Ex-Apple kernel engineer here, Apple will deal with the memory shortage by making software more efficient in ram usage. Apple will just make every aspect of the system more and more memory efficient. They've done it before over and over and can do it again.
This is a great long term strategy despite what the share holders would want to believe. If you increase efficiency even on lower end devices, you will get people coming back for more. It isn't the sale today, it is the sale tomorrow that matters.
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.
Apple knows better than to buy a pile of incompetent smugs. Intel was rock bottom before Europe determined it was a “strategic move”[1] to buy factories in Europe from the only manufacturer that hasn’t innovated since 20 years, quickly followed by the US. In both cases, governments aren’t the most savvy spenders.
[1] A “strategic” expense is named like this when you can’t justify it by any rational means.
> 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 bought PA Semi as the starting point to getting off of Intel. Theoretically, memory seems like something Apple could figure out how to fab. And it's not like they don't have any capital reserves.
They bought P.A. Semi, but it was for their design capability; they never had fabs anyway, and Apple still depends on TSMC and others for manufacturing chips. Apple building fabs to ensure a guaranteed supply of memory (or logic) chips would be an unprecedented level of vertical integration, even for them.
In the Tim Cook era when Apple needs to lock down the supply of a commodity part, they have a history of buying a dedicated manufacturing line for a manufacturing partner.
Yes, the author knows very little about the industry or how Apple operates. Fanfiction indeed.
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.
> Yes, the author knows very little about the industry or how Apple operates.
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"
Got a shitty PC with 32gb ddr5 now the ram alone is almost worth as much as the purchase price of it all. It is playing up.. normally I'd return it to Amazon but...
The author doesn’t seem to understand that Apple places RAM orders years in advance. I’m not sure if it’s even feasible or possible for Apple to fully integrate their supply chain and open up memory fabs, the cost of entry must be enormous.
And by "places orders" we mean "helps TSMC acquire plots of land on which their next facilities will be constructed" kind of level of scope, timing, and commitment.
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.
The problem is every twenty years or so DRAM makers get burned by building for demand that mostly disappears overnight. They've been through it enough times that they're going to be really reluctant to build new fabs. They'll certainly put some effort into getting the absolute most out of their existing installations, but I would be surprised if you see a lot of new fabs until they decide the demand is durable.
The only thing that can actually introduce competition in RAM is some form of government backing around national security concerns. China has been doing this for some time though so there will probably be major Chinese supply coming in the medium term.
Real life is not SimCity, you can't just plonk more RAM factories like that. It takes an ungodly amount of capital investment, many years before you see a cent in return, plus there's only a couple firms worldwide that can do it in the first place.
"So much so that I heard Samsung’s making more money now with memory than Nvidia’s making with their processors."
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.
Yeah, I guess it was just charity that led them to develop a really fast, efficient processor and to put good memory in their machines in the first place.
Don't mistake not caring about "specs" with being indifferent to the experience.
"the experience" is what I meant by "vibes" and Apple users can care a lot about that. That means a whole lot more than just performance though which is why it's often so easy to find non-Apple products with way better specs for the same or lower prices. Some Apple users are fine with a slower experience as long as it's still an Apple experience.
completely agree. Most Apple users are in it for the ecosystem. Tech people care about performance and these people don't typically choose Apple until recently with the M series which are a beast. Even I'm envious.
Ex-Apple kernel engineer here, Apple will deal with the memory shortage by making software more efficient in ram usage. Apple will just make every aspect of the system more and more memory efficient. They've done it before over and over and can do it again.
This is a great long term strategy despite what the share holders would want to believe. If you increase efficiency even on lower end devices, you will get people coming back for more. It isn't the sale today, it is the sale tomorrow that matters.
I read this as satire.
I've been running an M1 Air w/ 8GB for a few years, and it's still working fine.
2 replies →
Because
i wonder if this is the real reason behind the push for the snow leopard like release this year
Apple? Sure. What about other developers? Firefox, Chrome already use gigabytes of RAM.
It's the websites that use that RAM, not the browsers.
(Often the ads on the websites.)
3 replies →
Suddenly Safari can surge ahead again!
welcome to the rust community
Fortunately, Apple devices only run approved software. Google will be forced to optimize memory or become unavailable on those devices.
3 replies →
[dead]
They won’t be able to do that for AI models, because they suck at AI.
I wonder if companies like Apple will eventually start making memory themselves.
I would suspect at Apple scale it makes sense.
Apple has started making a lot of different things in house, its only a matter of time imo.
I doubt they want to make a commodity.
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.
This is probably the natural conclusion but it will take some time to get there
in a sense that's exactly what cartel wants - to lure out investments that will get squashed into uselessness by supply flood that will follow
The key is Apple can be their own customer and just not care anymore.
