Charitably, they design their own main processors, their phones, their OS's, and many apps. From a hardware perspective, they are definitely less vertically integrated than Samsung, but they have vertical integration in the SOC/firmware/software/apps chain. It's not clear whether that actually drops their costs much, though, which was the original point of the comparison.
> Apple Inc. is one of the best-known companies for perfecting the art of vertical integration. The company manufactures its custom A-series chips for its iPhones and iPads. It also manufactures its custom touch ID fingerprint sensor. Apple opened up a laboratory in Taiwan for developing LCD and OLED screen technologies in 2015. It also paid $18.2 million for a 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in North San Jose in 2015. These investments allow Apple to move along the supply chain in a backward integration, giving it flexibility and freedom in its manufacturing capabilities.
Their build costs are always going to be lower. Outsourcing also hampers the innovation they could do since they're buying components on a market.
Also I think they had issues getting into selling markets.
I remember that they had to disable the fingerprint reader on their phones in America, patent issues perhaps?