I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.
It was worthwhile because in the end it taught them that they needed to do something like Apple Silicon. And hopefully the current memory fiasco will convince them that they need to take memory in house if they want to build what they need to build going forward.
I really don’t see any alternative long-term to not engineering and designing memory in house and collaborating with TSMC onshore in America.
Hopefully having an engineer from the Apple Silicon design group as the next CEO will pay off.
Maybe. Intel got out of the memory game baecause it became a commodity.
That said, I was involved in some research years back where there was the potential opportunity for memory optimized for specific purposes. Which didn't make sense for the vendor at the time. Apple's already doing it to some degree on-chip. But you can imagine it making sense for a vendor owning the whole stack which wasn't really the case for the vendor we were doing the research for.
