Design and fab startup are expensive - but once you start getting decent yields, the additional costs are silicon wafers and QA. I believe the biggest costs for a chip fab are startup costs - no matter what xPU vendors would like you to believe.

Competing computer makers may soon be demanding lower xPU prices from the above xPU manufacturers so they can more readily compete against these models. In fact, I suspect that Apple - once they recover their R&D costs - will be pushing the prices of these machines lower while still maintaining their margins - while competing computer makers will still have to pay Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and nVidea for their expensive xPUs, whereas Apple's cost goes down the more they manufacture. These new Apple Silicon models can compete up through the mid-high tier of computer purchases, and if as I expect Apple sells a ton of these many will be to your prime (most profitable) customers. Other CPU vendors and OEM computer makers take notice - your businesses are now on limited life support. Apple has yet to decide on an external memory interconnect and multichannel PCIe scheme, if they decide to move in that direction. The real powerhouses will probably come next year with the M1x (or whatever). They're still marketed at the same market segment, though they now have a vastly expanded compute power envelope. These are the machines you give to a teacher or a lawyer or an accountant - folks who need a decently performing machine who don't want to lug around a huge powerhouse machine (or pay for one for that matter). They have the same limitations as the machines they replace - 16 GB RAM and two Thunderbolt ports.

Most people are looking at these first Apple Silicon Macs wrong - these aren't Apple's powerhouse machines: they're simply the annual spec bump of the low end Apple computers with DCI-P3 displays, Wifi 6, and new the Apple Silicon M1 SoC. While the below Civilization VI scores are on slightly lower resolutions (1440 x 900 on Macs vs 1920 x 1080 on PCs), the M1 MacBook Air (37 fps) and MacBook Pro (38 fps) ran circles around the 16 fps rate from the ZenBook 13, and handily beat the XPS 13 as well. The MacBook Air has never been known as a gaming machine, but the M1 chip may change its reputation there as well. Again, though, this test isn't optimized for Apple Silicon - it's an Intel-based test running through Rosetta 2, so Apple's scores may improve when it's optimized. Oh, and on the PugetBench Photoshop test - which performs 21 different Photoshop tasks, three times per run - the M1 Air (653) and Pro (649) beat the XPS 13 (588). The Air's time is almost a third of the 27:10 the previous Intel MacBook Air needed, while both M1 scores are around half (or less) of the times posted by the XPS 13 and the ZenBook 13. The M1 MacBook Air and Pro win again on our Handbrake video transcoding test, converting a 4K film to 1080p at 9:15 and 7:44 respectively.

Macbook pro m1 illustrator