Apple Bows To Pressure, Drops Plan To Buy Chinese Memory Chips (appleinsider.com) 67
Following increased U.S. export controls against working with Chinese companies, Apple has halted plans to use YMTC chips in the iPhone. AppleInsider reports: According to Nikkei Asia, YMTC flash memory is at least 20% cheaper than that of rivals, and the company's 128-layer 3D NAND chips are the most advanced by a Chinese company. They remain reportedly one or two generations behind the chips made by Micron and Samsung, both of which are known to be working with Apple. Nikkei Asia claims that Apple had completed is months-long testing and verification. Political pressure and criticism from US policymakers made it abandon the plan.
"The products have been verified, but they did not go into the production lines when mass production of the new iPhone began," an unspecified source told Nikkei Asia. Reportedly, the intention had been to initially use YMTC chips only for iPhones being sold in China. Another unnamed source, though, claimed that Apple was considering ultimately buying 40% of all its worldwide iPhone NAND flash memory from the company. "YMTC is government-subsidized so they can really outprice competitors," said another source.
"The products have been verified, but they did not go into the production lines when mass production of the new iPhone began," an unspecified source told Nikkei Asia. Reportedly, the intention had been to initially use YMTC chips only for iPhones being sold in China. Another unnamed source, though, claimed that Apple was considering ultimately buying 40% of all its worldwide iPhone NAND flash memory from the company. "YMTC is government-subsidized so they can really outprice competitors," said another source.
YMTC is govt subsidized (Score:5, Funny)
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Ponch and Jon are protecting American businesses!
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The Chinese government heavily subsidizes industry (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point automation has gotten to a level where the cost of Labor really isn't the factor anymore. We learned that when Motorola moved there manufacturing to the states briefly in order to benefit from faster lead times on cell phones. They did move it back to China but not so much for the labor but because they can pollute as much as they want there.
Thing is you can bring the manufacturing back but the jobs aren't coming. They'll be a handful of them but we're never going to have the kind of numbers we used to see. And although Tesla had a hard time with automation Ford and GM and Toyota are all making strides there.
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How is it that you are 50+ years old and do not know the meaning of the word there? How is it even possible?
If you are going to be very careful, the "there" at the end of your first sentence should be in quotation marks, since you are mentioning it rather than using it.
Best wishes,
Bob
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In my younger days, I automated production. What it usually meant was instead of 10 people who barely graduated high school you had to hire three who were responsible at twice the cost per person. If you could get three responsible people.
In the US we would be ok if we were paying $15 a hour to an educated population. B
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All the while rents are doubling yearly. Yes, someone who may not be college educated needs to pay bills too... and if they can't afford to work to make ends meat, they are high-tailing it somewhere else so they can.
If restaurants and businesses were smart in urban areas, they would be slamming the local city council and demanding rent controls, subsidized apartments, and a cap on how high rents can be raised per time period. This would allow for people they can afford to live near there. But, in a typic
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if they can't afford to work to make ends meat
What is "ends meat"? Is that a new meat substitute?
It's a meat-extender, like sawdust in sausage!
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Real example. I have rented a few times in my life. My first apartment was $350 a month. About 25% of my pay I then went to a much more expensive downtown location, but still about 25% of my pay. Then I did not rent for about a decade or so. What I found when I did rent again was I was able to get a place that cos
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Even in Austin, rents are currently rising at a rate that would take 4 years to double, 7 years afer accounting for general inflation.
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No [kvue.com]
AUSTIN, Texas — At 19.6%, Austin is among the U.S. cities that have seen an increase year-over-year in the country, according to June housing data from Realtor.com.
Miami took the top spot with a 37.4% increase, and Orlando took second with a 23.9% increase. Meanwhile, other cities that ranked high include San Diego with a 19.1% increase, Providence at 23.8%, Boston at 23.6% and New York at 21.1%.
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But people who can't read or write want $15 an hour to move a plate from a table to a sink. There is a culture that says being educated is for losers, and it is the birthright to be given a home in San Diego.
Because we've tied wage to cost of living. If $15 doesn't give enough money to pay rent for that someone moving that plate, you don't deserve the restaurant in your town. If $15 doesn't pay the heating bill for the person stocking your grocery shelves, you don't deserve the grocery store in your town. If a job doesn't pay the person to live there, then you shouldn't have that amenity. People want all the niceness without having to foot the bill for it. You can't have cake and eat it too.
As for the educ
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Very few college graduates get that much at entry into the work force, nor should they until they get experience and show that they can add that much value by their work. (Not that graduating college is a good proof of education.)
