That's not relevant. Apple isn't going to be manufacturing its own chips, it doesn't do that currently. What the person was talking about was the same thing it does for the iPhone chips, which is design them and then get TSMC to fabricate them.

$17 billion is peanuts for Apple. However, Apple uses TSMC for fabrication and they are already at 7nm. No need to own fabs. AMD doesn't own fabs either. The Apple designed A12X Bionic processor contains 10 billion transistors and is already competitive with desktop processors from AMD and Intel. Do you think it would be that difficult for Apple to design a desktop or laptop version? They have more than enough money to hire all of the smartest engineers on the planet. The problem would be backwards compatibility, like the transition from PPC to x86 in 2005.