TSMC

Nikkei's question is whether China can clone the world's most complex machine. Beijing's Big Fund Phase 3 put $48 billion behind the effort, yet China's own SMEE lithography tools still can't reliably hit even mid-range nodes, and one customer said a machine "still doesn't work properly" a year after delivery. A BofA analyst's timeline: 5, 10, or 15 years, and "highly unlikely" to match ASML.

The HN thread mostly answered "of course they can", then split on the real bottleneck. The harder counter wasn't about machines at all: ASML's moat is the partnership web (Zeiss, IMEC, the US Department of Energy), and the West is the side projected to be short 100,000 chip-talent workers.

Apple plans a base M6 for entry Macs this year but is dropping the Pro, Max, and Ultra tiers of that generation — a first — to launch M7 Pro, Max, and Ultra instead, per Gurman. The high-end variants land as late as 2027 and 2028.

The catch an investor flagged: the base M7 targets 240GB/s of memory bandwidth. An Nvidia RTX 6000 already does roughly 1,600. The whole 'AI Mac' pitch rides on whether a future Ultra closes that gap for local inference.

The part targets inference, not training, so Nvidia keeps the training moat while OpenAI chases the recurring per-token cost. The pitch leans on one phrase: development "accelerated by OpenAI's models".

On Hacker News a chip engineer called the nine-month timeline impossible and guessed it is a relabeled Broadcom design with little real OpenAI contribution.