8 ms·
Apple freezes plan to use China's YMTC chips amid political pressure
- metadat 4y agoDo iphones really use 2+ old generation flash memory? I was surprised by this fact. Does it not make a big difference these days if you're 2-3 generations behind Samsung?
- randyrand 4y agoFlash is not power intensive, for iphone workloads so it doesn’t matter. (ie not worth the cost) the density is good enough already.
- ulfw 4y agomaybe for the older SE line?
- wmf 4y agoAn iPhone using the latest and greatest flash chips has 512GB but with older generation flash it would be more like 128GB... which is the model most people buy. Of course that assumes YMTC can sell their "obsolete" flash at a lower cost per bit.
- fomine3 4y agoPerhaps they need to use old (lower density) NAND chip for lower capacity model, because fewer chips means less parallelism, thus low performance.
- adrian_b 4y agoAccording to the link from Semianalysis posted above, they are no longer behind Samsung, therefore they had to be hit urgently by US sanctions, otherwise they could have become the dominant producer of flash memories, like also Huawei could have become the dominant producer of smartphones, without the US sanctions.
- tooltalk 4y agoYMTC can certainly be the dominant player with mediocre components under Apple's China-first strategy.
- throwaway4good 4y agoAccording to this YMTC ships the most advanced chips in the industry: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/2022-nand-process-technology-comparison https://www.semianalysis.com/p/2022-nand-process-technology-...
- dirtyid 4y agoYMTC unable to guarantee delivery of chips medium/long term due to new US sanctions. Like how most countries didn't ditch Huawei until sanctions made future delivery impossible. TLDR is companies won't ditch increasingly high-value PRC tech unless US kneecaps them to take the option off the table. Ergo expect US to sanction anything competitive coming out of PRC going forward until there's a de-americanized supply chain.
- throwaway4good 4y agoDoesn't the latest EO make it outright illegal for Apple to purchase from YMTC? Or can they go ahead if US suppliers can be substituted which I think there is a far chance they can for YMTC.
- dirtyid 4y agoBasically, YMTC is on unverified list with presumption of denial. But as we saw with Huawei, many parties will try to lawyer / lobby way into exemptions, so the only sure fire way is also export controls that prevents YMTC from making competitive products in the frist place.
- tooltalk 4y agoApple is probably mad busy lobbying on behalf of China's tech industry, like how they fought the Uigher forced labor bill. Apple has sunk so much investment in China that their all-in China-first strategy is starting to hurt them now.
- hayst4ck 4y agoThat is certainly one perspective. A likely perspective. A little more hopeful perspective is that people see that Xi is not fundamentally different than Putin and understand that money spent in China will eventually be used to attack Taiwan. It is pretty clear to me that it is not ethical to do business with despots however pragmatic it may be. Germany was clearly willing to sell Ukraine out to Putin, so you're probably right about the eventual consequences.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoNot normal for Apple to discourage competition amongst its suppliers. Must be some very heavy pressure indeed.
- ksec 4y agoPlan to use YMTC? I thought Apple was moving away from China. /s I mean I have been repeatedly stating this. Apple is doubling down on Chinese Supply Chain. There is no sign of Apple doing otherwise. The only difference is Assembly location. I guess the export restriction forbids Apple to even buy anything from YMTC. Which means Apple cant even ( as they very likely will want to do ) have YMTC NAND for Chinese market. Next is probably BOE. Where Apple would want BOE OLED for Chinese market.