Apple is upending the traditional (x86) CPU markets.
It is doing this by offering the same M1 chip in laptops, tablets and desktop PCs.
The same M1 chip at all price points (from $699 to $1,699).
“Apple’s willingness to position the M1 across so many markets challenges the narrative that such a vast array of x86 products is helpful or necessary. It puts Intel and AMD in the position of justifying why, exactly, x86 customers are required to make so many tradeoffs between high performance and low power consumption. Selling the M1 in both $699 and $1,699 machines challenges the idea that a computer’s price ought to principally reflect the CPU inside of it.“
Seemingly in the face of this and this, venture has quietly been funding semiconductor start-ups since 2017.
Partly this is an explosion of AI (especially edge AI), and new use cases (biology, quantum computing) but also the interest of big tech firms in acquiring semiconductor startups.
Informative post on what is going on in automotive semiconductor markets.
Shortages in the short term – mainly because the pandemic wrong-footed car makers.
Growth in the long term – driven by the amount of semi-content in a car (an electric vehicle has 110% more content than a conventional vehicle, autonomous driving doubles that).
Titled “A few things we learned in Q4 2020” this deck is a 97 slide tour of what is going on in digital advertising, gaming, payments & fintech, on-demand and e-commerce and software.
It largely consists of quotes from management calls and latest company data points.
A thought provoking and contrarian read arguing that the tailwinds from the internet and silicon valley are fading i.e. the industry is maturing.
This chart shows that growth rates are coming down in most areas of tech.
Worth noting it was done in early 2020 so missed the pandemic driven acceleration (the unanswered question being whether that was just pull forward or a true step change).
This type of environment leads to a rebalance of growth away from start-ups towards internet-first incumbents – as the former can’t rely on the market to grow and the latter use vast operational muscle.
This has profound effects including the financialisation of the technology industry.
The article covers its tumultuous founding (YC start-up) and history.
The undervaluation vs peers – the latest round valued the company at $6bn or $115 per daily active user (DAU) vs. $400 for Facebook and $310 for Twitter.
And finally possible areas of improvement and expansion.
All interesting to read ahead of the speculated IPO.
They acquired social podcast tool Breaker, Substack competitor Revue (and cut take rates to 5%), and are developing Clubhouse competitor Twitter Spaces.
Financial twitter is alight with commentary on the change going on. This was a brilliant thread (liked by @Jack himself) sent to us (thanks Tom!) on the cultural change going on.
This is a nice (fun) write up on the stock – including the narrative change.
“In this market, value is dead (jk sorry value folks!), obvious growth is crowded, but finding that inflection point when the narrative around a company switches from dead to very much alive is like finding a magical money printer in a market fueled by a magical money printer. brrrrrr^2”
Thanks to commercial rocket development (SpaceX) space launch costs are falling again.
“The cost of space launch dropped from very high levels in the first decade of the space age but then remained high for decades and was especially high for the space shuttle. In the most recent decade, commercial rocket development has reduced the typical space launch cost by a factor of 20 while NASA’s launch cost to ISS has declined by a factor of 4.”
