Apple Explains Why Its R&D Spending Is On the Rise (cnbc.com)

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Apple Explains Why Its R&D Spending Is On the Rise (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @06:00AM from the new-horizons dept.

Apple has steadily increased its spending on research and development over the past few quarters. An executive with the company explained why that's the case. From a report on CNBC: Company's financial guru attributes the spending to something of a much smaller scale: chips. It may not sound like it, but that research is "very strategic and important" for Apple to differentiate itself from the rest of the industry, chief financial officer Luca Maestri said on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. "Today, we do much more in-house development of some fundamental technologies than we used to do a few years ago, when we did more of that in the supplier base -- the work we do around processors or sensors," Maestri said. "It's very important for us because we can push the envelope on innovation, we can better control timing, cost, quality. We look at that as a great strategic investment." On Tuesday, Maestri also noted that Apple's "product portfolio is much larger than it used to be," and that keeping all these products moving along in parallel adds up, especially with smaller markets, like the Apple Watch. While Maestri said Apple drops a "meaningful" amount of cash on products that do not generate revenue today, these products are not very large "in the total scheme of things," Maestri said. "They add up over time, and hopefully, those are good bets that we are making for the future of the company," Maestri said.

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Suppliers by Anonymous Coward · 2017-02-15 06:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

Intel has been having major issues recently. Qualcomm has apparently been a thorn in their side. Apple is no longer willing to tolerate a lot of outside suppliers being in control, so apple will bring more and more production under their own control?
Kind of obvious by Guspaz · 2017-02-15 06:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

It makes sense, Apple's in-house processors have been a major competitive advantage, particularly at a time when Qualcomm has been leveraging patents to get a near-monopoly in the SoC space. Apple's chips have been a generation ahead of the competition for some time, although their infrequent release schedule mitigates that when everybody else catches up and then passes them before the next A chip is then released.
1. Re:Kind of obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2017-02-15 06:44 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  There have been reports of full-arm laptops running a build of OSX inside apple. They're looking to go full in house for their whole line and unify the IOS/OSX platform.
  They've had tremendous success building their own ARM chips and it's one of the reasons they do so well in the smartphone market - They don't have to wait on anyone else. They get the features they want, when they want, how they want. Remember the 5s shipped with the world's first 64 bit ARM cpu. Shipped. Not teased. Not soft launched. Flagship mainline product. Millions and millions of units sold day one.
  We've already seen other reports of ARM chips with an x86-64 compatibility module the would ease the transition and allow x86-64 compiled apps to run on their new platform. By this point Apple is the expert at the "Fat Binary" transition and they can do it whenever they want. 68k>PPC>PPC64bit>x86>86x-64 and now ARM64 (IOS is in the middle of an arm32>arm64 transition as we speak)
2. Re:Kind of obvious by ctilsie242 · 2017-02-15 09:06 · Score: 1
  
  Same. I can do a lot on OSX for developing, including using ansible and Vagrant for development projects. If that gets taken away, then I pretty much forced to Linux or Windows (and perhaps WSL). I hope the fact that iOS apps need macOS to write code on makes locking down macOS a thing that won't happen, but with the encroachment and attempts to lock down desktop boxes in general, I wouldn't be surprised by an effort like this.
3. Re:Kind of obvious by phantomfive · 2017-02-15 09:45 · Score: 1
  
  By this point Apple is the expert at the "Fat Binary" transition and they can do it whenever they want. 68k>PPC>PPC64bit>x86>86x-64
  Having gone through two of those, they both sucked, although the 68k to PPC sucked less than the PPC to x86. That one sucked hard because they didn't maintain backwards compatibility long at all.
  
  If I have to do another transition, it's going to be a transition back to Linux.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
4. Re:Kind of obvious by AmiMoJo · 2017-02-15 20:48 · Score: 1
  
  We have had ARM Chromebooks for years. Apple's main issue is that they need more cores to get good performance on desktop. 2 isn't really going to cut it, especially if they are trying to do binary translation on the fly.
  
