Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technology, and John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, recently accepted an interview with CNBC to discuss Apple’s chip business and related topics.
They called Apple’s move to bring chip and component design in-house the most “profound change” in the past 20 years. Srouji said that this move allows Apple to “build integrated products that are completely optimized for products” and emphasized that users are very concerned about the source of chips, and Apple’s pursuit is to build the best chips for the best products.
Srouji explained that the close collaboration between the hardware team, the chip design team and the software team formed a unique working relationship that allowed Apple to “build an integrated product that is fully optimized for the product” starting four years before launch.
Ternus talked about bringing chip and component design in-house, he first mentioned that Apple used to “use other companies’ technologies” to manufacture products and “build products around these technologies.” Although Apple has an “incredible” product design team, they are “limited by the technology available.”
Ternus believes that one of the biggest changes in Apple products over the past 20 years is that “we now have so many key technologies in-house,” among which “the most important is our chips.”
Regarding chip production capacity, Srouji said he could not answer this question because it is a chip foundry issue, but he believed that TSMC has the production capacity and capabilities to meet Apple’s needs.
Regarding whether there is any urgency to concentrate chip production in Japan, Srouji said that Apple “always wants to have a diversified supply covering Asia, Europe and the United States, and it is a great thing for TSMC to establish a wafer fab in Arizona.” Factories are undergoing similar diversification.