Longer term this shutting out of companies not on the leading edge will result in other changes. Components fabricated integral to the PCB being one such change.
I hadn't heard about this, and it sounds interesting. Do you have any references?
I get the impression looking at the electronics industry from the outside over decades, that techniques seem to be moving from "level to level".
That is, you now see single silicon chips made like entire clusters of computers, with on-board network connections between surprisingly independent cores and modules. It's almost like a bunch of silicon chips all within one monoilithic silicon circuit board, with no external wiring.
Then, several of these chips are in turn mounted on a physical board that is "just" another silicon wafer, possibly made on a very old node size, something still measured in microns. But nonetheless, it's a full silicon chip in its own right, with high-tech chips riding on top of it like circuit elements.
And then the motherboards seem to be miniaturising too. I remember when designers hesitated to use chips with much more than 20 pins because it would need to many traces that were too fine. Now? Thousands of pins are the norm for mainstream processors. Soon? Maybe tens of thousands, or even hundreds, and I wouldn't be surprised if circuit components start getting printed directly into the motherboards, like you said you saw.
I remember going into a library and picking up an old edition of Scientific American, from the 1960s I think. It had a full-page ad from Texas Instruments advertising their record-setting integration, because they could pack ten (10!) transistors into a single chip. They had an "actual size" picture in the ad, so you could see for yourself and count all ten transistors. The metal layer wires looked thicker than I've seen on some small PCBs these days, which should blow your mind...
What are these immense amounts of passives used for?
Imagine you sell widgets for $200 a pop. Widgets are hard to manufacture, production is limited. Someone else has 10k widgets that they want to sell for $75 per.
If you buy all the stock, people will be forced to buy yours, because of supply constraint.
200-75 = 125 is more income than if you price-matched and sold at 75.
Now why destroy them, and not just sell them back? Well, they're not necessarily identical to the widgets you make. Maybe they have the other brand's logo stamped on them. Maybe the datasheet doesn't quite match.
Either way, your customers might notice. If you just buy and burn, no one downstream of you sees anything, except for higher prices
Note also that the above sounds immoral enough to be illegal in a whole lot of countries, so I would advise you not do that, though I'm neither lawyer nor spiritual advisor.
E.g. if you can make 100k widgets for all of which you have customers at a dollar each, then in a supply shortage with limited alternatives you may find that if you credibly cut supply to 80k widgets, so that some customers will actually be left out, then they might be willing to pay two dollars per widget (so, 160k instead of 100k for that toy example), so you get more money for less goods.
Googling aroubd I see other stories of Apple buying all available capacity of 5nm manufacturing or glass or sapphire for smartwatch screens etc, here's one source for RAM tho (2009): https://appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/18/apple_buying_up_a...
In principle, it seems to me that this shouldn't be causing component shortages — on the contrary, it should reduce planning uncertainty for component manufacturers.
If Apple has a contract to buy 10% of a manufacturers capacitors. But then material shortages drops the manufacturers capacity in half. Apple's share is now 20% and anyone without a standing order is SOL.
I don't have insight into Apple ,justthis is how contracts work in general
Buying something in sufficient quantities that results in others not having it, but still selling out of it is not nefarious.