What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?
> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.
Apple is not even in contention over the same stuff. Nothing open sourced can fund the development process of a 5nm IC, as the tooling alone would be tens of millions if not more. The total cost of an IC would be in the hundreds of millions (making something of the M1 class is billions).
Open source is lower quality unless there is a commercial sponsor. This is almost universally true for software and hardware. This is because people, naturally, have less resources to invest in something with zero to no financial return.