Perhaps Apple would be better off hiring the best of the best from Intel and AMD and taking processor production entirely in-house?
They already do it for their iphones and ipads and that useless costly watch. From their entire revenue Macs are actually a small part, they make much much more on the phones and tablets. In part because they sell so much more of those and also because they can produce them for less than a quater of what they sell for. Huge profit margin, huge volume.
Macs may have a big profit margin compared to windows PCs but small (relatively) compared to ipad/iphone.
Actually producing inhouse like buying the fabs would be ridiculous. That is such a costly business which would make their company huge but not profitable. Apple is profitable because they let other companies produce their gadgets for cheap (in China, Taiwan, South Korea mostly) and than they add software and sell it with a huge markup (2-4 times the cost) under their name. If they bought up foxconn or TSMC, they'd just get the extra expenditure but little extra profit in their balance sheet.
The nice thing about software is that you have to write it once and get your return on investment and than it is all profit from there. That is why Microsoft and any big software company can be really profitable. Because software multiplies for free (almost: there is still support cost but almost). Foxconn, TSMC in short all companies that produce real goods need to carefully caluclate the cost and return of each single item they produce. They got variable costs.
Apple is essentially a software company just like Microsoft. They are like a Nestle who says how much milk and sugar and other poison go into a new candy stick but next tell another companie to make them to those specification and ship them out. If they actually would "produce" their product, they could never be as profitable as they appear to be in their US stocks.
