The flipside in terms of selling in large volumes to amortize fixed costs is simple: the iPad. Monumental volume tied to one single SKU of CPU. If they needed

The flipside in terms of selling in large volumes to amortize fixed costs is simple: the iPad. Monumental volume tied to one single SKU of CPU. If they needed to, Apple could afford to front someone the entire cost of building a leading-edge fab (or, I suppose, build one for themselves, except that I doubt they would want to operate a fab). So if Apple wanted to make some super advanced ARM chip available at a consumer price, they could probably change the colume aspect of the equation radically.