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My impression of Apple is that they have no interest in competing on price. They are a premium brand. In the same way Louis Vuitton could sell cheaper handbags compete on price because they bought & optimized the costs of making leather, but they’re not going to.

Yeah this. Apple already has fairly-successful and well-established price levels, they are not going to drop them anytime soon. If these chips really are significantly cheaper to make, that just means they will make more money per chip, at least until setup costs go to zero. Cook is a supply-chain guy, he knows the score: final price is what the market will bear, not some fixed calculation over costs; you win by squeezing costs down and pushing prices up at the same time any time you can.

Apple lowered the entry price of an iOS phone to $400 this year. There’s more profit to be made via monthly payments for services, so getting more iOS and macOS products into people’s hands is in their interest.

I’m not saying they will sell third rate quality products like $400 laptops or $200 phones and tablets, but they are interested in lower prices and making up for it by getting people to purchase more from the whole ecosystem.

Apple has lowered the prices on all of their major product lines: iPhone SE ($400), iPad ($329), Apple Watch ($279).

I can't see anything in the way of Apple creating a lower priced MacBook SE at around, say, $700. With that move, Apple could essentially own the technology stack (iPhone, iPad, Mac, accessories, etc...) of millions of consumers previously priced out of the Apple ecosystem, consequently driving services revenue.

It would be interesting to know how companies like Apple account for the market of older models and how that feeds into their services revenue. For example if you can go on Woot and purchase an iPhone 8 for $399, while Apple didn't make money off of that sale, they will certainly make money from app purchases and iCloud subscriptions. And at $399 there's bound to be people willing to purchase an iPhone even if it's older. With Apple's iOS support reaching back several generations, it's not always a bad deal.

So in a way, even though Apple isn't making money directly off the sale of that old iPhone, they're still able to feed this lower-end market and make money from apps and services, without directly lowering their prices and maintaining their perceived high-end status.

Edit: I gave an iPhone example but it certainly extends to the Mac lineup as well.

FYI, you can buy a brand new iPhone SE from Apple.com for $400.

I made up the numbers as an example. It doesn't really matter, my point is that Apple's old devices, be it iPhone or Mac, still have value years later. So even when people are fishing the old stuff from the bargain bin sites, Apple is still making money off of them. As a result, Apple doesn't need to compete with the $400 Dell because people will still be buying the 5-year-old MacBook Air from the bargain site and with it, buying app/iCloud subscriptions.

> They are a premium brand.

How can they be a "premium" brand if they already own a large percentage of the market?

Premium, by definition, is only for a small group of people.

Am I missing something?

I’m trying to communicate they’d rather make more per unit sold, and lowering costs while maintaining quality increases is good for making more money. Maybe upscale would be better than premium.

> How can they be a "premium" brand if they already own a large percentage of the market?

That's what makes them one of the largest companies in the world.

Premium profit margins with commodity market share.

I'd say 17% of the computer market is sizable but still small and segmented enough to be premium. Macs don't factor into the purchasing decisions of the vast majority of ordinary people.

List price for the kinds of Intel chips Apple used/uses is somewhere along the lines of $200, though I can't imagine Apple ever paid that much. Some quick googling says that Intel maintains a gross margin of 50% or more, so manufacturing cost is $100 or less, and that doesn't include R&D work. This is all just napkin math, but I don't see how the M1 would allow Apple to shave more than $50 or so off their prices, which still gets them nowhere near Dell/Lenovo/HP territory. Apple laptops have substantially better screens than your average "I just want to use the internet" machine, better sound, mic and camera, better hard drive and an aluminium body, all of which has to be paid for somehow.

The current M1 macs already are better value than the Dell, etc options. The 1000 air has a much better cpu, better gpu, and much better battery life than the corresponding XPS for the same price. The only demerits are the shitty Webcam and largish bezels for 2020.

Unless you think Apple is loss leading on the M1 devices, which I just can't see them doing.

After looking at Apple's bandwidth (68GB/sec or so) and latency (random latency 32ns or so, if TLB friendly) I think it's time to consider ditching dimms. Half the latency, higher bandwidth, and lower costs sounds good to me. Just hope that future motherboard makers with LPDDR4x-4266 have motherboard options with 32GB ram instead of today's rather low limit of 16GB on the M1.

I don’t know that there’s an architecture limit that means that higher than 16GB is infeasible. I suspect we’ll see 32gb in the new iMacs and presumably a lot more than that in the next Mac Pro (which I’m really excited about in terms of how they scale the architecture).

Most of DRAM latency is actually not DRAM itself, but CPU, and its controller.

DRAM always been at aroun 10-20ns of latency. PCB traces themselves add a maximum of 6ns roundtrip.

DDR PHYs on both sides do huge amounts of analog, and digital signal conditioning. Refresh system add random latency if you hit a refresh cycle. Prefetch-burst mechanism also adds limits of your effective random access times.

This is why HBM may well beat regular DDR on real world latencies.

Interesting, thanks for the detailed info. I've done a fair number of benchmarking of different CPU architectures and never seen a latency lower than 60ns or so. My jaw dropped when I saw the M1 chasing pointers on large random array (much bigger than cache) at 30ns or so. That's a pretty amazing latency for l1 cache miss, l2 cache miss, and retrieving a cache line from main memory.

>the perception has always been that MacBooks are the best built laptops available

First time I hear that.

You must be new here :)

>As an example of this I do wonder if the PC industry realises the bind they’re now in with the Apple and the M1.

Apple has had their own chips before and the PC industry is fine. These sort of things are always cyclical. It's easier for Apple to do the M1 when it's a shiny new thing than keep innovating for a decade. Eventually someone will come up with some innovation they can't match and it will swing back towards integrating commodity parts.

All you have to do is look at the success of the A-series chips for the iPhone/iPad and how they've progressed over the past 10 years. While year-over-year they don't necessarily add something big and shiny (a bump in specs, occasional co-processor), if you compare an A14 to an A9 from 5 years ago the differences are huge.

It doesn't take a "shiny new thing" every year to keep the M series chips looking better than Intel. Perhaps you're right and in another 10-15 years it'll come back to commodity parts, but it would take something Very Shiny to push that at this point. And afaict Intel is in no position to deliver anything shiny enough to do that.

Meanwhile look at the equivalent AMD CPU from that era to a Ryzen 5950X.

who made the DRAM for the M1, wasn't it Hynix?

I don't know what the margin is selling DRAM OEM vs just the part.

The memory business seems like there's always pitfalls and challenges and cycles, but is this change really that significant?

DRAM is already commoditized for decades. Highly competitive and pushing prices and margins low, with occasional crises that allow some manufacturers to get a windfall.

Apple has no interest to be in that market, unlike the CPU market, which is a high margin, high product differentiator business, it really hard to sell your design as outstanding when the guy next door sells a laptop with the same CPU at half the price.