> The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, Which applies equally to Apple devices, if you're watching the sales. They followed the same trend of m

> The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, Which applies equally to Apple devices, if you're watching the sales. They followed the same trend of moving units during COVID and then relaxed upgrades afterwards. > if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition Do you know how ARM works? Or even chip production, for that matter? For one, foundries don't choose to make ARM chips, their customers do. A foundry can and will make the same amount of money as their competition investing away from ARM, as Nvidia has shown on TSMC 4nm. Making "as much money as the competition" only works if you don't have to pay ARM license fees, and Apple is just about the only company in the world with that level of agreement with Softbank. Everyone else is avoiding ARM like the plague for it's dogshit licensing terms and 2-year OEM support contracts. The actual "deal" you get from buying ARM is the choice between their godawful off-the-shelf cores or the ISA itself. There are vanishingly few companies that want either of those things, least of all with ARM Ltd as the middleman. For two, ARM's "golden era" is behind us now. If you've worked in electronics you're probably well familiar with the story of the ESP-32, a wildly successful microcontroller that hasn't been "officially licensed" ARM in years. The rare few ARM chips that are profitable don't respect the ISA license they're supposed to pay for, leaving only Apple and Nvidia as legitimate customers. Of them, Nvidia has been shipping RISC-V in place of ARM for over a decade and Apple would too if they had to pay for the IP. ARM is desperate to find customers that don't want to take advantage of them, but cannot find a single one.