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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre there isn’t a 1TB RAM option hidden away for the excessively frivolous or VC funded.

They seem to be suffering from the supply constraints like everyone else. They phased out the higher capacities on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio a while ago, and if you order a 128GB MBP, say, you're looking at six weeks or more for delivery.

It's worse than six weeks: Apple quoted me 10-12 weeks yesterday for an M4 Max Studio (about Nov 17) December for the M3 Ultra. Planning to lock in a new model soon. I went looking for used but those are wildly expensive. Strange times. https://hard.bargains/posts/mac-before-sept-22/

Same reason they cut the big options on the existing models, this way they can sell more devices. The additional cost for the additional 512GB would have to make up for the loss of another sold device otherwise. No idea if there would really be that many people buying this then while on the other hand AI stuff makes people do crazy stuff, so...yeah :)

Considering Apple pricing it actually might.

256GB model is $10k and the 512GB version will probably be double

It's more bizarre that Apple got caught with pants down. Focused on CPUs and ignored RAM.

Seems like miscalculation. If they had their own fab for RAM, they could completely corner the market today.

They have no fab for CPUs, they are manufactured by Samsung and TSMC. The bottleneck is in manufacturing RAM not CPUs so there is nothing Apple can do here.

Let me rephrase. They have not booked enough capacity at contract manufacturer.

Recently Micron pointed that finger and threw that shade in Apple’s direction saying that their priority for years has been squeezing margins in their favour, so there wasn’t the slack in the system to build the fab capacity that is now desperately required given the sudden need for RAM now that there’s a cause to use it in AI Inference.

They don’t have their own fab for CPUs either.

They would have had to start building that fab 5-10 years ago. It would have been incredible foresight to do so and it would have looked insane.

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