But there will be and his point is they cut off supply to make room for the new M5 ultra which I hope has 768GB or more of memory.

If demand doesn't fall down or current manufacturers supply go up, somebody (presumably in China) will spin up fabs. Apple wanted to use blacklisted Chinese RAM already.

If the increased demand is not short term, production capacity will eventually increase. In the meantime, the logistics disruptions and industrial material shortages and energy inflation will disappear as soon as the wars disrupting them stop, which should bring prices down.

Unless the raw materials have an inherent limit on mining/production due to the amount present on the planet, why should or would companies not ramp up to eventually meet demand?

Edit: Okay, this doesn’t mean that that’s actually possible in the short-term, so I think you’re right. But that means as the silver lining, in the medium term horizon there’ll be enough supply again? :’)

Form factor is the easy part - both Nvidia and Apple are experienced SOC designers.

The hard part is the GPU architecture. Apple Silicon was designed with a laser focus on raster efficiency (similar to AMD's GPUs) which makes a lot of sense for highly mobile hardware, but is a crippling mistake for high-performance compute. Apple's largest Ultra chips are hamstrung with SOC-tier GPU performance, their highest-end desktops are outperformed by Nvidia's laptop offerings. Apple has to find a way to scale upwards without imposing too much architectural strain on their cheaper hardware like the iPhone and Macbook. Nvidia has already solved this issue; full CUDA compute stacks are usable on extremely cheap GPUs like the Nintendo Switch's Tegra SOC, or the Mac Mini-sized Jetson boards.

In terms of "who needs to redesign more to address the market", Apple has a lot of technical debt to unearth before they catch up to Nvidia. And if they do catch up, Nvidia will still support Linux and other differentiating features that Apple refuses to implement. It definitely feels like Nvidia is closer to a winner with the Spark than Apple is with the Mini or Studio.

> Or they could use that same amount of memory to ship 64x Macbook Neos, and probably make higher margins off the hardware volume

If it's an "or," absolutely. But if it's an or, they should be prioritising Macbooks over the Mac Mini Doug Brooks is discussing.

When we breach the "and" of memory supply sufficient to allow for more Mac minis (and Mac Studios), I think it would make sense to consider relaunching Xserve (with new branding, of course) as a consumer/small business product.

They could do both though. The margin from one user buying a $25000 is sky high compared to sixty kids all with the cheapest computer possible.

When I was at Apple we never wanted or. We wanted all. If that push to use Chinese memory works out it will be great for us and Apple.