Comment by BoredPositron
18 hours ago
The problem is not chip supply it's manufacturing. Apple has their own manufacturing suppply. This is not the chip crisis of the last years. Hyper scalers are switching to consumer hardware because there is nothing in storage for Prosumer anymore and the manufacturing pipelines for these are smaller and harder to scale than consumer ones.
The NAND itself seems to come from companies like SK Hynix, which are currently struggling to meet demand.
Apple doesn't make their own NAND, just like they don't make their own screens. They did write their own NAND controller and stuck it into their CPUs, but the flash memory that actually stores data doesn't come directly from their factories.
It's not a fucking nand problem. The producers reduced capacity because of the slow consumer PC market in 2024. With hyperscalers shifting to consumer products the market is strained but everyone is scaling up their production now. This is not the same as the chip shortage we had in the last few years. The production capabilities are there they are just adjusting to new market realities. We will see a whiplash for a few months but we can and will produce enough chips for everyone which we were not able to do in the 20-22 crisis. Stop getting your "insights" from influencers and stop parroting them.
It's ABSOLUTELY a chip shortage. TSMC is booked out years in advance and jacking prices because they can.
On the dram side, because that's what I saw recently, sk hynix is down to TWO WEEKS of inventory: https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-ddr5-inventory-down-to-just-2-...
I'd be curious what evidence there is to support its purely an end-product manufacturing shortage?
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Appple uses custom DRAM and NAND chips?