TSMC. They dominate the semiconductor market because they're consistently first to market with the world's most advanced chip fabrication.

But they're an example of the same phenomeon; they were founded in 1987, long after chip fabrication was a thing. They just did it right.

They took extreme risks on EUV lithography and accumulated market share by being the first to shrink nodes.

I think it's hard to know where to draw the line between derivative product and something unique. If we follow your logic that TSMC hasn't done anything new, then aren't all computer manufacturers just rehashing the ENIAC or whatever? Is a Tesla just a better model T? No, arguably we would say that these products are new to market because they've integrated new technologies in unique ways and often expended massive capital on R&D to do so. TSMC is no different.

Absolutely not TSMC was and has always been a pure play “execution” of chip foundry, based on the government of Taiwan taking financial bets on a growing chip market.

In no way was TSMC the first to market for chips or chip production or even any major chip fab product at its outset.

In fact they did exactly the Apple model and took what TI was doing and used government money to scale it. I don’t know a single unique product from TSMC

If anything Texas Instruments (which is I grew up around in Houston) could be considered actually building a good product from scratch, look at them now…

TSMC had the first copper interconnects, kind of their breakthrough node at the time, and the first EV-based process.

Depending on how you define "new" but there are certainly examples of this, Spotify is the first to come to mind, AWS could be another.

AWS was a literal spinout that’s a different thing entirely

Ok but "Business Email" wasn't exactly invented yesterday...

Which is my point. They did basically nothing new internally and will be able to capture what...10-20% of overall business suite market?

That’s genius

Vision Pro.

A costly gamble for tech they really wanted that wasn't mature yet.

They were still late, just not late enough.

Dominating the market??

The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.

there were tons of smartphones on the market prior to the iphone. i used several of them. mostly windows mobile devices that required a stylus or keypad for input. they had apps stores, web browsers, email, etc. copy and paste, which the iphone lacked at release. from a functionality stance there were many options very much like the iphone available. the interface on the iphone was nicer for most things, and it had a nicer web browser. not a different world of functionality at all, just a bit nicer overall but also with some big trade offs.

A world of difference. Completely different products.

Couldn’t agree more. Those amalgam windows mobile devices were an interesting for the time, but hellish experience imho.

i don't understand this take at all. what did the iphone do that the existing devices did not do?

Multitouch

thats certainly a nicer input method, but is that what you're referring to when you say its an entirely different product?

Wait, were you not there? Did you not see how much the world changed pre vs post iPhone? In 2007 some nerds failed to see the forest for the trees and bitched about MMS but we have 2 decades of hindsight so let’s not. Why are we having this discussion

That doesn’t fit: Apple’s been experimenting with VR since the 90s and Vision Pro was hardly novel–well executed, but not novel. I think it’s more complex where you have to think about the products executives and Wall Street analysts want to exist providing pressure against the “is it good enough to buy?” response.

Apple Watch.

There were literally thousands of smart watches that were launched prior to the Apple Watch

Garmin anyone?

I think Timex and Casio even had ones in the 90s

Which ones of those can do notifications, health tracking, sleep cycle, temperature/blood pressure? I’ll wait.

Garmin.

Does anyone take this bozo seriously?

He writes like.... the worst comments. I genuinely hope he gets much needed help. He seems like a bitter sad man.

+1

I appreciate that you made a whole ass new account just for this comment

Cheers to that

And I’d add that like AI, there was clearly a conflict inside Apple between people who wanted to be in the game and the people who correctly recognized that it wasn’t yet where most consumers wanted.

Like AI, the Vision Pro would have been a better product if Apple told the detractors to shut up and ship out. NPUs and AR are not going to sway consumers or compete for market share.

Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...