Partly home-made. Arm Holdings is British-based, but owned by Softbank Group (Japanese).

Arm makes a specification and standard (the ARM ISA).

Apple licenses that and develops their own chip, which is then manufactured by TSMC.

So I guess if Intel dies the US will still have a few good CPU design firms, but no manufacturing

Also note that Foxconn (China) assembles the iPhones

Eg https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-factory-foxconn...

ARM also produces core reference implementations. Most ARM licensees’ licenses only allow them to use those in a slightly modified form.

What you’re talking about is an ARM IP license, which allow the company to build their own implementation of the standard. Only a few companies have those and, of those, even fewer actually use it. Apple is one of those that does.

Apple still holds the license to the arm arches/designs they've used. There's enough customization applied that I'd guess Apple could function absent ARM, even if it's not the ideal scenario for them.

Plus Britain and Japan are both somewhere between close allies and client states. Nobody cares if we license from them.

Apple is also not a regular ARM licensee. They have a special deal because they were a very early investor when they wanted a chip to power the Newton back in the day.

No they don’t. I mean, that is why they have that license (though PA Semi, the company they absorbed that develops their cores, also brought one along with them); but it’s not a special or unique license. Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, etc all have the same license.

Apple is near unique only in that they’ve pretty much never used reference implementations (since the PA Semi acquisition, at least) from ARM and stick to their pure bespoke microarchitectures. But they’re not the only company that could.

Japan is our ally.

Not much longer if we continue as we do.

We still have allies?

More importantly, we militarily occupy Japan.

We won’t have any allies left at the end of next year besides maybe Russia and Israel.