  --
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5. Re:Kind of obvious by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 21:38 · Score: 1
  
  Apple's ARM chips have been sub par since the very start.
  You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
  
  --
  Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
What is sad that... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-02-15 06:21 · Score: 4, Informative

a tech company has to defend or justify spending money on R&D...for tech.
It is as if everyone thinks that "tech" just falls out of the ether like some magic pixie dust, and a "great" tech company is really only just a better tech integrator (like Dell) than everyone else. Or should be.
Carl Icahn I'm sure would not be amused at the frivolous and speculative spending of valuable shareholder money that should instead be used to enhance shareholder [his] value...today.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/carl-icahns-2-billion-apple-stake-was-a-prime-example-of-investment-inequality-2016-06-07
They are trying to replace ... by CaptainDork · 2017-02-15 06:22 · Score: 2

... Steve Jobs.

--
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
1. Re:They are trying to replace ... by farble1670 · 2017-02-15 08:04 · Score: 1
  
  You are profoundly confused about the difference between a vision and R&D. Coming up w/ the idea of the iPhone was the easy part. You don't hear about the thousands of people that toiled for years to make it into a polished product.
  Jobs was a visionary. He didn't do R&D.
2. Re:They are trying to replace ... by phantomfive · 2017-02-15 09:47 · Score: 1
  
  You don't hear about the thousands of people that toiled for years to make it into a polished product.
  If you watched many Steve Jobs keynotes, then you did. He even brought some of them on stage from time to time.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
3. Re:They are trying to replace ... by CaptainDork · 2017-02-15 11:26 · Score: 1
  
  I read the fucking book.
  Go look at why Apple brought him back and the in-fighting over cheap vs polished.
  Also, look at sales trends vs the presence of Jobs vs his passing.
  Apple is trying to buy a Steve Jobs.
  
  --
  It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
4. Re:They are trying to replace ... by farble1670 · 2017-02-15 11:54 · Score: 1
  
  Ok, you are right. Jobs, alone, did most (all?) of Apple's R&D. Hope you enjoyed the (fucking) book.
  
  Also, look at sales trends vs the presence of Jobs vs his passing.
  I know right? Apple is really in the toilet right now.
5. Re:They are trying to replace ... by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 23:26 · Score: 1
  
  Woz was the visionary, Jobs was the accountant
  Errm, nope. Building a computer for yourself may mean you are a genius. But only realising that that computer can be sold to the public makes you a visionary.
  
  --
  Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
making thinner and more apple only service takes a by Joe_Dragon · 2017-02-15 06:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

making thinner and more apple only service takes a lot of R&D.
now what about a real workstation? Some kind of server or at least the rights to run os x in a vm on any base hardware?
Re:The real question by omnichad · 2017-02-15 06:24 · Score: 2, Insightful

They had wireless earphones to sell. They made a market out of that piece of plastic and it ended up costing less than nothing - they made buckets of money on that.
Re:making thinner and more apple only service take by WarJolt · 2017-02-15 06:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Theres really no really research left that can make workstations better. I commend you for being so resistant to change, but Apple will lose money if they don’t stay ahead of the trend and unfortunately I don't think workstations are going to make Apple tons of money.
What is the R&D Actually For? by notsteve · 2017-02-15 06:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

To me, the salient question is whether they are investing to increase profits, or to make better products. The lack of updates in most of the mac line, along with battery and memory issues that crippled the new Macbooks, are decisions about resource allocation - Apple simply isn't interested. This is especially strange, since they still have strong development on OSX. On the mobile side, there is a lot of criticism about a lack of innovation to drive new product sales—but what I see is Apple simply looking to R&D to stabilise cost and production, based on the goal of meeting market expectations more consistently. All of this is very Tim Cook, and not very Steve Jobs. For all his faults, Steve did seem genuine about his passion to make "insanely great" products. Tim seems committed to demonstrable returns stability.
1. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by geekmux · 2017-02-15 06:51 · Score: 1
  
