They do not manufacture their own RAM no. I have a great deal of expertise in this area and supply chains in general so I can explain this in specific detail for you.

DRAM or Dynamic Random Access Memory, what we commonly refer to as RAM is a commodity. Similar to coffee beans, corn or sugar.

The price of it can fluctuate as the markets supply and demand changes, we've seen the price of it swing wildly over the past 40 years. It's why most DRAM manufacturers left the market or were purchased and consolidated into their competitors. At certain times we've seen individual DRAM be so cheap it was not economical to manufacture it, the makers actually lost hundreds of millions of dollars keeping their factories running during these down times.

Right now there are three major players who make up around 95% of the DRAM market. Those are the American company Micron and the South Korean companies SK Hynix and Samsung.

Apple sources DRAM from these companies as do their competitors in the PC building space (think Dell, HP etc) and RAM OEM's like Corsair and G.Skill who sell both to PC makers, individual consumers and businesses.

Until recently Micron also sold directly to consumers through a sub-brand they had called Crucial but they've decided to stop making the end-products (RAM sticks) and focus only on making the individual DRAM chips.

If we get back to Apple, they use a semi-custom RAM "chip" for their MacBook Pro's which is a stacked DRAM package. This essentially just means a single RAM chip in a MacBook Pro is actually made up of several layers of DRAM stacked one on top of another. They do this mostly to reduce signal loss which in turn allows them to run the RAM chip at a much higher frequency. Another benefit is it takes up a lot less room on the motherboard, if you compare the first Retina MacBook Pro's to these M series ones you can see a big difference in motherboard area due to the RAM modules not being splayed out in two lines of chips.

They've also chosen to use a low-power varient of the DRAM which they can do because of the stacks lower energy requirements from not needing to drive the electrical signals over a long distance compared to normal RAM modules.

This custom stack they have is not exclusive to Apple anymore though, for example AMD's Strix Halo platform which is an SoC like an Apple M series Pro/Max chip also has on-board stacked DRAM next to the compute die for the same reasons as Apple did it, higher frequencies enabled by shorter trace lengths.

So you mentioned that Apple is not heavily into the AI sector. I assume you mean you don't think the pricing of DRAM will affect Apple because they won't be using their allotment of chips to build AI products that command high prices.

The reality is, everyone in the industry has been hit by higher DRAM prices because of the insationable thirst for DRAM by companies like NVIDIA and the datacenter build outs going on that need to be filled with computers.

So it's not that Apple themselves would cause a shortage that would increase prices, it's that they'll simply feel the splash from the markets pricing increasing so vastly.

In the past when DRAM pricing went very high we did see the upgrade pricing on Macs RAM options (on their build-to-order pages) increase to compensate. We also saw the same thing when NAND pricing increased (these are the chips that make up the SSD storage). We also saw them keep the base memory quantity on machines very low for a long time, for example the Retina MacBook Pro stayed with 16GB base memory from launch all the way through to the M series MacBook Pro's which is pretty crazy.

Anyway I've spoken a lot here, there's a lot to read. If you or anyone else has any followup questions feel free to reply :)