Apple certainty has the financial resources to support other companies in e.g. developing specific innovations or building infrastructure (and has done so in the past) as long as there's an RoI for Apple.

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.

Memory designs are pretty entrenched with the various patents involved... I've said a few times that I don't know why Intel hasn't gotten back into DRAM production with their fabs. I suspect they may be contractually limited when they sold off their memory businesses.

>Memory designs are pretty entrenched with the various patents involved...

Can't be any more entrenched than CPUs, GPUs, and broadband chips, which Apple still designs.

Design is not the problem. Having foundry space to manufacture is the bottleneck. It is just all being sucked up (with AI needs being the big additional load).

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.

I don't think it's that... you have three companies that control over 90% of the market that have been convicted of collusion and price fixing more than once, when there were even more companies in the mix. The memory companies aren't producing at max capacity, they're price fixing.

Beyond this, memory isn't produced on leading end nodes, they're a few generations back as it is. For that matter, Intel isn't even near capacity and has/had plenty of opportunity to produce VRAM and SSD Storage, they got out of both as they became more commoditized.

I agree design is not the problem. I am answering the claim that "the various patents involved" would be the show stopper.

For CPUs, they are still licensing ARMs cores, of course with their own modifications, and they bought Intel’s modem businesses, which likely gave them the patents they needed. GPUs I can’t speak to on this though.

> For CPUs, they are still licensing ARMs cores

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.

Oh gotcha, I didn’t realize the distinction there! Very interesting, that’s a new rabbit hole to dive down.

for gpus i believe they license ip from PowerVR/Imagination

They used to. Switched to designing their own with the A11 about a decade ago.

And how much did Apple pay to get involved and overcome? There was LOTS of litigation involved.

Apple doesn't make their own CPUs, they just design them (using ARM IP). It's TSMC that makes them. The bottleneck with RAM is the manufacturing side.

The designing of the chips and Apple Silicon is the hardest part by far. By design we mean the engineering.

Production is not trivial, but can be outsourced to several parties.

Those third parties are running at capacity and are certainly the source of the increased prices since the supply is outsized by the demand.

They don’t use ARM IP. They have an architecture license. They basically created aarch64.

Alas RAM is basically a commodity product, unless they could have some design advantage over others like the A and M series chips, there is little incentive to go into RAM.

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.

They could justify it as a capacity investment, like buying all the tooling for their aluminum laptop bodies.

Unless Apple comes up with a novel memory, which I wouldn’t put beyond Cupertino, it makes more sense to participate in economies of scale.

Apple normally just does prepayment for capacity- funding the capital for the production line they need

It would take 5-10 years to design and verify a RAM design that comes anywhere close to the performance of modern day memory. Plus millions in NRE.

Why, is the idea that they would be starting from scratch, inventing it from first principles?

I would guess patents. If you don’t get the rights for an for an existing design, you need to build your own from the ground up

So if they start now, they'll be immune to shortages in 5-10 years.

It's a no brainer.

They'd have their own design in 5-10 years.

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.

Excuses.