You're missing that the customers aren't all buying the same thing. Apple is willing to make the investment/commitment and take the pain of shipping a product o

You're missing that the customers aren't all buying the same thing. Apple is willing to make the investment/commitment and take the pain of shipping a product on a brand new node, and the tooling will last longer than Apple needs it for. That rolls from phones up (eventually) to big pro chips as yields etc improve, but then volume tapers off after a few years as most products move to newer chips on the next process. Apple needs a lot of capacity up front (iPhone launch) so they make the deals so TSMC can scale up. Later smaller players like AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, etc can use the proven nodes with less risk. 16nm/12nm is still perfectly good for lots of things. TSMC keeps the fabs busy for a long time, Apple gets the volume of parts they need at a good price. Apple doesn't directly compete with the other major semis so it doesn't really matter that they always have access to better manufacturing. It's all fine.