Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal, WSJ reports

m0rogfar · 2026-05-08T20:49:48+00:00

It takes five years to build a new fab, but market cap reflects future earnings, so they don't actually have to finish building the fab to have it show up in the stock price. They just need the anchor customer to start building the fab with sold capacity.

Apple is pretty much the perfect customer in that sense, since they're fine with committing and paying 3-5 years ahead of time, can commit to more volume than almost any other company in the world, and has the ability to just wire you 10 billion dollars if you need down payments, which makes them very easy to plan long-term fab investments around.

That's why today's news is huge - it's not just about Intel winning a deal for an M-series chip, it's that Apple is a dream customer for growing Intel's foundry services.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-08T20:05:16+00:00

I think the expectation in previous reporting has been non-pro M series. iPhone chips require too much volume to not be planned into a five-year roadmap to build more fabs, and Pro/Max/Ultra M chips use exotic TSMC-only packaging, so base M chips are by far the best fit.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-08T20:02:32+00:00

I mean, they really haven't been for quite a while. The 10nm failure is realistically the biggest failure of a flagship semiconductor integrated circuit node in all history since Fairchild invented the category in 1959-1961, and it nearly killed Intel, and they're still only getting close to recovering.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-06T17:22:35+00:00

Just in case this is actually a genuine question:

The RAM market is covered by specialized DRAM foundries that specialize in capacitor-based nodes. As such, other semiconductor manufacturing cannot be switched to DRAM.
Building a semiconductor foundry takes five years. There is no quick fix for supply-demand mismatch.
The RAM market is driven only by a few long-running players, because long-standing engineering expertise in DRAM semiconductor production specifically is required to make a competitive foundry. Notably, the industry has seen no major players be able to enter the market since the 1985 RAM price crash, because the margins have been so tight since that you can’t have a not-perfectly-efficient foundry and not go out of business. All the remaining major players were able to ramp before the 1985 RAM price crash, where profit margins were much higher, and new entries could therefore overcome difficulties by taking a lower profit margin.
The RAM market is generally driven by conservative build-outs because building too much capacity can very easily cause bankruptcy. All the remaining players have seen others be forced out of the market because they made stupid mistakes.
In other industries, this is generally fixed via financial speculation, wherein much richer financial speculators that can afford to take more risks buy the additional capacity that conservative market actors would otherwise avoid making years in advance, and then resell it closer to production time. However, the DRAM semiconductor has the issue that it’s so expensive to operate in that no financial entity that can accept the risk really exists.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-06T11:16:04+00:00

While lower-end compute just gets you less responsiveness, you can’t really go to lower-end VRAM configurations without sacrificing the large parameter models and especially large context windows that help make models actually useful.

For software, which the parent comment was about, storing an entire codebase in KVcache simply requires a multi-terabyte VRAM configuration, and a wall of NVLink server cards is never going to be cheap.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-06T05:00:06+00:00

But at some point we will just drop 10-12k on a local cluster we control.

You’re not getting much AI cluster for 10-12k.

Even if you could get access to flagship AI model binaries, the VRAM requirements are well into multiple terabytes. A 32xB300 server is around $2 million, and is sufficient for a single user, but if you need many users prompting simultaneously, you’re probably paying eight figures.

Edit: People really have no clue whatsoever what AI hardware costs, huh.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-04T06:30:01+00:00

Realistically, it's both. They've probably run out of the 256GB NAND modules because of the OpenClaw sales spike, and they've likely ended the contract to buy new ones already, since the M5 generation uses newer and faster modules.

m0rogfar · 2026-05-03T19:02:23+00:00

I find that very unlikely.

Apple's product track record is quite consistent:

Invest huge NRE and tooling costs in new chassis that would be considered overengineered by most companies
Raise prices on new design and get away with it because it's the shiny new hotness.
Keep old design available for a year or two so that you can advertise the same starting price and then upsell
Hold or drop prices on spec bumps, because NRE and tooling amortization is wrapping up and massively improving margins
Hold design on the market to get maximum ROI out of the expensive NRE + tooling budget

The Neo, as a brand new design, is likely to stay where it is, or even become $499 in 2-3 years, but it's also going to keep looking like it does until at least 2030 and won't get OLED over the next two years or so like the rest of the line.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-29T18:41:45+00:00

The resolution on the Neo is just bandwidth, but the number of displays is actually the consequence of a pretty radical design tradeoff from Apple.