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In my younger days, I automated production. What it usually meant was instead of 10 people who barely graduated high school you had to hire three who were responsible at twice the cost per person. If you could get three responsible people.
Ahem.
As a retired Embedded Designer who has automated more than a few Production Processes along the way, I say that, unless that "Process" is something like batching human pharmaceuticals, it shouldn't require multiple skilled Babysitters/Start-Button-Pushers; or the "Automation" is pretty craptastic, sorry!
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Machines need to be fed and cared for.
True enough.
But generally, the "Feeding" part is either accomplished by another machine/part of the same machine; or by one Type Epsilon (that was the worker-drones, IIRC) workers to push the "Fill Me" button; or to otherwise get stuff to the Maw of the Machine.
Maintenance is usually spread across many Machines; so it is hard to say how much each one takes.
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Production runs 3 shifts a day.
Maybe.
But I will give you Extra Credit for a Snappy Response!
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Yes, damn those commies! China subsidize industry by:
1. Educating their children, so they grow up to become employable, productive workers for industry to hire, thus increases labor supply to keep wages low!
2. Building massing transport networks, so people can go to work cheaply without having to buy a car, further lowering their bargaining power to keep wages low!
3. Having universal health care, so factories can spent less for buying health insurance for their workers, further reducing cost!
4. Building ma
Re:The Chinese government heavily subsidizes indus (Score:4, Interesting)
7. Enslaving and raping the Uighur population
8. Harvesting organs from political prisoners for high ranking CCP members
9. Destroying Tibetan culture
10. Devastating the environment
11. Threatening all their neighbors and even countries that aren't neighbors
12. Strip harvesting the oceans
13. Building mini military bases all over international waters and claiming the South China Sea in violation of all international laws and norms
14. Supporting Putin's attack on Ukraine
15. Breaking their treaty with Britain, stealing Hong Kong and fucking over the people there
16. Engaging in industrial espionage on a global scale unseen before in history
17. Shipping endless supplies of fentanyl to the US like some Central American drug lords
18. Creating a surveillance state the worst government actors in the west can only have wet dreams about
Yup, China is awesome. Great place.
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Facts modded to troll by the usual CCP 50 cent shills.
If I was wrong or lying you could easily call me out. You Chinese commie shills never do respond. You can't. You just slam the censorship button.
You're terrified anytime everyone is reminded of the truth about your evil commie masters.
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The main problem is supply chains. If you have a circuit board, you can easily do pick and place at competitive prices in the west, but the actual PCB will still come from China (due to environmental issues). Similarly for much of the hardware and things like wiring looms. So even though it's competitive to do it in the west, logistically it's still a lot easier to just get a PCB assembler in Shenzhen to sort everything out for you. They can pick up a phone and get extra screws/resistors/hard to source IC f
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Tell us again how the Chinese and Indians are stealing our jobs and womenfolk!
Re:Apple canâ(TM)t win (Score:4, Funny)
More affordable? Please. They pocket the difference when cutting BoM.
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More affordable? Please. They pocket the difference when cutting BoM.
Not an Apple user, fan or hater. I'd always assumed that the reason iDevices were expensive was because they were made of the best components/materials. Is this no longer the case? My last hands-on experience with an Apple product was with a 10-year old pre-iMac that left a very bad impression on me at the time, mainly because it was dog-slow when compared to the "modern" Windows PCs. Now, when I look back at it, I'm pretty amazed that a user-facing computer could actually run that long and still be functio
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Anything, no matter the quality, is sold at the price that promises the highest profit. Manufacturing cost only determines whether or not something gets built in the first place, i.e. if the potential sales price is below cost, it won't get built.
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If you buy Apple, buy the extra warranty. If you are covered it is the best; if you are out of warranty even by a day, they are complete assholes.
The second half of your sentence is untrue. The internet is replete with hundreds of stories where Apple has "made good" on out of warranty gear.
But you are right: If you have AppleCare, they bend over backwards to fix or replace without bullshit, and at lightning speed.
And now that you can have forever coverage on a subscription basis for about the cost of a fast-food sandwich (e.g. "subscription" AppleCare+ for a $900 M1 11" iPad Pro is US$5.95 per month), there is very little economic reason to not just
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Macs have come with parts that on windows PCs are a dumpster fire but apple's vertical integration of software and hardware means they've done extra work to stabilise bad hardware so to avoid a high return rate or recall on an entire product line.
