Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
This is not Taliban getting into semiconductors, this is Japan who is already into semiconductors but lost its edge in this particular field but its leading in some other fields. Therefore they already have a considerable know how on mirrors and laser that they will have to improve on. IMHO the catch up will be much quicker and much cheaper than what the Europeans and Americans spent on to explore the path leading to what we have today.
OTOH you have Intel which never stopped R&D and they still have lots of trouble catching up; arguably they've been trying for almost a decade now, five years if you're being generous. (And they buy tools from ASML! Which other posters explain will also be the case here.)
IMHO Intel's case is more nuanced, they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC. They are also a giant corporation who has to re-organise and restructure, therefore can't move as fast as a newcomer. Intel's case is a business case, more than an engineering case. Just as Nokia.
The point still stands: they have the infrastructure, the experience, the logistics and the supply chain all secured and they're still at least a couple years behind if not more. It's extremely optimistic to say that it's going to be easier to start from scratch.
Intel was receiving continuous beatings from AMD (Ryzen/Epyc) a few years before Apple came up with M1. 2016/2017 vs 2020. I don't think Apple and Intel are in much competition: Intel doesn't make laptops and lacked Apple's moat when they did, and Apple doesn't sell (amd64) server CPUs.
> they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC
I mean, that's true from a business perspective.
But they were trying very hard to make the next process node work. They went from a process upgrade every other design generation (the famous "tick-tock") to just tock-ing at 10nm because they couldn't get the next process generation working.
>Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
In many domains they do. Once the original creators are retiring or not involved, there are tons of tacit knowledge at every step of the way, from the high level abstract design to specific quirks of some manufacturing equipment, that's very hard to build back.
This is not Taliban getting into semiconductors, this is Japan who is already into semiconductors but lost its edge in this particular field but its leading in some other fields. Therefore they already have a considerable know how on mirrors and laser that they will have to improve on. IMHO the catch up will be much quicker and much cheaper than what the Europeans and Americans spent on to explore the path leading to what we have today.