my car, the menus on my plasma TV and the electronics on my air conditioner are poorly designed, sometimes buggy and never pretty. The embedded electronics industry is crying out for the Apple touch of style and reliability.
We're now moving into the era where we are ready for our personal machines to be properly networked and to share our personal data. The air conditioner needs to know what time we'll be home so it can cool the house down in advance. The plasma tv wants to be able to play the second half of the podcast we half-watched at work during our lunch-break on our iPhone. And our car wants to integrate our music playlist, incoming phone calls and our list of contacts into its onboard GPS nav/audio system.
At the moment this is still a pipe dream. Most people consider themselves lucky if their car stereo has a 3.5mm input jack, and going from watching something on your iPod to finishing watching it on your plasma is hopeless. All the ways that have been tried to date are poor.
We all know why this computing development is important - the first company to really make everything in our life seamless will dominate the computing industry for years to come. The question is how should a company go about it?
Many companies have tried the obvious - consumer entertainment electronics. Windows media centre PC's, Apple TV, Sony products - all have been failures. Their crucial fault is that they aren't truly integrated. Not really, not totally. You still have to play with a Sony TV that can't talk to the Apple TV box, which can't talk to the Yamaha amplifier. And so-on. Three remotes are still required. The wife is still confused.
Not until one company makes the software that drives all the devices in the cabinet will it become truly seamless, but getting to that position seems impossible. Sony, Panasonic, LG or Samsung aren't going to invite Apple to design the systems that run their products - they see Apple as a potential competitor and doing so would reduce them to contract hardware manufacturers for Apple. Yet neither are they capable of taking over the computer side of the equation. A stand-off ensues and the result is that we all suffer from incompatible devices.
So what is Apple to do if it ultimately wants to be the dominant designer of computing across all the devices in our lives? Well, they could start with the car.
There is a rumour doing the rounds that Apple is designing a car electronics system for Mercedes. I think this makes a lot of sense. If Apple start offering embedded control systems to car manufacturers it would be the first step in expanding the iPod/iPhone lines into a true Apple ecosystem that involves all facets of your life.
Think about it: drop your iPhone into the slot on the dash and your car plays your music, puts the calls through the audio system and offers your list of contacts on the GPS nav screen. Seamlessly. Add the Apple design touch for the other functions (climate control, audio, etc.) and you'd have a winner.
For people without any Apple products the control system would still be nicer and cleaner than the abominations that most car companies currently provide. Add an iPod and they then get flawless audio integration. Buy an iPhone and the car suddenly becomes a seamless extension of your computing life. Suddenly, people who aren't Apple users but have a new car have a compelling reason to buy an Apple mobile computing product.
The car systems would encourage iPhone uptake like iTunes encouraged iPod buying. It's all about extending the eco-system and making people really want to buy-in to the Apple universe of devices.
There are many other areas of embedded-computing that Apple can and no doubt will pursue but I think cars would likely be the starting point. They're high-value, so the systems will likely return a profit in and of themselves. They're ubiquitous, so everyone will be exposed to the new offering. And we spend a lot of time in them, so we want them to work really well for us.
If Apple can get a stronghold in embedded systems in cars, and they continue to build the strength in mobile computing that is the iPhone then they might develop a linkage between the two that would allow them to dominate for decades. Apple's embedded and mobile systems could become as ubiquitous in our lives as Windows was in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's.
If Jobs is looking into the future and trying to own the world of distributed computing then he needs custom chips with low power consumption as well as great software teams. Apple already had the latter and they've been busy buying the former.
