> It was sorta implicitly assumed that any business that builds better hardware than Apple would boot them out overnight
It's not "build better hardware" though, it's "continue to ship said hardware for X number of years". If someone buys out the entire fab capacity and then goes under next year, TSMC is left holding the bag
It's not that, either. Low-margin, high-volume contracts are the worst business you can take. It devalues TSMC's work and creates an unnatural downward force on the price of cutting-edge silicon. By ignoring Apple's demands they're creating natural competition that raises the value of their entire portfolio.
It really is about making better hardware. Apple would be out-bidding Nvidia right now, but only if the iPhone had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware. Alas, iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will agree.
> but only if the iPhone had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware... iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will agree
I'd argue this from almost the opposite direction - there is no value-add for Apple because high-end smartphones exceeded the performance requirements of their user-base generations ago.
Nvidia has a pretty much infinite performance sink here (at least as long as training new LLMs remains a priority for the industry as a whole). On the smartphone side, there just isn't the demand for drastic performance increases - and in practice, many of us would like power and cost reduction to be prioritised instead.
It's not "build better hardware" though, it's "continue to ship said hardware for X number of years". If someone buys out the entire fab capacity and then goes under next year, TSMC is left holding the bag