Apple's A4 IPad Chip Could Find a Home in IPhones
Apple's A4 chip, being used in the iPad, could ultimately provide a speed bump to future versions of the company's iPhone, analysts said on Thursday. — Apple on Wednesday introduced the iPad handheld device, which has a 9.7-inch diagonal screen …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's iPad arrived at Wednesday's San Francisco event carrying two things Wall Street had been watching: the in-house A4 processor making its public debut, and an aggressive $499 entry price that analysts already sized as a worthwhile risk for a multi-million seller, with first-year forecasts clustering between 1 million and 5 million units.
Thursday's analyst chatter extends that bet beyond the tablet: the argument circulating is that the A4 could deliver a speed bump to future iPhones, turning the iPad into the first proof point of Apple designing its own mobile silicon rather than assembling someone else's. It sits alongside other unconfirmed Apple platform moves reported this week, including a rumored switch from Google to Bing as Safari's default search engine.
First-order effects
- If the A4 migrates into iPhones, Apple runs one chip program across two product lines instead of sourcing separate phone processors, so every tablet-generation improvement arrives on the phone faster.
Second-order effects
- Smartphone rivals building handsets on merchant application processors would be competing against a company that can tune iOS and its own silicon together, shrinking their window to differentiate on performance alone.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward mobile computing consolidating around vertically integrated players — firms that design their own chips, set their own software defaults, and treat each new device category as a proving ground for the next one.
The trend: Mobile hardware is shifting from assembled components to vertically integrated platforms where the same in-house silicon spans phones and tablets.