Apple freezes plan to use China's YMTC chips amid political pressure | Hacker News Reader

Apple freezes plan to use China's YMTC chips amid political pressure

asia.nikkei.com

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According to this YMTC ships the most advanced chips in the industry:

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/2022-nand-process-technology-...

Do iphones really use 2+ old generation flash memory? I was surprised by this fact.

Does it not make a big difference these days if you're 2-3 generations behind Samsung?

maybe for the older SE line?

An iPhone using the latest and greatest flash chips has 512GB but with older generation flash it would be more like 128GB... which is the model most people buy. Of course that assumes YMTC can sell their "obsolete" flash at a lower cost per bit.

Perhaps they need to use old (lower density) NAND chip for lower capacity model, because fewer chips means less parallelism, thus low performance.

According to the link from Semianalysis posted above, they are no longer behind Samsung, therefore they had to be hit urgently by US sanctions, otherwise they could have become the dominant producer of flash memories, like also Huawei could have become the dominant producer of smartphones, without the US sanctions.

YMTC can certainly be the dominant player with mediocre components under Apple's China-first strategy.

Flash is not power intensive, for iphone workloads

so it doesn’t matter. (ie not worth the cost)

the density is good enough already.

Plan to use YMTC? I thought Apple was moving away from China. /s

I mean I have been repeatedly stating this. Apple is doubling down on Chinese Supply Chain. There is no sign of Apple doing otherwise. The only difference is Assembly location.

I guess the export restriction forbids Apple to even buy anything from YMTC. Which means Apple cant even ( as they very likely will want to do ) have YMTC NAND for Chinese market.

Next is probably BOE. Where Apple would want BOE OLED for Chinese market.

Not normal for Apple to discourage competition amongst its suppliers. Must be some very heavy pressure indeed.

YMTC unable to guarantee delivery of chips medium/long term due to new US sanctions. Like how most countries didn't ditch Huawei until sanctions made future delivery impossible. TLDR is companies won't ditch increasingly high-value PRC tech unless US kneecaps them to take the option off the table. Ergo expect US to sanction anything competitive coming out of PRC going forward until there's a de-americanized supply chain.

Doesn't the latest EO make it outright illegal for Apple to purchase from YMTC?

Or can they go ahead if US suppliers can be substituted which I think there is a far chance they can for YMTC.

Basically, YMTC is on unverified list with presumption of denial. But as we saw with Huawei, many parties will try to lawyer / lobby way into exemptions, so the only sure fire way is also export controls that prevents YMTC from making competitive products in the frist place.

Apple is probably mad busy lobbying on behalf of China's tech industry, like how they fought the Uigher forced labor bill. Apple has sunk so much investment in China that their all-in China-first strategy is starting to hurt them now.

That is certainly one perspective. A likely perspective. A little more hopeful perspective is that people see that Xi is not fundamentally different than Putin and understand that money spent in China will eventually be used to attack Taiwan.

It is pretty clear to me that it is not ethical to do business with despots however pragmatic it may be.

Germany was clearly willing to sell Ukraine out to Putin, so you're probably right about the eventual consequences.

I didn't see any comments in your profile saying money sent to the US will eventually be used to launch bombs at non-white people. What do you have against Chinese people? Just coming off as jealousy and cope.

What do you really mean by "Xi is not fundamentally different from Putin"? You think both have same approach to politics? what sources informs your belief?

Germany _should_ be willing to sell out some other country to maintain their own economy and security of their people. It's supposed to be a democracy, the voters are german. Any german government that doesn't prioritize them over Ukrainian or US interests is corrupt

China has continued to insist that it will violently annex and assimilate Taiwan, a liberal democracy and one of our closest allies. Why should the United States enable its high tech industries with core critical technologies?

You are going upset Tim Apple with comments like that.

I don't see any similarity between Ukraine and Taiwan though. The US has been involved in the regime change in Ukraine at least since 2014 and actively funding/training the forces on the ground since. Taiwan has a lot of investment in China and their engineers are practically running China's chip industry now -- it's not clear to me how/what China would gain from a violent take over and an end of this symbotic relationship -- ie, there are so many downsides to this.

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