How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?(asymco.com) |
How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?(asymco.com) |
* https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-...
* https://www.micron.com/products/memory/dram-components/lpddr...
The shortage that connects to a modern Mac isn’t an SSD — it’s raw NAND.
There is a new modular RAM standard for precisely that but knowing Apple they will want to make their own.
SSD should be easy but since RAM does not last that much longer you still need to resolder that after 5-10 years!
Where are you getting this information?
True of NVMe SSDs, but SATA SSDs are no problem.
If we ever want computers to be sustainably made - instead of scorching the earth with each new device - we need to stop thinking the way people treat their devices is some natural law of how things will always be.
And the current memory crisis? There is no crisis for Apple. There is only crisis for others buying at spot price.
* Absorb the impact by some margin * Slash base models (which they are already doing) * Efficient software - So, end user experience is not affected. * Direct Price hike always be an option.
> But then Apple can negotiate on another basis and say, well, if you don’t do us a favor here and give us a better rate, then maybe we won’t work with you when all this settles down. You know things are going to settle down. These things are always cyclical. There’s never been a semiconductor boom that’s not followed by a semiconductor bust. Never. And they know it.
I have to think that the RAM suppliers wouldn't be that easy to intimidate with threats, since they know perfectly well how few alternatives Apple has. And they are also perfectly aware that Apple will play hardball with them when the market turns, regardless of whether they were nice to Apple now.
Apple can team up with TSMC to build some type of memory fab in the United States may take three years? Prineville, Oregon looks good close enough to water and Micron who won’t need many people once the Chinese use this memory crisis to take over the worldwide memory market…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona TSMC announced the Arizona Fab in 2020 they won’t have the final build out until 2029 for the 2nm (Build in house go around)
They have unused custom built AI servers sitting in warehouses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221264
Now I know Apple has given a measly one billion dollar refund to Google so far and they’re not paying OpenAI anything as far as we know and internally, maybe Apple spent a couple of billion dollars, which is less than what they spent on their rumored electric car so I think they have the money.
(Often the ads on the websites.)
I loved Asymco during the Apple 2010s run up, but this, inter alia things mentioned in other comments, should give the reader pause and evaluate how much of this is general knowledge x handwaving x vibes versus a practical ground floor understanding in 2026.
Personally I think the AI boom will crash out when all of these datacentres get rationalized. RAM manufacturers will crash as is normal in the semiconductor market.
There is just so much code out there that does not manage object life cycles well (over allocation, leaks, etc.), encodes data in text rather than binary representation.
The move to static binaries over dynamic libraries, applications that run web engines underneath rather than cleaner UIs.
I hope the memory shortage will encourage us to focus on efficiency again.
No brainer. Best move they will ever did.
It takes billions to tens of billions to setup a fab. It also takes years to get it working. Then when you add in the IP for memory, it pretty much ain't happening.
All the RAM monopoly has to do is wait 3 days before you're producing and drop the price and you're ruined. Meanwhile they've built up a battle chest of hundreds of billions in profits.
China might be the only competition we see come out of this, but only because they are playing the long game and have trillions of US dollars to play the game with.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/hp-reportedly...
Apple has started making a lot of different things in house, its only a matter of time imo.
Define "making". Sure, they design a lot of stuff in-house (CPUs/SoCs, wireless chipsets, etc), but they do not manufacture these things in-house: they have no fabs themselves.
But who knows. Their unified memory architecture across core types already puts them in a different design space. Maybe that design space leads them to further opportunities for memory architecture differentiation.
I could see them (1) taking the two processing chips that make up an Ultra in coming generations, (2) fabbed with logic on top, and power distributed on the back side, as Intel is going for, and (3) sandwiching the logic sides around a layer of unified RAM, with (4) massive optical linking distributed across the surfaces, resulting in (5) unbelievable bandwidths and parallelism we couldn't dream of today.
And then, (6) announcing it at WWDC 2029 and (7) taking my money 5 minutes after the midnight when pre-order's start.
It’ll probably only be worth it if it enables something “new” like more bigger Ultra chips or something.
SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron?
They should be banned.
[1] A “strategic” expense is named like this when you can’t justify it by any rational means.
They book manufacturing capacity often years in advance. Samsung is their majority RAM supplier and they reportedly agreed to doubling their price a few months ago.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-100-ram-price-hike-12...
The original article is baseless speculation proven wrong by news announced in February.
Hardly. While it may be fan fiction, or speculation, Horace has been researching and writing about Apple's operations for decades. I tried listening to his podcast years ago and the discussion at the time of Apple's supply chain movements was extremely detailed to the point where it wasn't even listenable for me.
"Our team has over 25 years of daily research on Apple Inc"
It's literally all they do
After all, how does one miniaturize future SOC devices if you don’t bring memory in the house eventually?
