Apple has used both Samsung and TSMC for its chips in the past. Until the A7 it was Samsung, A8 was TSMC, and the A9 was dual-sourced by both! Apple is used to switching between suppliers fairly often for a tech company; it's not that it's too hard for them to switch fab, it's that TSMC is the only competitive fab right now.

There are rumours that Intel might have won some business from them in 2 years. I could totally see Apple turning to Intel for the Mac chips, since they're much lower volume. I know it sounds crazy, we just got rid of Intel, but I'm talking using Intel as a fab, not going back to x86. Those are done.

Apple is the company that just over 10 years ago made a strategic move to remove Intel from their supply chain by purchasing a semiconductor firm and licensing ARM. Managing 'painful' transitions is a core competency of theirs.

Not all of Apple‘s chips need to be fabbed at the smallest size, those could certainly go elsewhere. I’m sure they already do.

Is there anyone who can match TSMC at this point for the top of the line M or A chips? Even if Intel was ready and Apple wanted to would they be able to supply even 10% of what Apple needs for the yearly iPhone supply?

I would imagine they could split their orders between different fabricators; they can put in orders for the most cutting edge chips for the latest Macs and iPhones at TSMC and go elsewhere for less cutting edge chips?

It's ridiculous that a trillion dollar company feels beholden to a supplier. With that kind of money, it should be trivial to switch. People forget Nvidia didn't even exist 35 years ago. It would probably take like 3 to 5 years to catch up with the benefit of hindsight and existing talent and tools?

And anyway consumers don't really need beefy devices nowadays. Running local LLM on a smartphone is a terrible idea due to battery life and no graphics card; AI is going to be running on servers for quite some time if not forever.

It's almost as if there is a constant war to suppress engineer wages... That's the only variable being affected here which could benefit from increased competition.

If tech sector is so anti-competitive, the government should just seize it and nationalize it. It's not capitalism when these megacorps put all this superficial pressure but end up making deals all the time. We need more competition, no deals! If they don't have competition, might as well have communism.

> And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now?

Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply...

Nvidia is famously a pain to work with. Apple vowed never to use their chips, Microsoft and Sony can't get them to make any GPU for their consoles.

The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo.

> EVGA Terminates Relationship With Nvidia, Leaves GPU Business

> According to Han, Nvidia has been difficult to work with for some time now. Like all other GPU board partners, EVGA is only told the price of new products when they're revealed to everyone on stage, making planning difficult when launches occur soon after. Nvidia also has tight control over the pricing of GPUs, limiting what partners can do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evga-terminates-relationsh...

If your customers are known to be antagonistic to business partners, the correct answer is to diversify them as much as you can, even at reasonable costs from anything else.

That means deprioritizing your largest customer.

As of today Intel is very around leading node

Apple is so notoriously ravenous for profit margin that they can’t not be that way.

Apple dealt exclusively with Chinese labor prices until they were directly threatened by the POTUS. You tell me.