[mikechen233]

Apple's advantage is in the virtuous cycle of big demand and big market for their products. And now they have built up the talent, the process, to build different chips and chips that are very large. M1 is not a small chip, it's complexity is comparable if not more than intel or amd or Nvidia's chips. They also established a sustainable relationship with tsmc. I am sure tsmc have exclusive or volume contracts for apple to be the first adopter to their most dense node. Tsmc allocates a lot more of waffer capacity to apple than other designers. The marginal cost for apple to design and build a large version of m1 is pretty cheap.