The Tim Cook doctrine, in part:
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc..
But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics].
Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
See IBM, Solaris and hp big iron. Even car makers would source various parts from other smaller companies
That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.
We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion.
It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.