Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

The greatest beneficiary of the rise of foundries like TSMC was a company that most people don’t even realize designs chips: Apple. The company Steve Jobs built has always specialized in hardware, however, so it’s no surprise that Apple’s desire to perfect its devices includes controlling the silicon inside. Since his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs had thought deeply about the relationship between software and hardware. In 1980, when his hair nearly reached his shoulders and his mustache covered his upper lip, Jobs gave a lecture that asked, “What is software?” “The only thing I can think of,” he answered, “is software is something that is changing too rapidly, or you don’t exactly know what you want yet, or you didn’t have time to get it into hardware.”