Having worked there under BK and Bobby it is very clear why. They didn't invest anything into engineering. Even today their comp is peanuts compared to any other company in the tech industry.

Bbbbbbut benchmarking………market survey……advanced analytics……some HR goober said that we are ‘competitive’.

They know it matters, they just don’t have the competence to do it since they promoted a bunch of toadies and charlatans into their technical leadership, and also outsourced a ton of technical work to “low cost geo” so managers can brag about cutting costs.

Why didn't AMD? Is the M2 that much better than Ryzen, for example?

It's not. 5nm Ryzen will finally give us the more apples to apples comparison. Unfortunately we're probably a ways out from 5nm Ryzen mobile chips.

Hmm, how did Apple get to 5nm first? Does the fact its ARM have anything to do with it?

They pay TSMC loads of money to have the first chips for each process node. They were first to 5nm, they'll be first to 3nm next year too. This is because they sell whole products rather than chips like Intel and AMD, so Apple's profit margins are astronomical compared to them, and so they can afford to pay TSMC so much.

Oh I didn't know that, thanks. So it's more that they bought out all of TSMC's product, rather than that they came up with an innovative new process.

Well, they bankrolled TSMC's R&D for N3 nm and N5, which allowed TSMC to increase capacity and get to new node ahead of competition.

Well, they also have some of the best silicon engineers in the Valley, and the world. It's not just TSMC, they only build what is designed.

Also their products include iPhones and iPads. Intel nor AMD are putting their chips into 10s of millions of phones, especially phones people will pay top dollar for, per quarter.

They bought out TSMC fab capacity by biddng significantly over AMD.