Comment by bigyabai

Apple's only path to bringing a real DRAM fab in-house is acquiring Micron. That's it.

Apple has no experience running large fabs, manufacturing modern DDR4 or DDR5, negotiating for precursors, packaging memory, integrating packages, optimizing DRAM efficiency, yield tuning or process sampling & qualification testing. It's equally as absentminded as suggesting that Apple simply replace TSMC with ASMC, their in-house EUV fab that can make 3nm wafers with 100% yield. Samsung has been making memory for 40 years, and they can't compete with SK Hynix' output despite their experience in design and fabrication. And Samsung is a success story, relatively speaking.

Apple cannot supply themselves at the iPhones scale, and would bankrupt themselves binning DDR5 for 512GB Macs. The US could give Apple the entirety of Intel Foundry Services as an act of corrupt eminent domain, and Apple would still be 15 years away from supplying their own RAM. DDR5 fabs are a small club, and Apple ain't in it.