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Comment by fearface | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a native speaker, but for me it sounds valid to call the company that produces the majority of Apple chips: Apple’s chipmaker.

It doesn’t exclude that they produce for other companies, but it concludes that Apple gets most of it’s chips from them. Right?

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I think the objection is about a functionalist perspective. Is it more accurate to call TSMC a chip manufacturer, or an Apple chip manufacturer?

If I happen to be the person who buy's the most Starbucks at my local cafe, does that make it my cafe? Is the core function of the cafe to make coffee or to make coffee for me?

Is the core function of TSMC to serve Apple's needs or to make chips? Do you see the difference?

If you were a famous person who only bought their coffee at that one place, and bought more coffee than (nearly) everyone else put together -- then yeah, I would definitely call that place "cjt's coffee place"

But the ambiguity is still there. If Gordon Ramsey loves a certain sushi restaurant and is the only one he eats at, calling it Gordon's sushi restaurant would be very confusing since it could realistically be either (or both) of the interpretations.

The same can be said for Apple, which prides itself for how vertically integrated they are

Continuing the restaurant metaphor, there is a big difference between Apple's and TSMC's relationship and a celebrity and a restaurant. The celebrity might tweak the menu a bit but it is the chef (and their cooks) which decides on how to cook it. Meanwhile, the Apple-TSMC relation is more integrated: in food analogy Apple also gets to decide what equipment they use, where to source their ingredients and shares some of their secret recipes.

Apple may be their biggest customer but at the end of the day they are still a customer. If TSMC wanted to, or had to, drop Apple as a customer they can. And they can only do this since TSMC isn't Apple's.

Does it have to be the person who buys the most?

“My company is having layoffs”. People would know that I don’t own my company.

Those aren't the same parts of speech though. The subject-object relationship is different.

Yes, and on an Apple news site that makes sense.

However, in a more general (not Apple-focused) context it might be more appropriate to start with what the company does (chip foundry/fab) and if needed then note their most important customers (Apple, AMD, NVidia).

If you're talking from the perspective of who make Apple's chips, yeah. This is an article about an investment Berkshire made though, and spent most of its time talking about his investment history with Apple and sort of...is structured in a way that says they view this investment as a doubling down on their Apple investment and not a investment that stands apart on its own terms. My issue with the phrase is less its use in a vacuum, and more the article as a whole in a way that is boiled down to how they only describe TSMC as Apple's chipmaker.

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