> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? TSMC would have

> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer. Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower. Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?