I can’t wait for times when I can afford chips from less than 8 years ago.
You certainly could do try a 20bn cell SRAM, in 155mm^2, if you could handle the routing, but the power consumption might surprise you.
Otherwise, you may end up filling up your fast memory with some cold data.
does Apple have enough of a design moat to overcome eventual overprice compared to competitors when "outisde" production is 2,4,10x cheaper
does Apple have enough of income/savings to maintain internal production capacity if it decides to switch back to outside sources
or can Apple acquire enough fab competence to negate internal/external price difference
we'll see how it plays out
So why would Apple need to make their own memory? The theory is exactly the same. They just need to continue to partner with their NAND and DRAM vendors.
They buy and build manufacturing capacity, and there’s also a huge shortage in that today.
Can a US company by a Chinese company... no. Number one, China won't let them. Number 2, China is building up these companies as a strategic reserve against the US/Korea for when they eventually go to war. So, yea, eventually the US will ban any imports of memory from those companies which would turn it into a toxic asset for Apple.
If this was solved by upgradable components, we would have "solved" e-waste in the 90s.
Component upgradability is not a sustainability solution, because it is architecturally bounded.
Second, sustainability isn’t a true false state. My previous computer, a 2015 macbook air, lasted me until this year. If it had upgradable ram it might have lasted me another 5 years. A computer that lasts forever is probably impossible, but 15 years is better than 10, and 10 is better than 5.
And it's not about motivation, but capacity: everything is currently at 100%. To get more capacity means building more fabs, and given the historically cyclical nature of semiconductors not may people want to necessarily take that risk (potentially end up with over capacity). And it wouldn't help now, as it takes >2 years to build a fab.
Unless the suggestion is for Apple to design M- and A-series CPUs with the memory circuitry in-die instead of on-package? (Using up some 'transistor budget' for RAM.)
I don’t understand why that’s so hard to understand and I certainly don’t think Apple will hesitate with a new technocrat CEO coming in September 2026, if Apple had a “slug” MBA person coming in September, I might buy the argument that they may not do anything but they have shown that they are capable of playing the long game when necessary.
I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall 5-6 years ago to see what the conversation was like on Hacker News when rumors of Apple replacing Intel came up. I bet it was much of the same. Oh no, don’t do anything.
Apple gives TSMC a billion dollars to build a cutting edge fab dedicated to making Apple's chips, a deal they repeat several times over more than a decade? Partnership.
Youtuber takes $300 to read an ad, giving viewers a 10% discount code? Also a partnership.
And as if Apple would ever block/pull/disapprove the world’s most popular browser.
Do they want to get into a commodity business like RAM production? Maybe not, but if prices stay high long enough that demand for their products falls off, they might think about it.
I know that I personally and my employer are cutting way back on new technology purchases and squeezing as much as we can out of old equipment due to the cost of RAM and storage now.
Fabs are a cutthroat business that's very hard to get into. It costs billions of continual investment to stay a float. That's why there's really only about 3 different companies with cutting edge fabs. TSMC, Micron, and Samsung. Even intel, who built a huge portion of their business on cutting edge fab tech, has struggled to keep funding it. AMD got out of the fab business almost a decade ago (spinning off global foundries) and that spin off is no longer cutting edge. AMD uses TSMC.
Fabs are some of the most expensive factories to operate on this planet due to a constant need for brand new equipment and cutting edge research. That's why there's not an Apple, Google, Meta, or Nvidia fab. That's why there's not an AMD fab. That's why Intel fabs are treading water.
Without the constant investment, you very quickly find yourself in the company of yet another cutthroat industry, the "not cutting edge" fabrication industry. And that, by and large, has already been locked up by about a dozen fab companies.
There are some ways to get this off the ground much quicker. One or more companies could buy an existing non-leading-edge fab like GlobalFoundaries. That buys a lot of expertise so you're not starting from zero.
DRAM also benefits from being very regular and relatively simple. It used to be what you bring up on a new process node to help prove things out.
It also isn't impossible to reduce reliance on ASML if you're willing to throw money at it. That's definitely a super-long-game move but it could be done.
I'm not going to argue that someone is going to do any of this but if demand is sustained it is possible.
They sit on billions because they avoid spending their money as much as possible.
The amount they spend on RAM in surrounding few years would represent almost nothing to the massive money hole that would happen if they tried to make their own fab.
Also, these problems tend to affect the entire market, which means if you're big, you're fine. It's when problems don't affect your competitors but affect you that the real issues for these companies crop up.
Meanwhile, I believe SOTA is at least 3 or 4 node shrinks beyond that 7nm process. It'll take years for them to catch up to where micron is currently.
