FWIW the Zeiss relationship is perfectly symbiotic, in that there’s an exclusivity deal and neither company can do without the other. For all intents and purpos

FWIW the Zeiss relationship is perfectly symbiotic, in that there’s an exclusivity deal and neither company can do without the other. For all intents and purposes you can regard ASML and (the litho department of) Zeiss as a single company. But the ASML machines are substantially more than just some purchased parts put together. There’s a lot of unique engineering in bits that you can’t easily point at as a “part”, such as the entire metrology software - that’s the bit that measures how badly positioned and how crooked the wafer is and adjusts the laser and all stage positioning etc accordingly. You can’t buy stuff like that off the shelf, it’s all developed in-house. And they have a whole bunch of things like that, which are like part physics, part math, part mechanics, part software and part choosing/speccing (and sometimes designing) the exact right parts. Canon’s new effort looks promising indeed btw, would be great if ASML gets some serious competition one day.