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I've been running an M1 Air w/ 8GB for a few years, and it's still working fine.

Because

It's the websites that use that RAM, not the browsers.

(Often the ads on the websites.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes I believe that’s what being a manufacturer partner entails

TSMC doesn't make RAM do they?

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.

Chinese DRAM production is already getting ready to ramp up.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/hp-reportedly...

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.