[baq]

OTOH you have Intel which never stopped R&D and they still have lots of trouble catching up; arguably they've been trying for almost a decade now, five years if you're being generous. (And they buy tools from ASML! Which other posters explain will also be the case here.)

[mrtksn]

IMHO Intel's case is more nuanced, they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC. They are also a giant corporation who has to re-organise and restructure, therefore can't move as fast as a newcomer. Intel's case is a business case, more than an engineering case. Just as Nokia.

[baq]

The point still stands: they have the infrastructure, the experience, the logistics and the supply chain all secured and they're still at least a couple years behind if not more. It's extremely optimistic to say that it's going to be easier to start from scratch.

[mrtksn]

Could be, even engineering projects with well defined requirements and a mature tech sometimes fail.

[neuromanser]

Intel was receiving continuous beatings from AMD (Ryzen/Epyc) a few years before Apple came up with M1. 2016/2017 vs 2020. I don't think Apple and Intel are in much competition: Intel doesn't make laptops and lacked Apple's moat when they did, and Apple doesn't sell (amd64) server CPUs.

[nordsieck]

> they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC

I mean, that's true from a business perspective.

But they were trying very hard to make the next process node work. They went from a process upgrade every other design generation (the famous "tick-tock") to just tock-ing at 10nm because they couldn't get the next process generation working.

That was very much an engineering problem.