I mostly agree, and the compaction of value accrued at the lower layers of the stack are a real thing, but there are two wrinkles to the industry that I find in

I mostly agree, and the compaction of value accrued at the lower layers of the stack are a real thing, but there are two wrinkles to the industry that I find interesting. First, like advanced turbine engine technology semi development continues to get more expensive as it matures and that drives consolidation rather than proliferation. Second, for now the end of Moore's law for companies with high pricing leverage looks like a move from "more for less" to "more for more" where they use performance and vertical integration to create a moat around their part of the market. You can see this in Apple shipping chips that are multiples larger than previous laptop processors, or NVIDIA pushing performance up but jacking prices up a the same time. Intel is going to have a hard time putting a 400mm2 chip into a Dell laptop at pricing and margins everyone can live with. At the same time they're going to have a hard time making margin on Xeons and still being competitive in TCO terms with whatever the Annapurna team can cook up for AWS using ARM IP on TSMC. This is all a roundabout way of saying unlike say the early PC industry I don't think maturing is going to level the field or lower prices, actually the opposite.