[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.