It's one level of abstraction above the transistor level; in other words gates and sets of gates. Designing at the raw transistor level is tedious, time-consumi

It's one level of abstraction above the transistor level; in other words gates and sets of gates. Designing at the raw transistor level is tedious, time-consuming, and requires specialized knowledge of low-level electrical and physics characteristics. When you design with standard cells, you only have to think about the logic functionality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell The parent's question is about whether Apple really did do some of the designing at the transistor level by designing their own cells, rather than using a standard library. This could give them an edge that ordinary users of the standard library wouldn't have.