re: “What part of my owning and operating a cross platform computer support business for 40 years “
So, this is what accounts for your obtuseness and lack of knowing what goes on in the REST of the world. All this makes a whole lot more sense now. You don’t have widespread experience upon which to make a knowledgeable judgement.
As to points about “security” and the like, revere engineering by knowledgeable folk (those with access to JTAG, chip removal and disassembly) and other in-plant tools used for development renders some of that moot; I have not looked into what hackers are able to do to the iPhones these days.
I think you are still unaware of a LOT of what used to be standard practice with regard to consumer gear ‘back in the day’; buying specialty ICs from Apple doesn’t compromise the security either, because, those with interest in that area have access to **whole phones** which can be reverse engineered.
I don’t think you know the design side of things either; that’s where I’ve spend some of my time in industry, the last stint with Cisco and the development of new infrastructure equipment.
I have looked into it, extensively, my dismissive FRiend, and am quite expert on those fields you only think you know. My knowledge is quite broad and just having access to the whole device to “reverse” engineer it does them little good on modern SoC ICs these days. They also have to reverse engineer the code inside those locked multilayer chips. It ain’t as easy as you think or the Chinese would have been turning out knock off iPhones long ago. . . And no one has cracked the Secure Enclave yet, now going on five years.
Do you think it would be easy to reverse engineer an Apple A12X Bionic 7nm SoC with its 7 billion transistors just because you have access to one of the Apple devices with one installed and you’re a whiz at desoldering components from itty-bitty circuit boards? Do you even know how many multiple layers of circuits there are in it? The A10 had six.