Comment by fragmede
3 hours ago
The problem is Apple's monopoly on devices that run iOS. In an alternate reality, Apple licensed out iOS, and alternative designs could flourish. The Android ecosystem still has keyboard phones a la Blackberry. Caterpillar makes an Android phone with a FLIR camera. It's a gimmick, unless you work somewhere where it's not.
In this alternate history, there's a tiny design firm out of Carmel, south of Cupertino, doing bespoke runs of an iPhone 4 with A18s and eSIM capability and they're always sold out.
That happened with the Mac in the mid 90s and Apple closed the deals immediately when the clones started to sell well, because they were better machines than the ones Apple sold. If Apple didn't stop the clones they would be a software company by now and we'd probably have a PC market with 90% of Mac compatible machines and 10% of Windows PCs + Linux.
The first link I googled about it is https://tedium.co/2025/09/02/apple-macintosh-clones-history/
> In this alternate history
In this alternate history, who would have invested the billions of dollars in developing the processor line all the way up through the A18 if it's not available as a market differentiator?
Why, P.A. Semiconductor, of course! Yeah I'm just making shit up in my alternate history, but even in our reality there are several SoC manufacturers; Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, NVIDIA, AMD, Marvell, Rockchip, Allwinner. There are a lot of things out there if just want to run Android on a thing. Even more if I'm just trying to run Doom.
I want an SE4 with touch ID and a 4 inch screen and an A18 processor in it, not the monstrosity that is the 16e. If things were more open; what I really want to see is what we almost get to see with Kickstarter. If I could find one million people to do a first run who're willing to pay $750 for a first run edition, just to simply break even, and then make money off subsequent runs as demand does or does not exist.
> Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, NVIDIA, AMD, Marvell, Rockchip, Allwinner
Five of these are race-to-the-bottom business models. One is use-the-legal-system-to-retain-your-customers. The last two don't make cell phone class parts, and probably wouldn't be interested in the margins.
I mention this to make a point -- the quality of the A18 that you (reasonably) want in a smaller, niche-market phone isn't a coincidence, it's a consequence of the designer being able to justify the investment because it acts as a market differentiator. PASemi would never have been able to do that on its own, any more than MediaTek has -- customers have no brand faithfulness to cell phone processor manufacturers, so as long as the OEM can freely move between them the distinction must be on price, at the cost of performance. There are upsides to the more open market you imagine in your alternate history, but it would come with the downside of the high end of the market being less developed, and flat out worse, due to less segmentation being possible.
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