It feels much more like cartel behaviour, where all the players recognized blame can be redirected to "Ai demand" and "Sam Altman secret deal"
I'd buy one or two but I can't stick them in a Colo because they don't have LOM or dual power supplies but I've been seriously thinking about buying one and just keeping it at home and having my Colo servers talking to it for local deepseek.
Not a high priority though considering how cheap deepseek is.
You can clearly see this in the shot of the Mini mobo: CPU/GPU ASIC with 2 separate ram chips packaged next to them: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Mac-mini...
The ram is soldered onto the SoC in close proximity to the main arm chip. What’s different is that it is simultaneously addressable by cpu and gpu cores, not part of the same die as the apple silicon unit.
So they don't have to stop producing machines entirely because they've run out of RAM chips. The problem they have is with supply not demand.
Still LPDDR
It's absolutely wild that Apple's desktop machines now cap out at less ram than their portables which can't sustain an intensive workload without throttling!
In fact, chips were kept under lock and key to prevent theft. But there was a massive theft there were 20,000 chips were stolen.
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-r...
May 15, 1989
FBI SA and US Customs Agents advised Assistant US Attorney that source information and investigation had determined that Atari Corporation was importing 256K DRAMS into the US in false packing containers, and without proper import documents in violation of US import laws and contrary to import agreements between the US and the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Trade. Atari purchases large quantities of DRAMS from Japanese manufacturers for use in their Taiwanese manufacturing plants. Purchasing in Taiwan allows Atari to obtain the DRAMS at a greatly reduced price. There are strict import quotes on the DRAMS, because of Japanese flooding of the market in years previously but there are no import duties. By shipping the DRAMS in the U.S., Atari can thereby increase the price by approximately four times their purchase price. The original manufacturers, whether Fujitsu or Mitsubishi would not be allowed to import this quantity at this price into the U.S., because this practice stifles U.S. manufacturers.
Investigation determined that Atari was importing large quantities, 150,000 or more a wekk into the U.S. since May,1988. None were declared through U.S. Customs, and it appears telexes and telephones were used to order specific quantities in furtherance of this scheme.
Based on the above, Assistant US Attorney stated he would consider prosecution of this matter under the Wire Fraud Statutes or 1001 Falsification of Import Documents.
SOURCE: FBI Case 87A-SF-40454, Pages 42-43It would surely be a smart move to support the right partner in quickly starting a new memory factory, precisely to Apple's specifications, in return for a long-term supply agreement? If Apple could secure their memory supply and at a lower cost than all of the their PC and phone competition, it would be hugely beneficial for them.
Can't be any more entrenched than CPUs, GPUs, and broadband chips, which Apple still designs.
And to be clear, the foundry space for CPUs/GPUs is not the same as for RAM, which is printed with much larger feature size in order to lower the costs.
To be clear here, Apple doesn't actually license any cores from ARM - they've got an architectural license and implement their own cores. Licenses for cores are a different thing.
If Apple had the manufacturing capabilities then sure, but they would still be running into the same resource constraints for inputs that everyone else is having nowadays.
At the moment, there are no solutions only responses.
It's a no brainer.
Immune to shortages no. They're not suffering shortages because they don't have their own design, they suffer shortages because the whole supply chain has issues, starting from required minerals and going all the way to shipping.
And like the final product (commercial RAM) now goes to AI which pays better, processes/materials/factory utilization to make RAM would continue to go to another industry and not Apple, if that pays better then.