Apple did this with the ipod and later ipod mini too, full exclusivity for small drives in deals (covering music players only) to monopolize the segment, eventually across multiple additional drive manufacturers and technologies after the mini to keep it full monopoly. Everyone else was stuck for years with laptop drives that could never be pocketable.

I'm not sure if node exclusivity was why Apple has the first true wireless earbuds, there was one competitor first with some giant ones so I suspect so, but lots of competitors followed fast (other foundry's nodes were more competitive then). Anyone know the history on that and what nm chips were used by them and earliest competitors?

And Apple was far from dominant in the computer market then and were small fry compared to the other computer companies with respect to its revenue.

Apple was just smarter and convince consumers to buy its products at a premium - just like with iPhones.

> convince consumers to buy its products

Consumers couldn't buy products with a pocketable harddrive: Apple had exclusivity agreements with all manufacturers of them to completely monopolize their use for music players.

The story goes that IBM (?) shopped the hard drive around and no one was interested except for Apple. It’s still the lack of vision by other manufacturers.

Also remember that the iPod wasn’t an immediate hit and it only sold 1 million in total in its first two years. It wasn’t until two years later when it was made available on Windows.

Apple did the same with Flash storage before the iPod Nano came out. Any of its larger competitors at the time could have had the vision to see that flash based players were the future and ensure they had the supply.

Apple was _years_ away from having the first wireless earbuds. I had The Bragi headphones (not Headphones) like 3 years before the AirPods got even announced. With basically all features sans handover but with an internal MP3 player and waterproof. Those were amazing but also somewhat clunky. But they were definitively long before Apple entered that market

Okay, let's take this same logic and move it up one layer of abstraction.

There are multiple fabricators (supply) and a small pool of chip manufacturers (demand).

As a chip manufacturer, I cannot go out and buy competitive silicon. I can't even get last-gen silicon. The best you can get is an improved 7nm node from Samsung, but nobody wants to run their CPU on the blood and guts of Exynos chips. So, by definition, I'd say that Apple has monopolized the cutting-edge lithography business through leveraging a partner.

A chip manufacturer absolutely could. Apple runs higher margins so they are willing to spend what it costs to get the bleeding edge stuff. Their customers appreciate the bleeding edge stuff and are willing to spend more to get it.

It isn't like Samsung and AMD can't afford to jump on new nodes, they just won't be able to raise their prices enough for it to make sense to them.

They can't, Apple has a contract to get all current supply, TSMC can't sell anything to AMD even if AMD paid more than Apple since they don't have any more to sell. They will get more to sell in a few years, but today they don't, you would have to go and convince Apple to sell their supply to you.

AMD has every right and ability to offer TSMC money for slices of that exclusivity. We know this because Huawei split exclusivity with Apple for the first batches of N5 back in 2020. I imagine it cost them a lot of money.