Translation: Apple's Driver Teams are actually competent; unlike the bullshit 2 bowls-of-rice-a-day "Developers" many others use.
When apple find out the chipset they use is crap they write code into OS X that mitigates it as best they can and avoid the expensive returns. It doesn't always work, but when it does it lets apple use cheap parts and yet the end user gets a better experience. This is easily confused for quality hardware until you check the parts list and realise it's all relatively low quality.
Don't confuse "off-the-bleeding-edge" with "low quality".
I know a person (actually an ex-boss) who went to work for a for major semiconductor manufacturer that was supplying components to Apple. He said that, in his dealings with several major OEMs, that he had never seen anyone else that got anywhere close to the painstaking demands for specification and quality assurance guarant
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When apple find out the chipset they use is crap they write code into OS X that mitigates it as best they can and avoid the expensive returns. It doesn't always work, but when it does it lets apple use cheap parts and yet the end user gets a better experience. This is easily confused for quality hardware until you check the parts list and realise it's all relatively low quality.
Don't confuse "off-the-bleeding-edge" with "low quality".
That seems to be my impression when scanning reviews. Apple hardware are rarely the fastest. As an indirect proof of this, Apple appears to be the only major, still existing personal computer manufacturer to have changed CPU architectures, at least thrice in the past two decades in an attempt to again achieve parity with the high-end Windows fpPCs offered by other manufacturers.
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Apple (until recently) contracted most of their supplier work to Foxconn. Not really sure what is their relationship with Foxconn anymore, though they probably still source a lot of hardware from them. Do you have any experience with Foxconn as an OEM? They don't sell Foxconn-branded hardware in the US anymore, but they used to, and . . . ugh.
There are, of course, worse solutions, but from the article you should already know that Apple's standards are only top-notch when compared to some other OEMs.
Re: Apple canâ(TM)t win (Score:3)
They are liberal in public but die hard conservative when they think no one's looking
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The 50 centers are out in force smearing truth with mod bombs today.
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Indeed, it looks like Apple customers are never going to get a break.
After almost five decades of paying sky-high prices for their gear, it looked like Apple users would finally get a break when lower component costs got passed down to them. And maybe Apple could finally eke out a small profit.
But no, politics gets in the way again.
Hmm... sneaky (Score:1)
Imagine a memory chip programmed to start inserting malicious code at a specific future time or via some trigger (like a certain pattern of data being written).
Of course there are far easier ways to infect the supply chain but really the possibilities are endless.
Not specifically because of China but in general we need to come up with better systems that can verify the hardware we use. It's not really the type of threat that would happen by some hack or whatever but with long term planning it could be a one
Re: Hmm... sneaky (Score:2)
A hard wired logic bomb. Only a matter of time.
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When you write your own compiler and tools chain from scratch in hand coded assembly on cpus designed and dabbed by your own loyal people on boards also built in house etc etc then you -might- be able to trust your systems. As long as none of your staff was compromised.
Hardly worth it.
Who knows (Score:2)
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Apple probably would. They certainly spend a lot of money to ensure nobody escapes their walled garden.
This is exciting (Score:2)
This is fantastic!
Not liking what Apple is up to (Score:3)
This might say something about Apple's commitment to quality, at least with respect to iPhones. They've always presented themselves as, a "premium price for a premium device" company. It looks like instead, their current business model is to just get down in the muck with the Dollar Store end of the cell phone market and grind out devices with a higher profit margin thanks to older, cheaper components.
So it's government regulation forcing Apple to keep their quality up rather than the invisible hand of the market? Truly, we live in strange times.
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These are not low quality flash chips. We need to stop assuming everything from China is crap. That's why China is dominating the automotive battery market, their batteries are better AND cheaper than everyone else's because they put in the R&D while the rest of the world just assumed it would be able to win with a "premium" product.
YMTC flash memory is good quality. It's also competitive on things like power consumption and endurance, both important in mobile devices.
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These are not low quality flash chips. We need to stop assuming everything from China is crap. That's why China is dominating the automotive battery market, their batteries are better AND cheaper than everyone else's because they put in the R&D while the rest of the world just assumed it would be able to win with a "premium" product.
YMTC flash memory is good quality. It's also competitive on things like power consumption and endurance, both important in mobile devices.
Right.
The ONLY reason they are cheap is because China is artificially-Subsidizing their low price. Period.
Knowing what I know about the standards Apple holds its Vendors to, you can rest assured that the actual quality and reliability of this Flash is equal to, or better than, the Vendors from which they are already purchasing those same components.
