This is why Apple still tries to own their entire supply chain, to a point where their suppliers don&#x27;t have excess capacity to sell to others (or legally can&#x27;t).  It continues to protect their scale.<p>Amazon Web Services is in a very similar boat -- it would be hard for others to replicate their scale.<p>Ironically in the AWS case, it is their selling of such scale that enables a whole lot of other companies to buy scale (in this case infrastructure) and eliminate that advantage from their competitors.