[robocat]

> Everyone has access to the same vendor.

Unlikely.

Who can pay as much as Apple - likely in advance and for exclusivity.

My guess is that Apple is financing some of the equipment (TSMC is a high capital business, and Apple has overseas retained profits it doesn't want to repatriate) and there will be contracts for the exclusive use of the new equipment nodes. With everything designed for taxation efficiency.

[acdha]

AMD, Intel, Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm aren’t as big as Apple (a recent development which still sounds odd to say) but they’re all big enough to get first class support from TSMC even if several of them didn’t have the resources to compete directly.

Using the latest process certainly helps but look at the older ones as well - it’s not like the performance gap disappeared when competing AMD processors were launched on the TSMC 5nm process, but that really highlighted the different trade offs those teams make: Zen4 CPUs certainly dusted the Apple chips, but the ones which did were desktop / server designs using far more power, too, since that’s where the money is in the PC side.

[MBCook]

Right. Anyone can beat Apple if you’re willing to burn electricity. Intel still makes the absolute top chips the public can buy. There is no contest in GPUs, the discrete AMD/nVidia cards stomp on Apple for the same reason.

But for similar performance, like in the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pros, Intel was embarrassed. The M1s were so much faster and cooler than the Intel chips they replaced it was hilarious.

The Mac Pro is absolutely the weak spot. Apple doesn’t sell enough so it seems unlikely they will spend the money to try and keep up with Intel there. The first Apple Silicon Mac Pro is not what people wanted. And I don’t know if that machine will be coming.