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Indeed, although most of the real work on the hardware side is done by TSMC on the processors, and Apple just does a good job wrapping that piece of silicon into a shiny glass and metal body. Apple's real superpower is getting people to spend money inside their ecosystem. They've essentially turned into a finance corporation pretending to be a tech company.


I'd strongly disagree.

Apple designs their own processors (now), specs/sources their components (e.g. screens), and then does all the integration engineering.

That's the bulk of device work.

Which isn't to say that semi manufacturing isn't hard, but is to say there's a lot of effort between a chip and a device.


Sure, that design work and firmware development is probably a miniscule part of their business in comparison to the scale of their App Store and other service revenues though. And Apple does no manufacturing at all, the screens come from Samsung and the phones are assembled by Foxconn.


TSMC builds the chips, according to Apple's designs. Foxconn assembles the phones, according to Apple's designs.

I don't think you realize how much work goes into building and cerifying a working, mass market device.




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