Not doing the final assembly yourself does not somehow disqualify you from being a hardware company. There is no company in the world that possesses the manufacturing prowesss of Apple, yet they all have access to the same final assembly shop (Foxconn, basically).

The component manufacture is outsourced too isn't it? It seems they have been setting up or buying some chip fabrication facilities, but does any current Apple product contain anything built in an Apple factory?

I don’t get it. Apple makes the best mobile processors in the world. They routinely introduce low volume manufacturing techniques to the iPhone, which they then scale to 100+ million units per year. How are they somehow not a hardware company?

They design processors, but they are manufactured in volume by Samsung or other outsourcing companies.

You have to design the hardware with the manufacturing process in mind. It's not like a re-compile.

I’m not saying that they actually manufacture the products. I’m saying they are a hardware company.