TSMC is estimated to have a 60% share of the global foundry market
Apple is currently the only smartphone manufacturer shipping a phone with a 3nm chipset
Why all of this matters
To put this in layman’s terms, the reason why this is so important is that as the process node numbers decline, transistor sizes get smaller. This means that more transistors can fit inside a chip making them more powerful and/or energy efficient.
A look at the last few years of Apple’s A-series application processors (AP) is a perfect illustration:
While the percentage increase in transistors varies from year to year, and it is getting harder to shrink the size of a transistor, you can see that in the example above, Apple was able to increase the number of transistors inside its A-series chipset by 123%. Put an iPhone 11 Pro Max side-by-side with an iPhone 15 Pro Max and the difference in speed can be felt immediately.
Even if Samsung has a head start at 2nm because of its early implementation of GAA, Apple has been TSMC’s largest customer for years and we wouldn’t expect to see the gang in Cupertino switch the supplier of what is possibly the most important component used to make an iPhone.