They mean Apple's advantage is in good part due to their anti-competitive practice of buying TSMC's entire 5nm production. Leaving none for others like AMD which had to compete on 7nm for the longest time. Same will happen for 3nm if nothing changes.

Whatever your opinion may be about Apple/AMD/Intel. Unfair competition is not good for consumers in the long run.

edit: instantly downvoted. As per tradition in Apple related posts on HN when faced with facts.

What's anti-competitive about that? Apple doesn't even make their own chips, they need outside vendor for that. AMD and Intel are free to offer TSMC even more money, if they want.

You think AMD's 200 billion market cap stands a chance against Apple's 2.3 trillion market cap?

Consumers only stand to lose in the long run. Including Apple consumers.

As far as I know TSMC is building a new factory in Arizona right now, and one more in Taiwan. That was largely financed by Apple's money, and is a huge win for consumers who will benefit from the most advanced chip manufacturing capabilities for the years to come.

> financed by Apple's money

> huge win for consumers

doubt

That buying however much of whatever from a single company can be read as "anti-competitive" reflects more on the market, which relies on a single company for its fundamentals, than the buyer.

To me it seems that the problem is not that Apple bought however much of whatever from TSMC, but rather that TSMC doesn't have competition at the moment. Hopefully that changes.

(I do think HN is a bit trigger-happy with downvotes lately. I don't often get downvoted, but sometimes people who reply to me with a different view do, and so they get grayed out and drop in the comments. I used to try to counter that, but my one vote doesn't work for very long, so I mostly gave up. But it's really annoying.)

Agree. Chip production is such an important aspect of economy these days. It baffles me that US still couldn't come up with a TSMC-like factory yet.

I get that it's really hard. Like rocket-science hard. But still.

Maybe Musk can start something in the sector.

The fact is, Intel is not using TSMC (yet) for their high-end CPUs that compete with Apple. Their stagnation has nothing to do with Apple monopolizing the fab's capacity. Since they [Intel] were on Macs before Apple Silicon, they are being used for direct comparisons.