I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
15 years ago I was an intern at Micron and learned they passed on a contract with Apple because Apple insisted on discounts and there wasn't a compelling reason to reduce profit at Micron.
So yeah, Apple probably does pay less. But the market has enough demand that suppliers do say no.
This is actually relevant, because DRAM costs just as much now per Gb as it did 15 years ago (that's controlling for inflation; it's as much as it cost 20 years ago on a pure price basis).
>Apple buys and uses so much RAM across all its product lines that it’s in a better negotiating position than the likes of Framework or Raspberry Pi, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the company’s last earnings call that memory pricing could begin to eat into Apple’s profit margins later this year.
There's also the fact that they were charging $200 to add 8GB of RAM before the prices went up, when that much RAM was something like $70 at retail.
The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.
Actually that is relatively cheaper than Apple has ever sold ram. They would always charge $200 for each ram upgrade and it might have been only 4gb or less back then.
The twist now though is they started soldering in the RAM with the retina macbook, so you can't run around apple's extortionate pricing like you could in the past and just buy components off the market.
Such a stupid cartoon evil villain move too, just to force us into getting RAM from them. I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM) in my life and yet I am forced to buy computers that optimize for this at the expense of things I actually care about like serviceability. And also consider the fact it incentivizes people to buy more RAM than they need today in effort to future proof their device, in a time of RAM shortages. And who knows maybe by the time that RAM amount is relevant the CPU can no longer keep up so the hoarding might not even be for anything either.
> I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM)
This isn't even a plausible excuse. For the entry level machines, the soldered RAM only has the same memory bandwidth as ordinary laptops. For the high end machines it likewise doesn't have any more than other high end machines (Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon) which just do the same thing as Apple -- use more memory channels -- without soldering the RAM.
And it's especially a kick in the teeth right now because it means you can't buy a machine with less RAM than you might prefer and then upgrade it later if prices come back down. If it's soldered then only what you can afford at the right now prices is all the machine will ever have.
I think part of what's happening lately is that chip folks are start to realize they can make margin too. Maybe it's possible thanks to consolidation but for sure folks see the crazy margins nvida, apple etc have, and I suspect they're like - we want that too!
I would think the price gouging on memory tiers is why its in a better negotiating position. Having 200% markup means minor market conditions wont prevent them from payment.
It costs the same, we just mark it as an opportunity cost of unloading the memory on the spot market.
If I buy contracts for 1 gold bar at $500, and the gold price runs to $1200, I can either continue to market my gold-containing product for the same profit margin, or I can unload all that gold for $1200/bar and make a profit of $700/bar. If my profit margin is high and it doesn't take many gold bars to make a thousand units, maybe discontinuation doesn't make any sense. But if my product is "solid gold statuary of Dear Leader", and the bars are most of my cost basis, I know what I'd do.
You’re thinking only finance. Their goal in buying the contract is to secure the good. The ability to maintain price will allow them to sell more units which is the number they want to show.
Amazing that it's gotten to that point but I think that's right. It's more intuitive that you would need vertical integration with your processing chips because of the degree of expert specialization necessary to produce them, especially in close coordination with a major product release.
By comparison, ram seems much more a commodity, but the game has changed and it seems like there may be an important strategic interest in sourcing and supplying your own.
Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
Or the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.
That's my whole point. M3 Max 128GB -> M3 Ultra 512GB. M5 Max 128GB -> M5 Ultra 512GB. But if M5 Max 192GB -> M5 Ultra 768GB, i.e. Ultra having 4x the memory of Max.
And you think this is the first sign that they’ve decided they’re going to spend the next few years being a RAM reseller before starting to sell consumer products again?
No, but "shipping less RAM" is clearly on that spectrum. The point wasn't about literal product strategy, it's that there's a limit to what actions are financially feasible and it's set by "what else could you do with that junk?"
it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market
other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly
but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with
Yep, but it they had to double or triple it on short notice, they'd have just removed it from the store instead, and I imagine that the RAM is going into 256GB systems for more $$$ but still nothing really that alarming for the consumer.
A friend's coworker had their pump lock on, and inject the entire reservoir of insulin into them. They were discovered in their home by the police after family members lost contact. No idea if it was an Omnipod, but I would hope that all insulin pumps have a separate watchdog circuit to prevent this.
My wife is T1 diabetic and has the Tslim pump. When there is an occlusion at the infusion site insulin stops being delivered and blood glucose goes high.
It never occurred to me that a pump might fail in a way to give her too much insulin...
My daughter is T1 as well. This bothers me every time I think about it. You are probably already aware but if your wife is using the dexcom there’s an app called follow that she can add you to to get alerts if things go awry (highs or lows).
She probably won’t want to use it but if she worries about that at all it might provide some peace of mind.
Many years ago, I worked on a project in Tennessee where the bank was installing computers in their branches (previously the tellers were using mainframe terminals). At the same time, they were consolidating the leased data lines to the branches to save money, as everything there was now a network device - including the ATMs.
The IBM representative on our team was working behind the through-the-wall ATM, routing some wires when a customer walked up (you could see them via the camera). Being a prankster, he started talking to her in a robotic voice: "Please insert card", "Please choose a transaction", etc. After a few of these he couldn't hold back any further and started laughing. The customer got the joke and started laughing too: "I knew someone was back there!"
Briefly, he was their first (and only) talking ATM.
IBM terminals were the original stateless clients. :)
I had a PS/2 Portable 70 for a while. It was a luggable Microchannel PC with a orange plasma display. Going through airports with it was a hassle as it didn't have batteries - I would have to find an outlet to power it on for airport security inspection.
I finished treatment for prostate cancer this summer. Most of my time in the x-ray machine was spent getting the alignment right. They'd take a CT scan, do some image analysis and other computations, then adjust the table some small amount before turning the beam on.
I'm curious how they do the alignment with the histotripsy machine. I would think that they could obviously do an ultrasound scan to get the gross alignment correct. But perhaps there is a CT scan afterwards that lets them make the fine alignment. It probably also helps that the liver is a much larger gland so aiming is less critical?
Ideally it'd just be software driven. Take an ultrasound scan, adjust, blast. In theory this could be done in milliseconds to counter patient movements. Pretty nifty really!
This is because the upstate (of South Carolina) has a large eastern European population, dating back to some of the churches there welcoming in ex-Soviets in the 1990's. The new families (Ukraine, Belarus, etc.) didn't get the MMR vaccine, so now they're vulnerable.
This has nothing to do with Ukraine or Eastern Europe and everything to do with Americans not willing to have their kids vaccinated. Which is result of right wing propagandists who wanted to achieve exactly this and got rewarded for it.
24 of the cases originated at a church where the congregation is primarily eastern European. But to your point - as long as the local population is below 95% fully vaccinated, it's going to spread. Regardless of national origin or religious & personal beliefs.
I absolutely loved my Moto X with the walnut back. I switched to an iPhone when it stopped getting security patches.
It was built back when Google owned Motorola, before they sold off everything but the patent suite. And was intended to be their flagship phone - which the Pixel later became. Looking at the GrapheneOS FAQ, it doesn't look like I have a prayer of installing it on such an old device as it doesn't have the needed security hardware. Is there a lightweight Android install available?
25H2 is better than previous versions, where I used Beyond Compare to do file copies because explorer.exe would crash, corrupting the copy. Still needs a lot of work to improve reliability.
If you have access to the wiring diagrams, I have seem people apply 12v to the correct pins to reverse the motor, moving the piston back from the rotor.
reply