  To me, the salient question is whether they are investing to increase profits, or to make better products. The lack of updates in most of the mac line, along with battery and memory issues that crippled the new Macbooks, are decisions about resource allocation - Apple simply isn't interested. This is especially strange, since they still have strong development on OSX. On the mobile side, there is a lot of criticism about a lack of innovation to drive new product sales—but what I see is Apple simply looking to R&D to stabilise cost and production, based on the goal of meeting market expectations more consistently. All of this is very Tim Cook, and not very Steve Jobs. For all his faults, Steve did seem genuine about his passion to make "insanely great" products. Tim seems committed to demonstrable returns stability.
  No matter who is in charge, they are beholden to Wall Street Greed above all.
  In case you needed any clarity regarding your salient question.
2. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by King_TJ · 2017-02-15 08:17 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I've made this comment before, but I think it bears repeating. I'm not really sure we can tell if Apple "just doesn't care about a lot of products in their lineup anymore" or not, until we let them get the new "spaceship" campus up and running?
  That's a huge real-estate investment that allows them to hire a whole lot of employees or contractors, especially given that Apple has said they don't plan on getting rid of any of its EXISTING office space.
  I think historically, Apple has *always* struggled with trying to do so much with so little manpower. They went head-to-head with companies the size of Microsoft, while selling a whole line of hardware along with the operating system and applications for it - when Apple employed FAR fewer people. This has resulted in the ongoing wisdom of "avoiding revision A of a new Mac" and the famed shortages of new products at launch time, among other things.
  It appears the head-count is about to dramatically increase at Apple, and I'd like to think a lot of things have gotten behind because it's slated to get addressed when new teams are hired to tackle some of it. The company certainly has the money to make those changes.
  I'm one of the people who shelled out the crazy high price for a new Mac Pro "cylinder" workstation, a month or two after it came out. I even upgraded it to 64GB of RAM via a 3rd. party memory supplier and upgraded the 256GB SSD in it to 512GB when I could source the needed part on the used market. I'm using it to type this message today and its still my "main" computer I use at home. But I only invested in this thing because I put faith in Apple to support it at least as well as they did the previous Mac Pro towers. (I owned a 2006 and a 2008 model before this one, and both were excellent workhorses that more than paid for themselves with work I got done with them.) Essentially, my loyalty was taken advantage of. Apple not only couldn't release a suitable display of their own for the machine, but never even took the obvious step of marketing an external drive storage cabinet for it. I bought a 3rd. party (DATOptic e-Box) external Thunderbolt RAID enclosure that I use with it -- but the point is, it looks like something that belongs on a Windows PC, not a Mac. It's bigger and noisier than the Mac Pro itself, and I can't put the Mac into sleep mode while it's on, or it doersn't handle it gracefully and can cause data corruption. Apple has never sold a single video card upgrade for this machine either, which is kind of ridiculous for a "Pro" desktop workstation. The dual FirePro D500's in this one perform about as well as a pair of ATI Radeon 7950 or 7970 cards, but OS X doesn't even support CrossFire mode with them. There should really be a program to take these in to have a newer, better graphics card upgrade professionally installed, since both nVidia and ATI/AMD are selling cards that are essentially 2 generations ahead of this technology now.
3. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by phantomfive · 2017-02-15 09:50 · Score: 1
  
  That's possible, but consider the counter-argument: somehow they still built their light-bar onto the mac. The frequency of updates doesn't bother me as much as the lack of quality in the updates when they do come. It's really sad because I feel that the world is better off with a company like Apple in it, making good products.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
4. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by larkost · 2017-02-15 10:40 · Score: 1
  
