[derefr]

What's the reason, then, that anyone with the capital to do so (again, e.g. Apple) doesn't just build a RAM fab, to both get cheap RAM for themselves, and join the cabal selling marked-up RAM to others?

Seems like RAM manufacturing is like building a casino: expensive to do, but basically a sure bet.

[wtallis]

The problem is that you need to have $10+B to throw at the problem after you license patents from the incumbents, and even then you'll end up being behind them technologically by the time your fab is up and running, so your marginal costs won't be appreciably better than contracting with the existing manufacturers for their more advanced memory.

You could theoretically spend several times more than that to try to get ahead over the course of two or three generations, but for that kind of money you could just as easily secure some very preferential pricing from one or more of the incumbents, thereby ensuring that everyone else trying to put a lot of RAM into a PC has to pay more.

The most viable path to establishing a new leading-edge competitor in this space is for a government to throw lots of money at the problem, knowing that it'll be years at best before it produces anything competitive, but having the advantage of being able to more or less ignore IP issues and having a potential demand far higher than any one memory customer can produce on its own. China is doing this for the NAND market, too.

[fulafel]

There would be a lot of candidate oligopoly markets to attack if Apple got into that business with its war chest. A risk with the DRAM plan is that they could succeed in lowering prices but the costs would be unpredictable and they would then take a very long time to break even, givn the new lower margins, and would have to become a semi house that makes chips for other customers (to get required volume to break even), taking away focus from their consumer product business.

[xbmcuser]

Apple probably will in the future when it is no longer able to squeeze margins from other expensive parts. It invested in the screen manufacturing now has moved to producing it own processors looking at the next most expensive part it is a likely move. Ram chip and flash drives if you are large buyer you might look at producing your own. If they are able to use all the capacity of a fab they might look at doing so. Or like they did with sharp invest in a company that runs a fab for using majority of the production.