"Yet we're pretending that they couldn't design for only one lithography and that's why they couldn't get their orders first?"
Don't manufacture arguments and then soundly beat them down. They didn't prioritize the new process so they ended up at the back of the line. They made a choice (to virtually no market detriment, and improving their financials in the process). As mentioned, both companies often run on older processes because power simply didn't matter, and wafer yield just mattered more. nvidia often has monster chips because...eh. If your GPU or giant AMD processor uses 300W, eh, that's life.
This may come as a shock to some, but despite all of the nonsensical rhetoric posted on HN (by Apple naysayers who have to dismiss anything Apple does with One-Simple-Trick nonsense that has zero association with reality -- I recall when it was the magical "big cache", as if Apple was sneaky having big caches, cheating the system), process improvements are not as big as they are held on here. They are of course a benefit, but a process improvement yields power or performance or density benefits (yup, even that last one is conditional on other factors), but the fiction spinners declare that no really it's everything all at once. It doesn't work like that. So they opted not to prioritize it.
Yet read your other posts and not only would AMD and nvidia be world's better than Apple in every dimension (see above about the Apple naysayers and their ignorance), but also they couldn't afford to because I guess the $1500 GPUs and $5000 CPUs just can't afford the big bucks Apple can spend making a smartphone CPU (where apparently they're outbidding everyone on every component, yet also simultaneously having by far the highest profit margin in the industry...my normal brain cannot even comprehend the lengths of how ludicrous and contradictory this nonsense is). Oh, and HiSilicon making chips for discount, very low end smartphones also apparently has more money to blow on this.
"The issue is that we're in a market where Apple can afford to pay suppliers so much that other companies literally cannot afford to compete"
So the bill of materials for Apple products must be enormous, right? Oh wait, they're absolutely rolling in profit, with some of the highest profit margins in the business. No, it isn't that whatsoever. Absolutely nothing indicates that Apple used its "warchest", or that it is paying a penny more than anyone else. Can you point out a single authoritative source claiming that? Because actual economics say no, that's utter nonsense.
But sure, Apple is "slowing down technological advancement" in the same post where you declare that they're paying more for that technological advancement. The desperate lengths this rhetoric has to go, with laughable self-contradiction, is embarrassing.