  The memory limitations that you cite, as well as the driving problem behind slow updates, can be squarely put at the feet of Intel. They have pushed back meaningful updates for a couple of years now. I am not implying that they are doing so deliberately, but rather have been unable to make meaningful upgrades.
  To take the memory size limitation, that is because Kaby Lake processors are the only ones to support 64GiB, and the models that Apple would have used were not available (let alone in Apple quantities) until long after the current MacBook Pros shipped. And I think you are a bit mislead about "battery issues". For most workloads Apple's newest MacBook Pro's have 10+ hour battery life. The only place where it is not better than the previous generation is on the 15 inch models on workloads that cause the GPU to kick in. There the battery simply is not enough to really feed that power-hungry GPU. This was an engineering decision (tradeoffs between a better GPU, thinness, and battery life for certain workloads), and real deserves a more thorough understanding than your summary indicates.
  A similar conversation applies on the MacPro front. Again, the Xeon processors that Apple used have not been upgraded in a way that justified updates. I wish that Apple had released speed-bumps along the way (and adjusted the bottom-end price along the way), but there was really not enough change since their release to justify a re-work since then. A GPU update might have been nice, but (full disclosure: I worked at Apple, and helped test one aspect of the GPUs) Apple spent a lot of engineer time making those custom GPUs sing on the workloads they were for: FinalCut Pro (not gaming). Likely someone crunched the numbers on sales and determined that it was not worth the expenditure to do that again for a mid-term product. Whenever it is updated again we will see if Apple goes the custom route again.
  I also don't think you are evaluating Apple chip work nearly well enough. I you look at the CPU/GPU work they have done on the iOS devices; for the last 4 or so years competitors have been at least a year behind on most real-work testing metrics. Only in multi-threaded tests does anyone else remain competitive within a year timeframe. That is despite Apple being lower-power and lower clock-speed in almost all cases. And the delta has been widening as Apple ramps up on this. They started with nearly off-the-shelf processors, but are now on their fifth version of increasingly modified ARM ISA (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), each of which had increasingly custom versions of the paired PowerVR GPUs.
  None of that work is about lowering costs, all of it is about improving performance. If Apple only wanted to lower costs they would be using Samsung or Qualcomm licensed CPU designs.
5. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by notsteve · 2017-02-15 10:57 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah - I kinda feel like that bar is yet another thing that everyone says is useless - and then five years later, everyone said Apple didn't innovate it because obviously it's a good idea. But because of clumsy engineering on the battery, they had to use low power ram in those computers that didn't support 32GB. I think we're all saying the same thing - though I'd add that their lack of support for their workstation-class machine is borderline criminal.
6. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by phantomfive · 2017-02-15 11:50 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, even a decent mac mini wouldn't take much effort, really, and would be really helpful.
  
  --
  "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
7. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by notsteve · 2017-02-15 12:41 · Score: 1
  
  I hear you and appreciate your points. Respectfully, I think you have partially mischaracterised the memory problems on the MacBooks. According to Schiller, it came down not being able to use 32GB of low-power RAM, in order to save battery life. Although he didn't mention it, he means LPDDR RAM. Yes, the current standards are limited to 16GB. http://bgr.com/2016/11/21/macb... https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pr... Mobile Skylake does support 64GB: http://ark.intel.com/compare/8... But it depends on what kind of memory you use - with Apple's new battery technology, memory compression, app nap and other technologies - they could have made that work if thinness was more important to them than performance. You're absolutely right that later Intel chips do support more than 16GB for LPDDR. Likewise, yes - Xeon chips have not gotten faster. But graphics cards have! And I've currently got more solid state storage in my Mac Mini than the Mac Pro supports. Agreed on the chip development, as well, but their operating systems run very slowly on older devices - which is not necessary - it's a design decision. If they used better specs in their devices, this wouldn't be as much of a problem. I have an original iPadit had 256MB of RAM. What were they thinking? (Battery life, mostly.) You couldn't even have two tabs open in a web browser without reloading the whole page. Soyes, their developments DO increase performance, but they USE them to increase profitnot making high-performance, long-term investments for consumers. Just my $0.02.
8. Re:What is the R&D Actually For? by notsteve · 2017-02-15 12:43 · Score: 1
  
  not to mention being stuck with Thunderbolt 2
Re:Bullshit by UnknowingFool · 2017-02-15 06:44 · Score: 1

So for you, Apple not updating one model of their product lines == they've not worked on R&D for all of the product lines. In the context of the article, Apple has been working on chip development (which affects their mobile products).

