Yeah and M2 was on N5P vs M1's N5, but it was still N5. M4 is still N3.

Apple often buys their entire capacity (of a process) for quite a while.

Apple pays TSMC for exclusivity on new processes for a period of time.

It's almost as if every part of the stack -- from the uArch that Apple designs down to the insane machinery from ASML, to the fully finished SoC delivered by TSMC -- is vitally important to creating a successful product.

But people like to assign credit solely to certain spaces if it suits their narrative (lately, Apple isn't actually all that special at designing their chips, it's all solely the process advantage)

Saying TSMC's success is due to their suppliers ignores the fact that all of their competitors failed to keep up despite having access to the same suppliers. TSMC couldn't do it without ASML, but Intel and Samsung failed to do it even with ASML.

In contrast, when Apple's CPU and GPU competitors get access to TSMC's new processes after Apple's exclusivity period expires, they achieve similar levels of performance (except for Qualcomm because they don't target the high end of CPU performance, but AMD does).