[pipio21]

Well, it is.

Most of this money is stored on things like multi billion factories manufacturing exclusively for Apple. For my company we went to some of them, and you get the impression of being on a huge manufacturing Catedral. Apple has a scale nobody in the world has, and I am used to see lots of factories, from cars' to refrigerators's manufacturing places.

If this money figures as cash it must be only for fiscal or "not telling your competitors how you do things" reasons, but this scale exerts an enormous pressure over suppliers.

[krzyk]

Really nobody has the scale that Apple has? Do they make ships like Samsung?

Where does Apple make cars?

[valuearb]

There was an article that claimed Apple bought so many aluminum milling machines at one point that it was almost impossible for competitors to get their own to make aluminum cases in any volumes. That's years ago and possibly apocryphal, but Apple does have some some big economies of scale in certain key points of manufacturing their products. They tried to do same in Sapphire but that one didn't work out.