Kind of a part 2 cause the article is interesting but locked behind a paywall. However reddit as a tldr and boy, in many ways, I am glad that memory manufacturers are getting their revenge on apple if all this is true:
The Beleaguered Chip Sellers Getting Their Revenge on Apple
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1xigeim/the_beleaguered_chip_sellers_getting_their/
Apple is the largest buyer of flash memory in the world
It used the leverage to force nand manufacturers into deals that ensured it was the most favored customer and no other customer got a better deal
$0.80 of every dollar consumers paid apple for memory upgrades went to apple's profits, only $0.20 were spent on supplies. Apple was making big money by squeezing not just the manufacturers but also its customers
Apple would order memory at already rock bottom prices and refuse delivery without communication, leaving manufacturers with loads of unused inventory which forced them into voluntarily lowering prices again
Apple schedules negotiations so that competing manufacturers would run into each other and dragged these evening meetings past midnight without dinner as a form of psychological tactic
To enforce this it forced expensive and lengthy audits on memory manufacturers to look into their books to reveal how much competitors were paying and how much each manufacturer was outputting to identify the struggling companies so that they could be squeezed even harder
Apple once threatened to have sandisk's ceo "crawl on his knees" when sandisk sold to higher paying customers instead of apple. When western digital required a fee for capacity reservation, apple sent a picture of the date written on a whiteboard to western digital and promised "payback"
As revenge, apple demanded that western digital pay them "testing fees" if they wanted their products considered, without any purchase commitment. They then got the security to escort the western digital executive out to humiliate him
Apple's spending on memory has quadrupled since the rampocalypse as manufacturers have rejected apple's past negotiation tactics. Apple was caught off guard because they were drunk on their leverage power over memory manufacturers and didn't expect them to push back. Memory manufacturers are now "gleeful" at apple's state
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
