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Where Will Apple Get Flash Memory Now?
An anonymous reader writes "EE Times examines whether Samsung could be about to control the equipment output of Apple by putting the Cupertino company on a rationed supply of NAND flash as the non-volatile memory goes into short supply in 2013. The analysis argues that Apple may need to put down billions of dollars of cash to fund a guaranteed NAND flash supply plan, something that Samsung did in the middle of the last decade."
they could probably pay someone to assemble the bits by hand under an electron microscope.
Apple may need to put down billions of dollars of cash to fund a guaranteed NAND flash supply plan
..which wouldn't be a problem for them.. and given the way they've worked with processors and displays, is to be expected.
Anobit has no fab plant, so it doesn't solve the problem of not being able to get the actual components.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Because Wikipedia: "Anobit Technologies, Ltd. is an Israeli fabless designer of flash memory controllers." For the reading impaired, this means that they design memory controllers, not memory chips, and they only design them, they don't make them.
Every time a company is not 100% vertically integrated you get these kind of fearmongering articles. NAND flash is a commodity, they can find it somewhere else.
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd just find the next big thing, and stop using NAND flash. Memristors anyone?
Of course, if anyone else tried this, the new tech would be non-viable, but Steve would use his force of will to make the new tech work at the price he wanted to pay.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
this is not a school yard
samsung borrowed lots of money to build high tech flash memory factories. they can play hardball with apple, but they need to have a customer lined up to buy up whatever apple doesn't. unused capacity means lost revenue while salaries and interest on the debt still has to be paid
Nothing like the nerdrage geeks seem to have against companies they have nothing do with. Grind your teeth!
Disclaimer: I hate the fact that people get so riled up over cell phones
Pay particular attention to the 'Total cash' line item. Apple could build their own fab anywhere they wanted with the amount of cash they have. Why is this an issue? Oh yeah, it's not. More FUD on a slow news day.
It'd be easier to accept your assessment of Apple's intellectual prowess if you used things like capital letters and punctuation.
/just sayin
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
...they invent flash and sue everyone who uses their patent.
6 years ago Samsung was barely a competitor in the non-smartphone market, now Samsung is outselling Apple in smartphones.
Samsung is probably their own biggest customers for their NAND flash. Companies often "buy" within their own divisions, so Samsung's phone division is Samsung's component division's best customer.
Now also consider that Samsung has become the largest manufacture for smart TV's and AV components, all requiring NAND flash, even some of their refrigerators have web services built into them. Samsung is creating an empire significantly larger than Apple.
ANY Samsung shareholder should be thrilled with the direction Samsung has taken and turning it into a household name that exceeds Apple's mindshare around the world.
You could be a stupid investor and dump Samsung shares because you don't like how they are treating Apple, but realize Apple is becoming a small drop in Samsung's profits and business strategy. Considering how vocal Apple has been about moving away from Samsung, Samsung is taking the right steps to sever ties and move towards more lucrative and profitable industries, namely, themselves.
Samsung makes phones, tablets, computers, the parts that goes into those devices AND TV's, appliances, and so much more. Samsung is so friggen diversified that Apple probably NEVER made a significant impact on their profits, so if I ran Samsung, I would say good riddance and cripple one of their pissy competitors in only one of their many many divisions.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
OH YEAH?!! Well, your favorite brand of pencil sucks. They don't even use sustainably-grown cedar!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The article starts by saying there's little to no reliable evidence for this... but Apple MAY be planning to jump ship on Samsung with regards to manufacturing of its A7 processor. Then, from there it goes on to "if this happens, how will it affect Samsung's willingness to sell memory to Apple", and speculates (with zero support, not even rumors) that maybe Samsung MIGHT need to keep more of its own memory for its own products, in which case it MIGHT have to allocate how much memory Apple can buy (again, this is not even supported by some whisper the author heard in a bar - he's flying solo).
That's bad rumor-mongering even by analyst standards.
#DeleteChrome
...all in the midst of a glut in capacity in the semiconductor industry.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No, its not probably the start of the term; it goes back, in that specific form, at least to IBM's tactics against competitors in the 1970s.