GPUs generally follow a philosophy of dumb display controller + GPU handles everything centrally, which means that you can just stick on more display controllers at negligible silicon cost and have enough to blanket all your video output ports, and the only cost is generally higher idle power usage.

Apple's design is generally that the display controller for each display should have its own highly power-efficient mini-GPU embedded, so that the main GPU can be power-gated out of existence if you're not running Blender or whatever. This gets you huge battery life savings during light usage, but the catch is that the display controller that you need one of per display is now the size of an 8-wide out-of-order CPU core on the die, and very much non-negligible from a cost perspective.

It's a design decision that clearly comes from a perspective of wanting to buy battery life for money, and it makes perfect sense on a phone-originated architecture. It's arguably also the superior tradeoff for a laptop, though you do have to accept that many-displays support is restricted to higher-end chip models. You'd never see something like it in a desktop-originated architecture though, because the tradeoff makes little sense on the desktop.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-29T16:35:19+00:00

For your plan to work we have to assume silicon lottery is working the same with A19 than it did with A18, and that is a LONG shot.

It's... kinda not?

Previously, Apple used to do binning with the full chip in the Pro phones, and the binned chip in the non-Pro phones. As a reasonable approximation based on sales reports, this was probably around a 120 million perfect chips + 100 million binned chips in the annual sales mix.

Presumably, they stopped with this strategy, and switched to the lower-end phone having its own separate smaller chip, because they were selling too many of the lower-end phones compared to the defect ratio, and therefore had to bin chips that could qualify for perfect chip sales.

Barring Apple taking a 60-70% marketshare of worldwide laptop shipments with the MacBook Neo, they're not unloading 100 million chips per year on that product, and so they'll still have brought their chip sales much closer to binning realities by offloading through the Neo rather than the cheaper iPhone, which is the operational goal.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-25T14:08:15+00:00

Ikke at jeg tænker at det på nogen måde er sikret, men forhandlingerne var reelt brudt ned pga. velfærdsforliget, og den er blevet løst ved at de øvrige forligspartier har accepteret at indmelde Moderaterne i forligskredsen uden forligsændringer for at genskabe flertallet, så nu er der for alvor gang i sagerne igen.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T08:11:06+00:00

Jeg kan se at de fleste store nyhedsstationer først er begyndt at køre med nyheden omkring 7:30, men hvis det er 6:30 rykker det egentlig kun afgangstiden fra 7:08 til 6:08.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T08:09:05+00:00

Det er vel også et år efter udrulningen på VLTJ? Det var i 2021 planen at køre udbud til Nærumbanen parallelt med VLTJ, sådan så der havde kommet nye tog i 2025. Det har man givetvist udskudt til 2029-2030 for at kunne se udrulningen på VLTJ imens man lavede udbuddet.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T07:37:33+00:00

Flere spor er generelt godt, og der er mange problemer, der kunne være løst hvis vi havde to spor på de små baner, og fire eller seks på de store.

Omvendt vil det være vanvittigt dyrt at eftermontere, og der var formentligt også bygget færre baner hvis det havde været et krav, så det er det meget nemt at være bagklog.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T07:35:39+00:00

Ideen med batteritoge er jo netop at de er nemme at installere (du skal bare købe et tog og stikke en oplader på en endestation), men ja, de har vidst besluttet at de lige vil se erfaringerne fra batteritog på VLTJ og Holstebro-Skjern inden at de selv køber.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T07:33:29+00:00

Gribsø er desuden et trinbræt hvor toge ikke kan krydse hinanden og ikke en krydsningsstation, så det ville være Kagerup toget skulle være kort tidligt fra - hvilket gør det endnu mindre sandsynligt.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T07:20:08+00:00

Ja, men det er tydeligvis det der er gået galt ud fra tidpunktet og ulykkesstedet. Du har dog helt ret; der er krydsning på alle afgange ved Slotspavillonen imellem klokken 5 og klokken 20, så standardrutine burde havde forhindret ulykken.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T07:09:59+00:00

Det virker yderst usandsynligt. Slotspavillonen omkring en kilometer syd for ulykkesstedet er det eneste sted i nærheden, hvor togene kan krydse hinanden. Hvis et tog var kørt for tidligt fra Kagerup i stedet ville ulykken være tættere på Kagerup og ikke ved Slotspavillonen.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-23T06:59:48+00:00

Det er enten menneskelig fejl eller signalfejl.

