Comment by Osmium
13 years ago
At a guess, I imagine it's really difficult to rip off a chip design just by looking at raw circuit designs (unless you're copying the entire chip). Wouldn't it take a great amount of expertise to look at some plans for a chip and say "oh, that's why it works so well!"?
It works so well mostly because it works only with other Apple hardware and software. They have up to 10 designs to optimize. That are fairly close to each other.