[wtallis]

Even if we make the not-particularly-reasonable assumption that Apple would want to own a fab, and the wildly unreasonable assumption that they would accept any outside customers for the fab: building a fab business from scratch to something competitive would take on the order of a decade or more even for a company with Apple's resources. And if Apple bought somebody else's fab business, it seems most likely that it would be Intel's and there would no longer be an Intel do design chips that would be in search of a foundry. (Intel has the only relevant logic fab business that could plausibly end up getting sold off to the likes of Apple.)

[saltcured]

Yes, I suppose I was imagining the weird transition like AMD did when they split off Global Foundries. Imagine the remaining Intel being a chip designer like AMD. For someone of my age, it seems both incomprehensible and somehow inevitable. Crazy leadership choices seem to be happening so often in recent years.

Honestly, I found it hard to understand why they abandoned RAM and solid state memory fab sectors too. With all the national security spending by DoD, DoE, etc., I would have thought there is room for some US-based business to remain, even if some of the mass consumer stuff has been lost to low margin international competitors.

[Melatonic]

They already spun off Intel vs Intel Foundry into separate companies awhile back

Intel was in ram and solid state for a bit but didnt stick with it. Optane was a huge flop and they use different manufacturing techniques vs CPUs. Plus Micron is one of the biggest dram manufacturers and US based.

[throwaway173738]

They wanted to focus resources on the very profitable top end of the market and leave the low-margin commodity business to competitors. If you repeat that cycle enough eventually you just stop competing with anyone because you’ve fired everyone who has the capacity to do that. Then it’s only a matter of time before you get eaten for lunch.

[Someone]

> not-particularly-reasonable assumption that Apple would want to own a fab, and the wildly unreasonable assumption that they would accept any outside customers for the fab

Isn’t running a fab only while it makes top of the line chips a bad idea because you can still make good money from it in later years?

If so, I think they, _if_ they ever want to own a fab (unlikely, IMO), they’ll want to accept outside customers for it when it has stopped being best-in-the-world.