[adventured]

There is at least one aspect where they may be a serious competitive problem: their enormous size enables them to buy up a huge share of the world's most advanced chip supply from TSMC. Their scale and the profit that goes with it makes that possible. They can very effectively limit competition globally through that mechanism.

You're a smaller company with a hot new phone? You need a large supply of 3nm chips from TSMC to compete? You can't get them because Apple is buying them all.

And their leverage on TSMC (with TSMC eating the cost of defective supply), which is very remarkable unto itself, may also be a serious problem.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-savi...

[tonyedgecombe]

These arguments feel like we are complaining that the situation isn't fair because Apple is so well run compared to the competition.

[scarface_74]

You mean smaller companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Amazon who could have just as easily bid on capacity?

[astrange]

If TSMC wants to sell more people capacity they can simply build more capacity.