Question about manufacturing philosophies

I’m a more casual observer of tech, and I’ve noticed there are two schools of thought on how to handle the so called “budget” market (actually this stems from a debate we had with a friend). These are what we’ll call the Apple way and the Snapdragon/Intel way.

The Apple way is whereby for the budget market, they use the previous year’s model. Apple doesn’t generally do budget phones. If you want to get into iOS on a budget, you have to get a past model. They do the same for SoCs. Apple releases only two per year at most, like the A12 and A12X. If they want to build a cheaper device like their new iPod Touch, they just use an old processor like the A10.

Snapdragon and Intel on the other hand release their products yearly and in tiers. There’s the 400, 600 and 800 series chips. There’s Intel Core i3, i5, i7, and i9. If they did it the Apple way, instead of selling a budget phone with a Snapdragon 600, they’d put in an older 800 series like the 821 or 835. Or budget laptops having last year’s or previous premium i7’s.

So my question is, why don’t other manufacturers do like Apple? It surely should save on development costs and would reduce fragmentation in their product lineups. Ama there’s an angle we just didn’t see in our discussion?

Sawa

  1. if everyone did it the apple way then smartphones would only be for rich people.

  2. There is no fragmentation caused by having different socs and processors costing different prices. Both Qualcomm and Apple update their chips on time and frequently hence no fragmentation

  1. Is that necessarily the case? I’m basing my argument on the fact that most tech gets cheaper as time goes by. Of course Apple’s prices are out of reach, I’m thinking more on the philosophy. Like why can’t an Android manufacturer decide to put an older Snapdragon 835 on their midrange phones instead of the latest 600 chips?

  2. Maybe I used the word “fragmentation” wrong. I was thinking more on development costs and having a lean inventory vs a larger one. Isn’t it easier to develop one killer chip yearly, then as time goes by they get cheaper, so that a customer on a budget anauziwa ile ya kitambo yenye imeshuka badala ya ku-develop chips for all price points every year. That way they can milk a design for longer before they’re obsolete.

The real cost of manufacturing yesterday’s chip today is higher than that of manufacturing today’s chip today.

  1. technically SD 835 will be slightly faster in performance than SD 675 but in real world usage you will barely notice. SD835 will still be expensive hence drive the cost up

  2. It is not a problem for the chipmakers plus so far I have never seen any delays with them in releasing updates for those chips. Qualcomm even releases them publicly on https://source.codeaurora.org/

  3. Samsung and Huawei makes their chips inhouse but still release 3 for the different segments