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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

PS: I had one key moment in my career when I was at Google and a speaker mentioned the unit “NBU”

… PS: I had one key moment in my career when I was at Google and a speaker mentioned the unit “NBU”. It stands for next billion units. This is ten years ago and started my mental journey into large scale manufacturing and production including all the processes included. The fascination never left. It was a mind bender for me and totally get why people miss everything that large. At Google it was just a milestone expected to be hit - not one time but as the word next indicates multiple times. Mind blowing and eye opening to me ever since. Fantastic inspiration thinking about software, development and marketing.

Original discussionApple Is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage478 source comments · at import
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RO

This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts. I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking abo…

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ZV

How did you get into large scale manufacturing and production? Was it a career switch? Downsides? It too fascinates me. Any book recommendations?

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KE

Did google ever ship a billion units of any hardware? Can't think of anything substantial. Apple hit 3 billion iphones in mid 2025.

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