apple design their own chips. they don’t make them. they have to join the production queue at tsmc or foxconn like everybody else. and when demand goes up the queue gets longer.
This is correct. Samsung operate a chip foundry. Apple does not. Interestingly, Samsung’s Exynos chips are only used, for the most part, outside Korea and the United States. Those regions get the superior Qualcomm silicon. Exynos has never been as good.
Apple chips are built by TSMC IIRC.
Apple and others use system-on-module (SoM) architecture, where discrete slabs of silicon are integrated together in a single package, which lets them use a less expensive process for their 64GB of RAM transistors versus the smaller/higher performing/much more expensive node that they’re etching the logic transistors with. But at the end of the day, every OEM is competing for time and space on the same handful of machines in the world that are capable of etching the silicon. Those machines are huge and hugely expensive and can’t be spun up on a whim, so even Apple ultimately has to pay more because the chip makers know that if they don’t they can find someone else who will as there’s no alternative.
They can afford to not raise them too, but then they’d be making less more money
they don’t make their own chips they architect them and have them made.
Greed.
