Apple probably pays a premium on the 200 million pieces they buy. Since no one else apart from Samsung is making signficant money from Android, it'd be somewhat hard to cover the loss. PC volumes are lower, a lot of them are low-end, and Intel uses their own fab for most of their CPUs.
>> Can't they just threaten to sell the space to someone else?
You mean TSMC threaten? The only other huge players willing to pay a premium for state of the art node like that are GPUs, and they just got the whole crypto mining rug pulled out from under them so they may not be interested in paying top dollar any more.
My guess would be AMD; they'd love to have server processors even farther ahead than what Intel is able to fab themselves and the large margins for server processors are able to absorb TSMC's asking price.
My thought is margin is low on apple but volume is high. They also are a good partner helping to push the process forward. AMD and NVIDIA are probably more profitable than apple for tsmc but volumes are much lower.
I also think the ability to improve tier prices as fast as they have is directly related to apple’s volumes.
