this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Wait, don't new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?
Yes, you are missing something. You are assuming they get their memory from a different supplier than the rest of the industry.
For some reason lots of people assume this.
My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it's not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple's RAM is making it specifically for them.
Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.
Afaik they use the same type of memory as phones do, variants of LPDDRx. "Unified" does not denote a different type, it means that both the GPU and the CPU can use the same memory (similarly to integrated GPUs using the main system ram).
Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read somewhere that they were doing something special in terms of their specs but maybe that was wrong (or maybe they transitioned at some point to save money)