Comment by craigyk

The way I look at it, is that Apple is trying to have its way by shopping between Samsung, TSMC, and any others. Their leverage doing this comes from offering bulk purchases, or in the case of LCDs, helping to finance large capital expenditures. Their biggest worry right now is that Samsung's competition doesn't seem able to compete, at least at scale.

At the end of the day though, if push ever comes to shove, there isn't much they couldn't afford to buy outright, even their own fabs. I was holding out hope that they were trying to save 200B to build out their own wireless infrastructure, but they could conceivably buy control of Intel instead.