Wait, don’t new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I’m missing something, but shouldn’t Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?
My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it’s not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple’s RAM is making it specifically for them.
Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.
I see. Yeah, I think the problem is that they can’t insulate themselves from the overall production timeline constraints. Because even if their chips are unique, they don’t have their own private production lines. They only get a share of available production capacity.
And as I understand it. Buying out a memory production facility is something they are not interested in. They don’t want to be in that part of the supply chain. And getting in now, only for memory supply chain constraints to go back to “normal” in 2 years isn’t a strategy they want to take.
Apple would rather have a diverse supply chain, and have the ability to pit different vendors against each other.
Some of this is similar to why just building a new facility isn’t a solution in the near term either. Because by the time it’s online, the situation is likely to have passed. And then you are back in a commodity market that’s historically difficult to compete in.
Afaik they use the same type of memory as phones do, variants of LPDDRx. “Unified” does not denote a different type, it means that both the GPU and the CPU can use the same memory (similarly to integrated GPUs using the main system ram).
Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read somewhere that they were doing something special in terms of their specs but maybe that was wrong (or maybe they transitioned at some point to save money)
Wait, don’t new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I’m missing something, but shouldn’t Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?
Yes, you are missing something. You are assuming they get their memory from a different supplier than the rest of the industry.
For some reason lots of people assume this.
My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it’s not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple’s RAM is making it specifically for them.
Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.
I see. Yeah, I think the problem is that they can’t insulate themselves from the overall production timeline constraints. Because even if their chips are unique, they don’t have their own private production lines. They only get a share of available production capacity.
And as I understand it. Buying out a memory production facility is something they are not interested in. They don’t want to be in that part of the supply chain. And getting in now, only for memory supply chain constraints to go back to “normal” in 2 years isn’t a strategy they want to take.
Apple would rather have a diverse supply chain, and have the ability to pit different vendors against each other.
Some of this is similar to why just building a new facility isn’t a solution in the near term either. Because by the time it’s online, the situation is likely to have passed. And then you are back in a commodity market that’s historically difficult to compete in.
Afaik they use the same type of memory as phones do, variants of LPDDRx. “Unified” does not denote a different type, it means that both the GPU and the CPU can use the same memory (similarly to integrated GPUs using the main system ram).
Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read somewhere that they were doing something special in terms of their specs but maybe that was wrong (or maybe they transitioned at some point to save money)