[jrockway]

First, Apple is the world’s leading volume buyer of a precious, expensive component: flash storage. They get better prices and priority availability from suppliers.

Do they get better prices than Samsung? Because Samsung is who designs and makes the flash memory. (Also, Wikipedia seems to say that Sony buys more than Apple.)

[wtallis]

If Apple has a long-standing contract for deliveries of flash, Samsung probably can't easily say that they'd prefer to keep the flash memory for use in their own gadgets. Considering that at times Apple has placed orders for more than half of Samsung's annual output, such a contract is likely to exist.

[jrockway]

That was back when flash was new and exotic, right? Every music player on the market is flash-based now, and so are many computers. Samsung's Wikipedia page says that Apple accounts for about 2% of their sales.

[wtallis]

I agree that the flash market has changed a lot in the past two years, but no mobile gadget maker can compete with Apple as a reliable consumer of flash memory. Even the newcomers who are using the flash to build SSDs probably have to deal with the fact that Apple's deal with Samsung was made first, and sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other companies, too.

[Tamerlin]

" sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other companies, too."

Of that I'm a bit skeptical. For one thing, this sort of idea was fairly common about the G4 processors, even though Apple was by far the smallest purchaser of G4 processors -- Ericsson, Cisco, and Nortel were shipping routers using G4's in tens of thousands while Apple was still taking pre-orders in some cases.

Another thing to consider is that Samsung is among the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing companies. They fabricate and sell enough semiconductor products to make even Intel's volume look comparatively small. Even with the iVolumes that Apple produces, it's hard to imagine that even they could be a dominant consumer by volume.

[wtallis]

By that I meant that it was largely Apple that proved that it was a good idea for Samsung to expand their flash production capabilities, and Apple also had a significant effect to drive their competitors to start buying flash in such large quantities. I don't think there's enough publicly available information to determine whether Samsung's profits off Apple were enough to directly finance a whole fab, but when one company starts buying half your production capacity of a commodity item, that's a good sign that expanding your capacity will soon be worth every penny invested.

[napierzaza]

Ugh ____ has 95% of the music player market.

Fill in the blank.

[dagw]

I'll answer "No one". Most numbers I can find place Apple in first place with around 75%.

[thomasz]

Are those international numbers? I'm just wondering, because if I would buy the cheapest nano, I'd have to pay 159€, which would be ~ 219$. That's not really competitive. The cheapest Air costs ~1,377, a 15'' Macbook Pro ~2,410.

[thomasz]

In revenue or in units shipped?

[GHFigs]

Wikipedia seems to say that Sony buys more than Apple

The table on the Samsung page lists companies by fracton of Samsung's total sales, not just flash memory. Nor, for that matter, does Apple only buy flash memory from Samsung.