I wasn’t aware Apple has a wafer fab. Learn something new every day....
Apple owns a fabless design company. . . they designed it. But Apple is reported to have purchased United Microelectronics Corporation, a chip fabrication company this summer, capable of producing the A7 processor in house.
The vast majority of companies designing and selling chips don’t own their own fab. TSMC in Taiwan, GloFo in the US, Singapore, and Germany, Samsung in the USA, and to a lesser extent IBM are where the chips are made, for a fee.
They don’t. Almost no one does any more. The capital investment necessary to set up a fab line is immense, and there’s enough fab capacity out there that there’s no point in trying to set one up.
Even a company as large as cisco doesn’t fab their own chips. They design, simulate, etc and then they send the design out to a fab house. In one case, we were looking at using IBM’s fab for a SOAC router chip.