That's not really an Apple tax though, that's a cost of doing business tax. It's not like Intel and AMD and everyone else aren't effectively doing the same exact thing.
Intel and AMD __literally__ sell those broken chips to the open marketplace, recouping at least some of the costs (or possibly getting a profit from them).
Apple probably does the same strategy PS3 did: create a 1-PPE + 8-SPE chip, but sell it as a 1-PPE + 7-SPE chip (assume one breaks). This increases yields, and it means that all 7-SPE + 8-SPE chips can be sold.
6-SPE-chips (and below) are thrown away, which is a small minority. Especially as the process matures and reliability of manufacturing increases over time.
I can confirm that 5000 desktop ryzen series has issues with turbo boost, basically if you disable turbo and stay on base clock then everthing is fine, but with turbo (CPB) enabled you get crashes and BSOD. I had this problem at work at my new workstation with ryzen 5900x. We RMAed it and new cpu works fine. From what i read it's pretty common problem, but it's strange that no on talks about it.
I think yes, but if you buy cpu, you look at advertised speeds and you expect get them in your machine. From what i researched, to achive advertised clock frequencies you need to increase voltage to make it more stable. Some people reported silicon degradation after increasing voltages (it worked fine for week and then problems returned).
I am very interested in AMD's latest lineup (and bought a 5500U laptop that performs super well so far) but I am aware that on the PC front things can be a bit rockier and not always stable so such comments and articles help a lot.
Apple sells a 7 core and 8 core version of their M1 chips. Maybe Intel and AMD ship CPUs with even more cores disabled but it's not like Apple doesn't do this at all.
