alt Hacker Newsedit: looks like i had the wrong understanding, thanks to the comments below for explaining
~~~~~helps that Apple's SoC has the RAM on the main die itself. They're probably immune from these price hikes, but a lot of the PC/Windows vendors would, which would only make Apple's position even stronger~~~~
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How does that make a difference? It's not like the price change is on DIMMs. The price change is on the DRAM, which is a commodity item. It's not like someone is going to discount it if you tell them "nah, I'm going to solder this one to my SoC".
If Apple is insulated it is likely because Apple signs big contracts for large supply and manufacturers would prefer to be insulated from short-term demand shocks and have some reliability that their fabs can keep running and producing profitable chips.
I also had that misunderstanding, so after seeing this comment I looking up info. In this article you can see the xray of the m1 chip composited onto the photo of the chip, which has external memory components. You can also see in the architecture diagram that the memory is attached from outside the area where the Fabric, CPU, GPU, NPU, cache, and some other unlabeled things are located. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1/
And in this article you can see a photo of the memory chips attached outside of the Apple component https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/11/19/apple-mac-mini-teardow...
Perhaps on the same package (stacked) but absolutely not on the same die.
Which Apple product is this? Memory dies and logic dies require entirely different factories to make, so I doubt this SoC exists.
They're probably immune for a while because they're probably using a long term contract, but when it comes time to renew they'll have to offer close to market price to convince the manufacturers not to use that fab space for more profitable memory.