It’ll probably only be worth it if it enables something “new” like more bigger Ultra chips or something.
Who is the cartel?
SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron?
They should be banned.
they blew it! They could have bought Intel for cheap and made memory AND CPUs!
Apple knows better than to buy a pile of incompetent smugs. Intel was rock bottom before Europe determined it was a “strategic move”[1] to buy factories in Europe from the only manufacturer that hasn’t innovated since 20 years, quickly followed by the US. In both cases, governments aren’t the most savvy spenders.
[1] A “strategic” expense is named like this when you can’t justify it by any rational means.
Their best strategy is to buy Micron Semiconductor 12 months ago with cash equivalents on hand, for $106 billion.
No brainer. Best move they will ever did.
This reads like Apple fanfiction to me.
> 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 bought PA Semi as the starting point to getting off of Intel. Theoretically, memory seems like something Apple could figure out how to fab. And it's not like they don't have any capital reserves.
They bought P.A. Semi, but it was for their design capability; they never had fabs anyway, and Apple still depends on TSMC and others for manufacturing chips. Apple building fabs to ensure a guaranteed supply of memory (or logic) chips would be an unprecedented level of vertical integration, even for them.
12 replies →
In the Tim Cook era when Apple needs to lock down the supply of a commodity part, they have a history of buying a dedicated manufacturing line for a manufacturing partner.
DRAM fabs are their own well-known specialized process which is covered by the DRAM companies. It doesn't make sense to start a competitor for it.
3 replies →
It's crazy to think Apple would actually fab memory (or TSMC for that matter). It's an entirely different process than logic.
They probably could, but time is a big factor.
Yes, the author knows very little about the industry or how Apple operates. Fanfiction indeed.
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.
> Yes, the author knows very little about the industry or how Apple operates.
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"
https://asymco.com/about/
It's literally all they do
Got a shitty PC with 32gb ddr5 now the ram alone is almost worth as much as the purchase price of it all. It is playing up.. normally I'd return it to Amazon but...
If Tim Apple can't beg China for more while in Beijing then I guess they need to port SoftRAM 95 to OSX.
Maybe even MagnaRAM after that. It had a crocodile on the advert.
This makes me wonder when we'll start trading memory on the commodities markets.
Can't even find a ddr2 sodimm that's not a ripoff.
The author doesn’t seem to understand that Apple places RAM orders years in advance. I’m not sure if it’s even feasible or possible for Apple to fully integrate their supply chain and open up memory fabs, the cost of entry must be enormous.
And by "places orders" we mean "helps TSMC acquire plots of land on which their next facilities will be constructed" kind of level of scope, timing, and commitment.
Yes I believe that’s what being a manufacturer partner entails
2 replies →
TSMC doesn't make RAM do they?
1 reply →
Less APP, more LLM
What?
Our problem is lack of competition
No, it's the time, effort, and capital necessary to build cutting edge semiconductor fabs. Measured in tens of billions of dollars and decades.
High prices for RAM should attract competition.
In general, no.
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.
12 replies →
Chinese DRAM production is already getting ready to ramp up.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/hp-reportedly...
1 reply →
The problem is every twenty years or so DRAM makers get burned by building for demand that mostly disappears overnight. They've been through it enough times that they're going to be really reluctant to build new fabs. They'll certainly put some effort into getting the absolute most out of their existing installations, but I would be surprised if you see a lot of new fabs until they decide the demand is durable.
The only thing that can actually introduce competition in RAM is some form of government backing around national security concerns. China has been doing this for some time though so there will probably be major Chinese supply coming in the medium term.
Real life is not SimCity, you can't just plonk more RAM factories like that. It takes an ungodly amount of capital investment, many years before you see a cent in return, plus there's only a couple firms worldwide that can do it in the first place.
"So much so that I heard Samsung’s making more money now with memory than Nvidia’s making with their processors."
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
Yeah, I guess it was just charity that led them to develop a really fast, efficient processor and to put good memory in their machines in the first place.
Don't mistake not caring about "specs" with being indifferent to the experience.
"the experience" is what I meant by "vibes" and Apple users can care a lot about that. That means a whole lot more than just performance though which is why it's often so easy to find non-Apple products with way better specs for the same or lower prices. Some Apple users are fine with a slower experience as long as it's still an Apple experience.
completely agree. Most Apple users are in it for the ecosystem. Tech people care about performance and these people don't typically choose Apple until recently with the M series which are a beast. Even I'm envious.
No need to be. I'm rocking Asahi on a M1 and it's the absolute peak Linux desktop experience.
build a fab!
buy an Intel!