This round, I'm definitely siding with Micron and

This round, I'm definitely siding with Micron and other memory stocks. It's not because Micron made me money (I also need low-cost storage to upgrade my equipment). It's because Apple has really been used to throwing its weight around, especially when memory prices didn't rise earlier.

Apple has long been selling memory at a premium. The price difference between the 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB models can directly cover the cost of a domestic Android phone. The Chinese version itself is a stripped-down model with an even higher gross margin. Now that memory prices are rising, at most, it just brings the premium-priced memory back to regular memory levels. Its gross margin might have decreased at most, but it's not losing money. Apple has always been one of the smartphone manufacturers with the highest gross margins. Now, with memory prices up, to protect its gross margin, it hasn't stood with consumers to get through this tough time together. Instead, it's somewhat encouraging consumers to blame the memory manufacturers for raising prices. However, scarcity drives value. AI infrastructure requires more storage. In the early days, you suppressed profits across the upstream and downstream industries while raising consumer prices, all for more profit, without ever thinking about significantly driving the development of the entire industry chain. So, for memory chip manufacturers, building factories takes an especially long time. What if, after building the factory, the underlying logic of AI changes, and it might not require so much memory? And their own inventory goes from tight production and urgent sales to supply balance or even oversupply. Which scenario offers greater, better profits? Building factories also costs money. When supply is abundant later on, they'll be forced to lower prices again.$Sandisk(SNDK.US)$Seagate Tech(STX.US)$Western Digital(WDC.US)$Micron Tech(MU.US)$Apple(AAPL.US)

Ryan-

Apple and Micron seem to be having a dispute. Micron's Chief Business Officer stated that the reason for the downturn in the last round of the memory market was because some customers continuously pushed down procurement prices.

He had told these customers who kept pushing down prices that this approach was detrimental to the industry. Due to a genuine lack of profit, most of the industry's factory construction investments in 2023 were forced to be terminated.

Now Apple blames the memory manufacturers for raising prices.

Apple is accustomed to playing the role of the big boss in the supply chain, with suppliers begging for its business. In the past, Apple's orders were strategic-level, and suppliers would sustain losses to secure them. But when the profit margin of HBM is several times that of LPDDR, and NVIDIA has secured over 60% of Micron's HBM capacity pre-orders, Apple has never experienced such cold treatment in the Cook era over the past few years 🙉

Apple as the big boss: If you don't supply, plenty of others will.

Memory as the big boss: If you don't want it, plenty of others do.

How the tables have turned.