Yup. The original article is gone, however there is the key excerpt in an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532257
Apple, unlike a lot, if not all large companies (who are run by MBA beancounter morons), holds insanely large amounts of cash. That is how they can go and buy up entire markets of vendors - CNC mills, TSMC's entire production capacity for a year or two, specialized drills, god knows what else.
They effectively price out all potential competitors at once for years at a time. Even if Microsoft or Samsung would want to compete with Apple and make their own full aluminium cases, LED microdots or whatever - they could not because Apple bought exclusivity rights to the machines necessary.
Of course, there's nothing stopping Microsoft or Samsung to do the same in theory... the problem these companies have is that building the war chest necessary would drag down their stonk price way too much.
For those like me who wanted to hunt down the linkrotted article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108182313/http://atomicdeli...
Some of the other big tech companies have or are able to have just as much, if not more cash, than Apple:
https://www.capitaladvisors.com/research/war-chest-exploring...
They just don’t want to bet they can deploy it successfully in the hardware market to compete with Apple, so they focus on other things (cloud services, ads, media, etc).
Google is not a hardware company (outside of the Pixel lineup where they just take some white-label ODM design).
Microsoft has a bit more hardware sales exposure from its consoles, but not for PCs. They don't have a need for revolutionary "it looks cool" stuff that Apple has.
Amazon, same thing. They brand their own products as the cheap baseline, again no need.
And Meta, all they do is VR stuff. And they did invest(ed?) tons of money into that.
The point is they have enough cash to make an attempt to be whatever company they want. Apple chose to delve into hardware, the others chose not to, not because they don’t have the cash.