Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Feb 22, 2016 (III)

choi

Brad Stone, Adam Satariano and Gwen Ackerman, Apple's Other Johny. Johny Srouji wants to tell the story of iPhone chip -- as long as he doesn't reveal too much. (cover story and at the same time one of the three feature stories)
http://www.bloomberg.com/feature ... le-chief-chipmaker/

Quote:

(a) "Srouji recently spent several hours with Bloomberg Businessweek over several days and guided a tour of Apple chip facilities in Cupertino, Calif, and Herzliya, Israel.

(b) "Apple’s usual response is to point to Jony Ive and his team of fastidiously cool, Wallabee-shod industrial designers

(c) "When the original iPhone came out in 2007, Steve Jobs was well aware of its flaws. It had no front camera, measly battery life, and a slow 2G connection from AT&T. It was also underpowered. A former Apple engineer who worked on the device said that while the handset was a breakthrough technology, it was limited because it pieced together components from different vendors, including elements from a Samsung chip used in DVD players.

(d) "Srouji was born in Haifa, a port city in northern Israel. He was the third child of four. His family was Christian Arab, a minority within a minority in the Jewish state.

(e) "One morning in February, Srouji conducts a brief tour of his domain, which is scattered in unmarked locations around Silicon Valley.

(f) "Apple isn’t completely in charge of its own destiny. It remains in many ways a prisoner of its supply chain. Displays come from Samsung, and cellular modems from Qualcomm. Samsung and TSMC, based in Taiwan, still manufacture the processors. Apple’s ability to keep up with demand is in part dependent on the production capacity of those companies. It also lags behind Samsung in some areas of chip development, such as adding a modem to the central processor to conserve space and power and transitioning from a 20-nanometer chip design to a more compact 16-nanometer format, which means even more transistors can be crammed into a smaller space. 'If I was just arguing hardware and not Apple’s marketing, I would say Samsung has the best processor,' says Mike Demler, a senior mobile chips analyst at the Linley Group, a technology consulting firm in Silicon Valley.  Or Apple could just be getting started. It relies on suppliers for Wi-Fi modems now, but will it forever? 'I don’t want to go into Wi-Fi specifically,' Srouji says.

Note:
(a) Usually spelled either Johnnie or Johnny. But here the principal character is Mr Johny Srouji. (He is a foreigner, so * * *  Just like me, who unknowingly chose an Anglicized first name with unusual spelling, in the eyes of Americans.) Hence "Johny" in the title.
(b) "Other Johny" in the title alludes to a certain Johny in the Apple. That is industrial design chief Jony Ive, whose first name is Jonathan.
(c) On the cover: "Want to know what makes the iPhone so ridiculously profitable? It's not just the apps, camera, or design. It's the multibillionaire-dollar, eight-year bet Steve Jobs made on this chip. A peek inside the undisclosed locations where Apple makes its brain.

Right below (in the cover) is a "stamp-sized" chip, or microprocessor. I am clueless about the instrument that hoists the chip.
(d) Despite the teasing in the cover, the report says absolutely nothing about chips. All that is important or potentially so is quoted above.
(e) It is unclear to me whether quotations (a) and (e) refer to the same locations in California.

(f) Regarding quotation (f).
(i) So Samsung is better than Apple in chip design?!
(ii) What do you think? Will Apple attempt to do vertical integration, making every component in house, building its own foundries (not just for microprocessor but Wi-Fi also)?