[stephencanon]

Apple is indirectly plowing billions of dollars into that research via their contracts with Intel and the foundries. If the margins on those contracts aren’t sufficient to provide for further research, that’s on the head of the supplier’s pricing teams, not Apple.

[cromwellian]

And if Walmart's employees and Chinese suppliers have their payments squeezed, it's not Walmart's fault? That ignores the pricing power that a large player has. Apple and Tim Cook, as has been noted in the media, are very good at negotiating down their suppliers.

But no matter how you slice it, these downstream suppliers are doing more with less. They have much smaller margins, fund more important R&D which benefits the entire ecosystem, which takes up a much larger percentage of their overall revenues.

The marginal utility of an extra dollar in Apple's cash reserves seems less useful or effective than the marginal utility of a dollar in say, TSMC's coffers.

[stephencanon]

Intel obviously has vastly more negotiating power than any of Walmart’s suppliers. This may or may not be true of other fabs, but even in that space there are only a few suppliers and the costs of switching fabs are enormous; that isn’t true when Walmart is searching for a supplier of plastic adirondack chairs.

[cromwellian]

Apple doesn't buy mobile chips from Intel, they buy them from Samsung.

[wmf]

You're basically arguing (repeatedly) that outsourcing (and thus the whole modern economy) won't work. It's provocative, but seriously citation needed.

[cromwellian]

I don't I've arguing outsourcing won't work, just that outsourcing can lead to malinvestment.

[antr]

True, and that r&d $ is hidden under capex and investment in associates. Real r&d expenditure can be tough to measure from the outside.