alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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>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.
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.
Apple needs to seriously consider some sort of vertical integration on memory, it has proved it can do it with CPU's
Yes but the clock has been ticking, new products are being released, and at some point they will be renegotiating the next contract
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.
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.