That's a fair point, yield has to be included. I lumped yield in with the pessimistic 75% factor for area utilization of the wafer. I should have been more cl

That's a fair point, yield has to be included. I lumped yield in with the pessimistic 75% factor for area utilization of the wafer. I should have been more clear. The area loss for square die on a round wafer should be much less than 25% of the total wafer area. If you look at process tech cost trends, the $17K is also very pessimistic. I think a customer the size of Apple is probably getting a much better rate than that. Remember, they sell well over 200 million TSMC fabbed chips a year. Hard to know for sure of course, but I imagine these chips are ultimately costing Apple well under $40. We'll never know of course...