Quite true. Most American companies have to show more revenue and profits than what they got in the previous quarter, else the shareholders will scream bloody murder. However, the Asian companies have got it right: profits don't matter. Marketshare does. Once you have control over the market bordering on the monopolistic, you can charge what you feel like. They also make long term investments (like Samsung in TFA). On the other hand, you have companies like HP whose operations seem to be planned on a day-to-day basis. Even then, they have trouble sticking to their plans (or CEOs).
Yeah, that'll be a real disaster, what with Apple being so short of cash and all.
Samsung has a monopoly on NAND flash chips?
Not a monopoly, but a clear majority of world wide manufacturing.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Yes, would've been much better to still be in these mythical days when everything about smartphones was cheap, open, easy to use, and not at all locked down and preconfigured with abortionware by the cell carriers.
You lot amuse me - the iPhone is orders of magnitude more "open" and functional than anything that existed in anything remotely resembling a "mainstream" smartphone market prior to the iPhone's debut. But because it's not completely open in every way you can imagine, you clickety-clack away on Slashdot, burning all that nerdrage - and probably some lean tissue - talking about how Apple's entrance into the smart phone market plunged us into some sort of Smartphone Dark Ages.
The good old days you all seem to remember aren't anywhere near as good as you'd like to believe they were. And the best thing is, we have legitimate competition in the smartphone market between Android & Apple - which means that we, as consumers, will continue to benefit as they duke it out.
Quit yer bitchin - these are great days we're living, bros.
(Incidentally - since Apple's 30% cut is so unreasonable and extortionary, where are the multitude of viable competitors charging something significantly less than that? Maybe that 30% really is a lot closer to 'break-even' or 'modestly profitable' than you'd like to admit, given that they're handling hosting, sales, distribution, and payment processing?)
Before the GD, we allowed executives to own stock. As such, many of our companies were short-sighted and we had crashed every 20 years or so. Since 1933 when the no-executive-own-stock was put in place, the companies switched to long-term focus and we had massive economic expansion. It was after reagan rolled that EO out and allowed executives to own stock that we have seen nothing but short-term focus. It has nothing to do with profits. It all has to do with stock manipulations. Look at GE, IBM, and HP. They have done massive damage to themselves via CEOs that look short-term. Heck, an even better example is American Airliens. They did great under Bob Crandall. Under the next 2 CEOs, the companies was bankrupted. Why? Because the executives had loads of stock and pushed for short-term manipulation that ran up the stock price at which point the executive sold much of their stocks, while waiting for more.
What is needed is for an EMPLOYEE STOCK. One that is tied to profits, and is not allowed to be sold on the open markets. Yes, basically, an ESOP. However, they need to make it so that NO employee is allowed to own any public stock in the industry.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Apple much to its disgrace has large amounts of unused cash around, that perhaps it should have invested earlier, but buying out Samsung is simply not even close to being a reality, Samsungs market cap sits at $200Billion admittedly half that of Apples Plummeting Market cap of $400Billion, but it is far too large for Apple to buy.
need a fab? buy a fab. update it. make a screaming pile of flash memory. undercut the market price while supplying all their own.
oh, and One More Thing... we remember who our friends are, and they get a discount.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Is less about outsourcing and more about pay rates and employer expectations.
http://www.startribune.com/business/164935926.html?refer=y
There was another story in this paper as well about this I couldn't find the link to -- a survey found that the "problem" wasn't a lack of workers, it was the low wages and working conditions that kept employers from recruiting workers.
Training is an issue as well -- employers have a desire to hire "ready for work" employers, even though the employees they often want need to have extensive education and experience with complex, high tech manufacturing systems that are difficult to get experience with...without working on one.
It's a self-perpetuating problem for employers. As long as they refuse to invest in training and paying salaries, they will have a shortage of workers.
I also think they have another problem -- the culture of manufacturing and blue collar employment generally. Manufacturing jobs have historically been "dumb" jobs -- the kind of work some high school dropout or grad got working on an assembly line turning a bolt, adding a part or whatever. Little to no skill, no education. Treat them awful and throw them away, we can always plug another body into this. It's why much of this COULD be outsourced -- there's little difference between an ex-jock who barely got a high school diploma and some third world country mouse who moved to the city.
