[kaibee]

This analysis misses kinda a major point. The nice thing about making mobile SOCs is that the yields are more forgiving. If you have 1000mm^2 of silicon that you're slicing into 10mm^2 dies, each defect (of which there will be many on early leading nodes), will only cost you a 10mm^2 chip, instead of a 50mm^2 chip. And because you're making them in volume, you get many many cycles to improve your process before you try to make bigger chips with it, ie: CPUs/GPUs. And because Apple wanted the increased performance/battery life, they reserved capacity from TSMC on these leading nodes in advance, helping to finance their development while providing a garunteed customer that was going to buy in volume. This gave TSMC a huuuge advantage over Intel that materialzied around ~2018.