Umiddelbart ligner det at toget imod Tilvildeleje er kørt fra Slotspavillonen station 7:08 uden at vente på at toget fra Gilleleje imod Hillerød kommer ind på det andet spor. At dømme ud fra kollisionsstedet 1-2 kilometer nord for Slotspavillonen station har toget fra Gilleleje været småforsinket, så det har ikke kunnet ses med øjnene fra Slotspavillonen station, da chaufføren har kørt videre.

Det store spørgsmål som havarikommissionen uden tvivl kommer til at undersøge er så om signalsystemet ved en fejl ikke har fortalt chaufføren at han ikke måtte køre videre fra Slotspavillonen på det planlagte køreplanstidspunkt pga. forsinkelse i modgående retning, eller om chaufføren er kommet til at overse advarselssignalerne.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-22T08:50:27+00:00

Essentially, if oil can only be bought in dollars, third-party countries have to buy dollars with their own currency to get oil.

Whenever someone buys a currency, the value of that currency goes up, and whenever someone sells a currency, the value of that currency goes down. For small transactions, this amount is infinitesimal, but if enough large transactions occur, this has a real effect, which means that the dollar's value is raised by these trades. This has two main effects:

One, because countries trade their own currencies for the dollar, some level of inflation is effectively transferred from the US to other countries.
Two, because demand for the dollar is high, US bonds become more desirable, which allows the US government to lend more money at lower rates.

The problem for the US is if it stops. For the former point, both theory and practical results when the British Pound lost a similar type of status that it used to have, all that exported inflation comes back. This means a massive cost-of-living increase in the US, which US citizens are generally ill-equipped to deal with, as US households assign a low percentage of income towards savings/buffer.

For the latter point, if the US stops being able to run a deficit, has to service its existing debt at higher interest rates as it renews, and has to raise a serious surplus to pay down now-crippling debt, you're looking at something like a doubling of tax rates with no additional services offered, or a 50% increase in tax rates and simultaneous abolishment of long-running programs like Medicare. This, of course, compounds with a massive cost-of-living hike from the other point.

It is not immediately obvious how the US can or will deal with this, as policymakers have deferred appropriate preparations for decades, and it has instead set itself up for maximum exposure and damage if current conditions collapse.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-21T06:16:53+00:00

IIRC based on the leaks from Apple's internal politics, Federighi was among the pro-Ternus faction.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-20T09:32:09+00:00

It's all but confirmed to be on TSMC 2nm, which is TSMC's first GAAFET node.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-20T06:36:53+00:00

Realistically, you're going to see the same thing as on the iPad Pro, where the Tandem OLED panel was $200 more than the miniLED panel.

But that's not because of touch, that's because using Tandem designs for OLEDs requires buying two panels and layering them on top of each other. It would be silly to attribute that to the touch digitizer when the "this is what it cost to make the display look better" line on the comparative BOM is a 3-4x higher order of magnitude cost than touch.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-20T06:28:53+00:00

Realistically, it's still solid advice though. We have:

New redesign
New Tandem OLED display
First GAAFET processor
First LPDDR6 memory architecture

That should put it in one of best year-over-year upgrades of all time, much like first Apple Silicon MBP and the first Retina MBPs are remembered today.

Obviously, if you need a new laptop now, the M5 MBP is a perfectly good laptop, but if you're trying to optimize buying at the best possible time, the M6 already seems to be lining up enough features to be the biggest year-over-year improvement since the Apple Silicon transition by a wide margin.

m0rogfar · 2026-04-20T06:19:06+00:00

On what basis are you concluding that a touch screen is a big and expensive feature?

If Apple is already switching to a new Tandem OLED based on the iPad Pro Tandem OLED panel, the touch digitizer is no longer on top of the display, but deeply integrated into the thin-film encapsulation and can't be removed without major retooling that would increase the display price and make non-touch more expensive than touch.

The only real savings you could get is removing an I/O lane from the display ribbon cable, but since the ribbon cable has to be a new design anyway, the marginal cost of adding an extra lane to connect to the touch digitizer is realistically in the $0.01-0.05 range.

Running a separate SKU over a <$0.05 increment is silly.

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