--
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Pathetic by Anonymous Coward · 2017-02-15 06:44 · Score: 1

It's a pathetic day and age when R&D has to be explained.
CEO bonuses and compensation? Nope.
Massive goodwill charges for buying some waaayyyy overpriced Silly Valley startup or some other takeover? Nope.
CEO's ridiculous retirement package? Nope (See GE)
Paying a CEO an obscene amount to fuck up the company (Yahoo! & HP) Nope.
Now if any of you would like a pay raise to at least be competitive with your peers at another company, well YOU have to justify it and sorry, it's not in the budget.
Re: Simple Answer by UnknowingFool · 2017-02-15 07:12 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes it's not like Apple designs their own processors for their mobile devices or anything. Oh wait, they totally do that

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Re:Simple Answer by Anonymous Coward · 2017-02-15 07:16 · Score: 1

But they make some damn fine dongles.
Re:making thinner and more apple only service take by MachineShedFred · 2017-02-15 07:24 · Score: 2

Regardless of if you believe a EULA is enforceable or not, setting up any kind of for-profit venture that is violating the EULA of literally the richest company on the planet is a fantastic way to get bankrupted through legal action. Never mind the whole "oh, you updated your server and now it doesn't boot because you're hacking the booter to make it run somewhere it wasn't designed to" problem.
I would much rather have Apple say that I can run macOS with the server app in a VM for added cost in their license than take the legal risks or run with zero support if a business requires it. And I say this having run many OS X servers in the past, on both Mac Pro hardware and both PowerPC and Xeon based XServe models.

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Re:Simple Answer by geekmux · 2017-02-15 07:37 · Score: 1

But they make some damn fine dongles.
...says Courage, the Cowardly Slave to Wall Street.
Re:I haven't seen anything new in years... by MachineShedFred · 2017-02-15 07:53 · Score: 2

You do know that the memory limit is a function of the chipset right? The chipset that Intel makes? And that is probably exactly one of the reasons for the quote in the fucking summary? That they're spending more on silicon design because their suppliers are fucking around and not delivering the stuff they need?
TL;DR: You just fucking agreed with the article, even though you were trying to be snide.

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Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Re:Bullshit by DontBeAMoran · 2017-02-15 07:53 · Score: 1

Don't worry, you'll soon see an updated and ARM-powered Mac mini. It's even going to be quad-core!

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Re:making thinner and more apple only service take by farble1670 · 2017-02-15 08:00 · Score: 1

Apple needs to have an system for pro work. They where the platform for media pros in the past.
Why? "Pro" is a niche market and not a money maker.
Re: making thinner and more apple only service tak by farble1670 · 2017-02-15 09:00 · Score: 1

And that's why you care about pros. Because they drag in non-pros with them.
Sort of like how iPads started out as the platform for pros, then become popular w/ the masses ... oh wait.
That theory's great, as long as you look at only one of Apple's successful products. But I'm guessing you are going to tell me that the entirety of Apple's hundred billion dollar success is down to developers choosing OSX.
Re: Simple Answer by Cmdln+Daco · 2017-02-15 09:19 · Score: 1

They tweak the ARM design. Lots of companies tweak their own designs.
Re: making thinner and more apple only service tak by Cmdln+Daco · 2017-02-15 09:45 · Score: 1

The entirety of Apples hundred billion dollar success is down to producing gadgets for consumers. And, as you seem to insist, upon abandoning the 'Pro' market. Even though Apple forces 'pros' to use their platform to create content for their gadgets.
Now, when Apple chooses to open up and allow their iOS development tools to run on Linux or Windows machines, it won't be a problem. As it is, they're sorta shooting themselves in the foot as far as developer support.
Re:Bullshit by Cmdln+Daco · 2017-02-15 09:47 · Score: 1

And it will run anything you can find in the App Store.
Whee! Does it have Angry Birds?!?
Re: Simple Answer by gravewax · 2017-02-15 10:37 · Score: 1

No they don't. They take an existing design supplied by ARM and make some modifications to it, they do not design their own.
Re: Simple Answer by larkost · 2017-02-15 10:48 · Score: 2

"tweak" is a bit of an understatement. They are on their 5th shipping version of modified ISAs (Swift, Cyclone, Typhoon, Twister, and now Hurricane), and the included PowerVR GPU has been increasingly modified from the base technology from Imagination Technology. Where most "tweaking" is in how many cores or what fixed-function units are included, Apple has been playing with the core instruction set to make them more performant (both from power and speed perspectives). This has been how Apple has been at least a year ahead in meaningful performance for at least 4 years now (multi-thread performance is not usually meaningful on a phone), despite having a lower base clock speed than their competitors (thus getting very nice battery savings out of it).
What this article is talking about is that Apple is spending increasing amounts of money directly in R&D, rather than farming it out to their suppliers (which does not count in R&D).
Re: Simple Answer by UnknowingFool · 2017-02-15 12:13 · Score: 1

They tweak the ARM design.
If by tweak, they design their own cores rather use the stock ARM cores, yes.

