Citing foreign technology media The Information reported that Apple’s chip division has experienced a serious talent drain, with engineers and executives leaving in search of better opportunities and an improved work environment. Johnny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technology, is worried about this.
Apple’s A-series SoCs continue to lead the smartphone market in terms of performance, but the performance upgrades between each generation have become smaller and smaller. This is certainly due to technical constraints on the one hand, and another important reason is the exodus of many executives and engineers from Apple’s chip department.
The A16 Bionic chip was designed with ray tracing capabilities early on, but was too power hungry to be used in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. That’s probably why there’s evidence that Apple’s latest top iPhone SoC uses a GPU architecture similar to the A15 Bionic.
And the talent drain outside of technology has become a big problem, with more and more chip engineers jumping ship, such as designer Gerard Williams III. He left in 2019 to found Nuvia, which was acquired by Qualcomm, which then launched Oryon.
In an effort to prevent more engineers from leaving the company, Apple has made internal presentations to try to convince its employees that a career at Apple is more rewarding and stable and that jumping ship to other startups carries significant risks to growth. Given that many industry experts and economic observers are predicting a severe economic downturn, many of these engineers may prefer to work at Apple.
The gap in performance between Apple’s A-series chips and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips is already narrowing, and The Information says Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has closed the gap, and if next year’s A17 Bionic continues to disappoint in performance, Qualcomm and MediaTek’s successor model, due out in late 2023, could outperform Apple.