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I'm not so sure, Apple doesn't have a great history of properly testing the durability of their products. Keyboards, screen hinges, batteries...
Not saying that this flash memory isn't a quality product, it is. I'm just not convinced that Apple is good at testing things.
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I'm not so sure, Apple doesn't have a great history of properly testing the durability of their products. Keyboards, screen hinges, batteries...
Not saying that this flash memory isn't a quality product, it is. I'm just not convinced that Apple is good at testing things.
Keyboards: A design issue that simply didn't show up until things got into the field. Happens. It was insanely amplified by internet trolls. Apple worked diligently to fix the design, and to make it right for affected Users, both in and out of Warranty. Haven't heard a peep for about 2 or 3 years; so. . .
Screen Hinges: What was that; like 15 years ago? Give it a rest!
Batteries: Everyone has problems with bad battery-batches. You're going to have to be more specific than just declaring "batteries". Plus, App
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Not testing your keyboard for normal amounts of dust is a pretty big oversight. It took them years to correct it, the membrane fix they tried didn't work. To make matters worse, the keyboard was riveted into the top part of the case, so the whole upper part of the laptop had to be replaced. The warranty didn't fix the design flaw, and once out of warranty it's only a matter of time until the replacement keyboard fails too.
Screen hinges have been a problem since the 90s when they started making laptops.
The i
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Not testing your keyboard for normal amounts of dust is a pretty big oversight. It took them years to correct it, the membrane fix they tried didn't work. To make matters worse, the keyboard was riveted into the top part of the case, so the whole upper part of the laptop had to be replaced. The warranty didn't fix the design flaw, and once out of warranty it's only a matter of time until the replacement keyboard fails too.
Screen hinges have been a problem since the 90s when they started making laptops.
The issue with batteries wasn't a bad batch. Lithium ion batteries naturally degrade with use and after a while are unable to provide as much current as when they are new. That was well known but Apple ignored it, and the result was your iPhone would go from 50% battery to 2% in a second, or just crash entirely. They offered reasonable price replacements for a while, and degraded performance in software to prevent the worst of it.
Ok, now I know you're just trolling.
Goodbye.
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Unless you're recording raw 4k video on your iPhone, then the flash performance required is really not that amazing. I imagine that a technology node 2 steps behind the current bleeding edge is more than sufficient for regular iPhone users.
BTW Apple has always been good at making their products appear more premium than they really are. It's essentially their entire business model and why they make such obscene profits compared to their competitors.
Apple is a luxury company (Score:1)
Apple has always been good at making their products appear more premium than they really are.
Apple has very nearly always been a premium computer company with superior product design. In that sense, Apple is like Cadillac or Lexus. Whereas most everyone else, who feels priced out, will choose an everyday marque and model, or will obtain a used or refurbished Apple device.
I find there to be no reason to criticise a luxury company for being a luxury company. It even supports its phones with OS updates longer than any other major phone maker.
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If you define premium as high end hardware, the iphone hasn't led the phone market for a number of years. It's possible to spend more money than the top iphone and get better cameras, better displays, better CPUs, more RAM more storage... etc. etc. In fact it's possible to spend less than an iphone and get some of that too. Apple are pretty good at picking the right parts for their hardware. They rarely use "high end" parts but they manage to grind a reasonable amount of apparent quality out of them regardl
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LOL. "Premium Price for Premium Device" is something that clearly ignores the margins that Apple has had on the iPhone in the past. It may have been more expensive, but largely you're paying for software and external looks. Largely Apple's device hasn't been any more premium than that of any other device. Sure they released the glass back iPhone 8 *uuuuaaaeeehhhrrr* (sorry just jizzed in my pants at the premiumness), but otherwise the underlying hardware wasn't special.
Now off to change my underwear.
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This might say something about Apple's commitment to quality, at least with respect to iPhones. They've always presented themselves as, a "premium price for a premium device" company. It looks like instead, their current business model is to just get down in the muck with the Dollar Store end of the cell phone market and grind out devices with a higher profit margin thanks to older, cheaper components.
So it's government regulation forcing Apple to keep their quality up rather than the invisible hand of the market? Truly, we live in strange times.
This Flash is cheaper, not because it is shitty; but because China has put their thumb on the scale to make the price less than the competition.
Apple simply can't afford the bad press from including an unreliable or poorly-performing component in the BOMs of Meelions of Devices.
Damn (Score:2)
Damn, I was hoping to see Apple products made illegal by US sanctions on China.