[cosmotic]

Apple doesn't make their own CPUs, they just design them (using ARM IP). It's TSMC that makes them. The bottleneck with RAM is the manufacturing side.

[sgt]

The designing of the chips and Apple Silicon is the hardest part by far. By design we mean the engineering.

Production is not trivial, but can be outsourced to several parties.

[cosmotic]

Those third parties are running at capacity and are certainly the source of the increased prices since the supply is outsized by the demand.

[selectodude]

They don’t use ARM IP. They have an architecture license. They basically created aarch64.