Voordat Tim Cook de opvolger werd van Steve Jobs als Apple's CEO was hij de Chief Operating Officer (COO). In die rol groeide hij van de man op de achtergrond, die vooral zorgde dat alles op de achtergrond op rolletjes liep, tot iemand die duidelijk ook een visie heeft voor Apple in de toekomst.

Zijn opvolger bij Apple is Jeff Williams, die de afgelopen tijd ook steeds meer te zien is tijdens keynotes, hij nam bijvoorbeeld tijdens het recente event de complete presentatie van de Apple Watch voor zijn rekening. Tijdens die presentatie demonstreerde hij samen met Apple-collega Deirdre Caldbeck hoe goed bellen werkt met de nieuwe Apple Watch Series 3 met cellular (vanaf 32:15 in de video hieronder).



Aan het eind van die demo verlaat hij plotseling het script (I'm gonna go rogue for a minute) en vertelt hij wat hij er echt van denkt:

You guys get it, but sometimes people take technology for granted, and just for perspective: I'm miked, in fact I'm actually double miked, in just the right locations. So you can hear me.

Deirdre is out in de middle of a windy lake, and the only microphone on Deirdre is the little tiny one on the Apple Watch. It's a foor or two away from her mouth, she's paddling, and the signal is being sent over cellular coming in. And that's just darn close to magic.

Who would have thought.

Dezelfde Jeff Williams was in zijn hoedanigheid als Chief Operating Officer recent in Taiwan, waar hij sprak over de uitstekende relatie tussen TSMC (die nu al Apple's A10X Fusion en A11 Bionic processors maakt), de toekomst van processors, kunstmatige intelligentie en dat de enorme volume's die Apple nodig heeft een extra verzekering zijn voor de toeleveranciers.

Een live stream van deze presentatie is te vinden op deze pagina, hieronder een aantal interessante gedeeltes daaruit, waar al deze dingen aan bod komen.

It's interesting, when we look back a decade ago, the question we had was "do we have enough processing power in our silicon to match our ambitions?" The big challenge we had as we moved into the mobile revolution was this tradeoff between performance and power, and the view at the time is you had to choose - you've got one or the other.

Largely as a result of what the fabless model has done, what TSMC has done, what many people in this room have done, Simon and his organization from ARM - we have reached a point where those tradeoffs are not necessary. We have performance in thermally constrained environments. And so this opens up for the next decade a whole new world. So for the next decade, the question is not so much "Do we have enough processing power to meet our ambitions?" Though we need to keep working, of course we need to drive better lithography - don't slow down! - but I think the question for us is "Do we have the right ambitions to go utilize this technology in front of us?"

We at Apple are not concerned about the talk of a slowing semiconductor industry. Not the case at all. We think the potential is huge. We believe strongly in both the cloud side, but the future will be a lot of on-device processing. We believe this is the best way to deliver great features without sacrificing the responsiveness and the privacy and the security. We see in our brand-new A11 Bionic chip, which is made right here at TSMC, every time somebody takes a photo, there's over 100 billion operations. That's just mind-boggling. In a single photo, over 100 billion operations. The potential is limitless.

We put a neural engine on the chip, and I won't repeat some of the things that Jensen shared, but we have the same view and vision of the potential of AI to deliver a much safer and efficient autonomous system. The neural engine on our chip has already enabled Face ID, processed locally. And so we view that the next ten years is about the ambition to do what Simon's daughter is asking for, to make life better. And probably one of the most significant examples of this is our opportunity to use transistor technology advances and power scaling to revolutionize healthcare. We think the industry is ripe for change. We think there is tremendous potential to do on-device computing, to do cloud computing as well, and to take that learning, and through machine learning, deep learning, and ultimately artificial intelligence, change the way healthcare is delivered. And we can't think of anything more significant than this.

So I think the question in front of us is "Do we have the right ambitions, and can we go do this?" And there is no such thing as autonomous innovation. Human beings dream it. Human beings drive it. And sure, we'll have deep learning, but there's not autonomous innovation, so it's up to us, this generation over the next ten years, to take advantage of what is in front of us in the silicon world. We at Apple are really inspired, for those of us who started many years ago on a green monochrome computer screen, we're super inspired with the state we're in, and I'll just say this: If in the next ten years, from a society standpoint, we just do a few "gee-whiz" things like flying car kind of dreams, and then the rest of the time we're using the faster chips to do the same things we're doing faster, we will have squandered one of the biggest opportunities in front of us. I think we're at an inflection point, much like my colleagues, with on-device computing, coupled with the potential of AI, to really, really change the world. And we couldn't be more excited about it at Apple, and thank you for your time.

The nature of the way Apple does business is we put all of our energy into our new products, and we launch them, and if we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You can not double plan the kind volumes that we do. We want leading edge technology, but we want it at established technology kind of volumes.