And that sucks for them at this point in time, but it’s just business, and business has risks. Apple does a lot to mitigate risks to their business, and if AMD really was outbid, then that just means AMD probably also tried to mitigate as much risk to their business as they could, but they clearly didn’t mitigate it enough.

At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.