Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era

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As we ponder what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs, I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a veteran Silicon Valley CEO who knew Jobs. This was just after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple. We got to talking about why Apple is so well-positioned in the post-PC era, and this executive zeroed in on something you don't hear too often. "Steve Jobs told me he has 1,000 engineers working on chips," he said. "Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything."Not only are Apple's processors extremely power efficient, but Apple is also removing the hard drives from its products and replacing them with flash memory chips. It's not just iPhones and iPads, the MacBook Air's memory is also flash. All of Apple's products are moving in this direction. When you combine these two fundamental changes at the silicon level, "form factor no longer becomes an issue," explained the Silicon Valley CEO. ]]>