[gumby]

Not an Apple fanboy but I don’t this is completely correct. As a huge buyer of semiconductors they can, when they want to, exert a lot of pressure on suppliers. Famously they did this with Gorilla glass; they have done so with Intel and qcomm. Sometimes not so successfully (all the expense on the “liquid metal” company, for example).

It’s not all sheer pressure; they do a lot of collaborative design. After all they have one of the best semiconductor design teams (both digital and analog) around. And they are on standards bodies; they allegedly (some non-Apple people told me) contributed contributed significantly to USB-C.

I emphasized completely because in the modern ecosystem it’s broadly true (RAM, displays etc)

[2muchcoffeeman]

Apple’s supply chains and how they can apply pressure is massively underrated.

People still have this idea that “so and so actually invented it”. Or “Apple just combined X and Y”.

But they fail to see how truck loads of money and a customer willing to pay for something and making large pre-payments can change the trajectory of a company. Or even has impact on other players.