I wrote an article on Apple Silicon, where I discussed the fact that one of the key differentiating features behind iPhone and iPad is Apple’s custom silicon.

The Secure Enclave, the many hardware accelerators for graphics and video encoding and decoding, on-device encryption hardware, the Neural Engine, all of these extra capabilities helps Apple make their their devices stand out from the competition, driving features, functionality, and once more, performance.

Every iPhone and iPad contains a Neural Engine capable of five teraflops of processing, and that functionality is being used in more and more places in the system: Photos and face/scene/object detection, on-device voice transcription, on-device language translation, Scribble handwriting recognition, and so on.

Adding the same type of capabilities to their notebooks and desktops will again help Apple leverage those features and help make those products stand out well ahead of the pack.

If you’re using the same exact parts as everyone else, then I might agree we could have a discussion about commodities. That’s one of the main reasons why Apple is making the Apple Silicon transition.

When a $500 “budget” phone outperforms the competition’s flagship phone, I think we may be able to see where Apple’s “innovation” pays off.