There was already a fire under their butt before Apple. Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing against each other. And that competition yielded architectures that are at least on par and very probably better than what Apple can do.
They can design better chips. They just don't have as much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already did before with, for example, the first generation of small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s that were just as good, had to wait for years to access the parts.
But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning for this better than they did, but you can fault these companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to supply chain strategists too.
You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as much money as possible and were trying as hard as they could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple. There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority of Apple processors aren't even being sold on performance.
Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that selling processors is very competitive. There will never be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple unless iPhone sales nosedive.
Can you give some examples? And a time frame in which AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia can use the same tech as Apple?
Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do not like the reality of capitalism. This is like complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when Germany won it fair and square under international law. Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING, wait till you see what companies do when they decide they don't want to play by the rules!
Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind, and are now working harder than they were before to design something better. Just because capitalism in the long term usually gets competitors to converge does not mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that had been flatlining, so there is more competition now than there was before.