They're certainly the leading player in terms of cutting edge capabilities, but there are plenty of companies working on fabs. It wasn't long ago that Intel used to have the leading fab and simply got complacent/slow opening the door for TSMC to surpass them.

In the macro sense there seems to be more widespread awareness and money going towards fab competition than ever before. I suspect we'll trend closer to performance parity between competitors in the coming years.

Nobody will be able to compete against Apple CPUs while they're 1 process node ahead of competitors though.

I recently moved to Linux from MacOS, but probably will have to go back to Apple on the m4 for local LLM capabilities (high RAM specs much cheaper than commercial GPUs). Too bad Asahi is still missing some pretty critical capabilities (microphone, USB-C monitor connection etc)