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#ram#chips#memory#apple#mini#still#mac#more#don#design
Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It feels much more like cartel behaviour, where all the players recognized blame can be redirected to "Ai demand" and "Sam Altman secret deal"
I'd buy one or two but I can't stick them in a Colo because they don't have LOM or dual power supplies but I've been seriously thinking about buying one and just keeping it at home and having my Colo servers talking to it for local deepseek.
Not a high priority though considering how cheap deepseek is.
You can clearly see this in the shot of the Mini mobo: CPU/GPU ASIC with 2 separate ram chips packaged next to them: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Mac-mini...
The ram is soldered onto the SoC in close proximity to the main arm chip. What’s different is that it is simultaneously addressable by cpu and gpu cores, not part of the same die as the apple silicon unit.
So they don't have to stop producing machines entirely because they've run out of RAM chips. The problem they have is with supply not demand.
Still LPDDR
It's absolutely wild that Apple's desktop machines now cap out at less ram than their portables which can't sustain an intensive workload without throttling!
In fact, chips were kept under lock and key to prevent theft. But there was a massive theft there were 20,000 chips were stolen.
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.
Can't be any more entrenched than CPUs, GPUs, and broadband chips, which Apple still designs.
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.
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.