[webaholic]

Apple pays a premium to TSMC to reserve the early runs on the next gen nodes. They can do this because they can charge their users a premium for Apple devices. I am not sure the rest of the players have that much pricing power or margins.

[MBCook]

Plus they can guarantee big volumes. Even if only the pros get the new chip this year as rumored that’s still a very large order to make.

Next year it’s likely all iPhones (plus possibly iPads) will also be on the new process.

It looks like Apple sells around 200 million iPhones a year, and the two pro models are somewhat more popular combined than the non-pros.

So even if we assume 2/3rds of Apple sales are older models, the pros would still need around 40 million chips on the new process in the first year.

For comparison it looks like AMD sells about 80 million chips a year, across all CPU models.

[kramerger]

Actually, both Apple and AMD have reduced their orders with TSMC due to expected drop in sales.

https://wccftech.com/tsmc-faces-order-cutback-from-major-5nm...

[smoldesu]

Nvidia does, which is why they bought out the 4nm node (and beat Apple in GPU compute by a country mile).

[monocasa]

Apple A16 is on N4 too.