I am running Arch Linux here. When I boot my machine into a full desktop environment it uses 1.1 GB of memory total, for everything.
If I open Firefox, it in itself uses about 1.3 GB to have Firefox open with just HackerNews in 1 tab. I have no extensions except uBlock Origin.
I was pleasantly surprised at the tab unloading settings under "memory saver" in ungoogled-chromium.
"We have now approached the problem again by refining our low-memory detection and tab selection algorithm and narrowing the action to the case where we are sure we’re providing a user benefit: if the browser is about to crash."
I would prefer FF to be more proactive in unloading tabs way before "its about to crash" to keep system level memory pressure lower. Firefox is the main memory hog on my M1 mac.
Chrome can do this, there is no reason we should be stuck with "manual tab unload" and "unload when the browser is about to crash".
I am using an extension, but that just reinforces the argument: they could be doing much more here.
Moreover it's a massive economy of scale, while their consumer electronics competitors are busy fighting a losing battle against the server market for chips, Apple can undercut them, grow their market share and get even more service revenue.
Should they also start CPU fabs? Batteries? Lithium mines?
On the other hand, if Apple invests in RAM production and prices fall, it's not like the investment is wasted, RAM is a commodity. They lose at worst the opportunity cost of deploying the capital inefficiently, but they have so much that it hardly matters.
Apple should take this crisis as a warning that they aren't vertically integrated enough to protect their business model.
As for batteries, Apple is not even close to the largest consumer of batteries. If they were an electric car company then yes they should be making their own batteries.
Memory is well within Apples design and Engineering capability. Long-term, Apple has to think about the Chinese getting a bigger part of the market in memory because they can undercut the three company cartel worldwide in time with this fake AI memory crisis.
It's actual corruption and the standard fascist model of corporate takeover by the state.
The "integration" of SpaceX/xAI is just standard Musk-move-losses-to-the-company-making-money-at-the-moment bullshit.
Apple actually have the runs on the board, xAI has Musk-BS.
The initial investment in chip fabs is so big it can't be justified when the established players already make enough to satisfy demand, but right now they don't so there's an opportunity.
It's still risky for sure but it makes some sense that it happens now. Hyperscalers spend 100s of billions yearly, at some point the amount given to TSMC gets larger than starting your own fab.
If success was guaranteed (it's not, as AMD and several others have learned) I think many more co's would start their own fabs in the current market.
As for why xAI, well why not - many of the others who can afford a fabbing attempt can't risk getting on TSMC's bad side even for a year or two.
Operating a FAB requires employing PhDs that are willing to work 8 hours shifts with no breaks (each removal of a bunnysuit is an expensive exercise), and there’s no reason to believe SpaceX is capable of hiring such people.
In addition, the know-how is concentrated in Taiwan. You literally can't train enough people in enough time to move everything out of there.
Where are SK Hynix and Samsung located again? Or 95% of Micron's facilities?
For example, Micron is actively building a few new fabs. One of which has been in progress since Biden (pretty close to my home in fact). It's not going to be completed for another 5 years at a minimum. And this is a company that has the experience and partnerships for producing fabs.
Yes, a new company might decide they want to enter the market, but even if they decided, today, "Yes we'll do this" I'd expect a minimum of a decade before they start spinning out their first chips. That's also at least a $1T investment at this point to get started.
Not even they necessarily have the experience to do it! Intel has a policy called "Copy EXACTLY!" for fab construction where they make every irrelevant detail the same as their last fab, because they don't actually know which of the details matter.
After spending a lot of time studying the problem what they finally realized is they built the building too close to the interstate and vibrations from the interstate were ultimately making their way into the factory causing errors.
To combat this problem, they spent millions retrofitting shock absorbers onto the building.
It's not shocking that intel would do the same because even the slightest movements and vibrations can spoil the chips. Putting a restroom in the wrong spot might spoil a batch when someone flushes the toilet.
Again, people might want part of it, but they are also a bit smarter than you are and read history books to see exactly how this is going to play out and then they gladly walk away before they light their money on fire.
Reusable rockets likely got the same ridicule, as did fast satellite internet, self driving and fully electric vehicles.
I can understand that Musk does not have the most palatable personality, but floating ideas and at least attempting innovation regardless of outcome over a long time is a net positive for society and should not be discouraged.
In those areas, Musk successfully leveraged government largesse to compete with fat, lazy incumbents who had either coasted for decades (rockets and satellite Internet) or who didn't bother to show up to the game (EVs, self-driving and otherwise.)
That does not describe the semiconductor industry.
Musk has never beaten anybody who actually put up a fight, as far as I'm aware. I guess Blue Origin technically counts, but again that's not exactly TSMC.
Aren't we still waiting for that?