The PC market is hardly a "tiny niche." Comments like that undermine your credibility.But all those architectures competed for the same PC market, which is now nothing but a tiny niche in the margins of the giant smartphone chip market.
I was referring to overall R&D spending, not manufacturing. No argument that Apple and TSMC have spent a lot of money building factories.Well, of course they do! TSMC became the largest chip maker with over >50% global market share, because their biggest customer, Apple (buying up 25% of the whole production) pushed them to build more and more factories with ever smaller process nodes. That's where the iPhone performance comes from. AMD is only able to order 4nm chips from TSMC, because the A16 Bionic paid for the factory.
I'm so tired of the stupid "they make the most profits" fanboy argument. What does that have to do with anything? Despite them "making the most profits", there are plenty of other companies out there developing and selling tech, doing tons of R&D, etc., and they seem to be doing okay.I'll give you a sound 25 year guarantee with an 80% chance on 50+ years and longer. There's only one company (other than Apple) left that makes any profits in the smartphone market. Which means there is already an Apple monopoly on computing. They may not make the most phones, but they make all the profit in by far the largest electronics market ever. And whoever wants to take the chip crown has to compete without money in the most money driven high-tech industry known to mankind.
Your argument is just hyperbolic fanboy nonsense. Like I said, look at the history of the tech industry and chip architectures. Apple has switched architectures multiple times because things hit a wall. Assuming that Apple will always be the leader because they've had a good ten year run is no different than the people who said Intel could never be beaten or Microsoft would control the computing world forever. I'm sure they found plenty of pointless graphs to post too.