Can't be any more entrenched than CPUs, GPUs, and broadband chips, which Apple still designs.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
quaddoggy•1h ago