Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
Or the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.
And you think this is the first sign that they’ve decided they’re going to spend the next few years being a RAM reseller before starting to sell consumer products again?
No, but "shipping less RAM" is clearly on that spectrum. The point wasn't about literal product strategy, it's that there's a limit to what actions are financially feasible and it's set by "what else could you do with that junk?"
That's my whole point. M3 Max 128GB -> M3 Ultra 512GB. M5 Max 128GB -> M5 Ultra 512GB. But if M5 Max 192GB -> M5 Ultra 768GB, i.e. Ultra having 4x the memory of Max.
it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market
other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly
but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with
Yep, but it they had to double or triple it on short notice, they'd have just removed it from the store instead, and I imagine that the RAM is going into 256GB systems for more $$$ but still nothing really that alarming for the consumer.