Lots of companies tweak their own designs.

If by "lots" you mean 7 companies have licenses to design their own 64-bit ARM cores with 7 companies having rights to design 32-bit cores.

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Re: Simple Answer by UnknowingFool · 2017-02-15 12:18 · Score: 1

No they don't. They take an existing design supplied by ARM and make some modifications to it, they do not design their own.
Well that's not factually true. An Apple Ax processor is not an existing design by ARM; they are wholy designed Apple chips.

NVIDIA and Samsung, up to this point, have gone the processor license route. They take ARM designed cores (e.g. Cortex A9, Cortex A15, Cortex A7) and integrate them into custom SoCs. . .With the A6 SoC however, Apple joined the ranks of Qualcomm with leveraging an ARM architecture license. At the heart of the A6 were a pair of Apple designed CPU cores that implemented the ARMv7-A ISA. I came to know these cores by their leaked codename: Swift.
You're just dead wrong.

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Re: Simple Answer by Chrontius · 2017-02-15 23:10 · Score: 1

You know Apple spun off Arm after designing the architecture for the Newton MessagePad, right?
Because we got nothin'. And... by poofmeisterp · 2017-02-16 06:27 · Score: 1

...if you can only release a new "version" of i* devices every year, there isn't enough money coming in anymore. Solution, release the iPhone 8 in December, and the iPhone 9 in February, followed by the iPhone 10 in March to fix all of the annoying but awesome bugs and glitches in version 9.
Wait a minute...
Re: making thinner and more apple only service tak by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 21:21 · Score: 1

The entirety of Apples hundred billion dollar success is down to producing gadgets for consumers. And, as you seem to insist, upon abandoning the 'Pro' market. Even though Apple forces 'pros' to use their platform to create content for their gadgets.
Now, when Apple chooses to open up and allow their iOS development tools to run on Linux or Windows machines, it won't be a problem. As it is, they're sorta shooting themselves in the foot as far as developer support.
Blahfoosle. The MacBook Pro, despite all the poopooing here by people who'd never buy an Apple anyway, is a huge success. In the "Pro" market

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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Re:making thinner and more apple only service take by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 21:28 · Score: 1

Apple is an appliance company now
Now? The Apple I was an appliance - at least compared to the kits other vendors sold. Which was the whole reason for its success.
And stop pretending that "Pros" don't want appliances - even more than other people they want to work with their tools, not work on them.

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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Re:I haven't seen anything new in years... by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 23:52 · Score: 1

Intel provide chipsets with larger memory

Sure. And the notebooks that use them have much lower battery running times.

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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Re: Simple Answer by Plumpaquatsch · 2017-02-16 23:53 · Score: 2

They tweak the ARM design. Lots of companies tweak their own designs.
Having a working 64 bit ARM chip 2 years before anybody else is "tweaking designs"?
Delusional much?

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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Re: Simple Answer by UnknowingFool · 2017-02-17 02:44 · Score: 1

so you seem to have COMPLETELY FUCKING MISREAD what you linked. the OP said they take an existing design/architecture (which they do) and then modify it to create their core.
This is what the OP said:

No they don't. They take an existing design supplied by ARM and make some modifications to it, they do not design their own.
Nowhere did the OP say anything about "architecture". He also said that they "do not design their own." Both are clearly misrepresentations of what Apple does.

no they don't just take a core, but neither do they design one from scratch, they license the architecture from ARM.
And neither does any ARM licensee according to you. Qualcomm doesn't. Apple doesn't. According to you neither designs chips. Both just happen to have hundreds of chip designers who do absolutely nothing all day long.

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