Unions boosted the wages of these jobs until the early 70s, but there was always this cultural gulf between "labor" and "management"" and usually open hostility, as management sought to screw labor any way they could, and labor sought to take management for maximum compensation and minimum work. Labor were people to be piss-tested, searched and yelled at, and sic your security goons on if they step out of line.
Now we're at this point where the people manufacturers need aren't the dumb HS grads or third world peons, they are educated people with extensive skills, but business keep perpetuating this fucked up class warfare kind of culture, with the working conditions and pay to go with it. No wonder they can't find people -- anyone self-aware enough and smart enough to do this kind of work wants nothing to do with being treated as little more than a slave.
If we would have a manufacturing environment that treated the skilled workers more like white collar office workers and paid them that way, I can only imagine the talent pool would grow a lot deeper and the productivity would skyrocket.
Taiwan? Germany? Or, godforbid, the United States?
The added bonus is that they wont copy your designs while they're making this stuff for you.
That may be one of the funniest things I've read in a while.
Next time I need a baby in two weeks, I'm going to get together a team of 18 women and have them knock it out. I can pay extra, so it shouldn't be problem to get them focused and working together.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
He did specify women.
I wager that no matter what resources I muster, getting a functioning baby, from scratch (so to speak), is going to take me no less than 36 weeks, and that's shorting the process by a couple figuring you can induce early (i.e.: the base moulding won't be applied and some of the paint won't be finished).
I've watched some "fast track" architectural projects (I'm a structural engineer in real life), and one of two things happen: The project ends up taking just as long as it would have, or it becomes an absolute clusterfuck where nothing works properly. Occasionally, you get both the regular schedule AND the clusterfuck. On very rare occasions, and on very small projects, good planning actually saves time - but it's still never as much as the owner would like.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It took SAMSUNG 2 years to build a fab in China recently. That was considered neck-breaking speed to have one built. China is the easiest place to build b/c of poor labor and environmental laws, but you can't simply clear land, pour concrete, complete a building, and get the equipment online much faster. Even if you purchased an old fab, it would take at least a year or two b/c the old equipment wouldn't be of the quality necessary -- nor would the air filtration, etc. It'd take you almost as long to re-furb an old fab as it would to build a new one to get it to where you'd want it to be.
All companies that build fabs have the kind of money to make these things happen. Pouring more into it won't make it happen any faster as speed is always a priority in the industry. You build a fab, expect to get so many years out of it of high profit, then switch gears to low profit as you build another fab for the higher profit things... and then re-tool the old fab or sell it when the cycle starts over.
Gah, Slashdot needs a better way to log in so I don't have to post as AC w/ out wiping what I just wrote and finding the post to reply to... oh well.
Only if money/supply is guaranteed. If it is not, they don't have to list it. If I'm a bread maker, I don't have to list the amount I'm paying for flour unless the contract says I'm contractually obligated to buy a certain amount at a certain price. If I have an agreement that I may buy up to X amount for Y price, it isn't an obligation. I could pay $0 amount if I chose to use another supplier. Or if I bought enough to cover me for the next quarter. It all matters in the agreement. Many are saying that the memory suppliers got burned by Apple time so they wouldn't enter into any fixed agreements would they?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What is needed is for an EMPLOYEE STOCK. One that is tied to profits, and is not allowed to be sold on the open markets. Yes, basically, an ESOP. However, they need to make it so that NO employee is allowed to own any public stock in the industry.
What you are describing is a mutual business or workers co-operative; where all employees own a portion of the business, are entitled to vote at AGMs and share in the profit, but the share of ownership is non-transferable- it lasts exactly as long as you are an employee. Additional capital can be raised on the open market as publicly tradeable bonds (such as PIBS), which more or less function as non-voting shares.
This is a sentiment I whole heartedly agree with. Mutual businesses have shown themselves to be (as a rule) more stable and more long-term viable than PLCs time and time again.