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Think supply and demand rather than Moore's Law. If the supply of a chip goes down (e.g., a manufacturing plant gets hit by an earthquake) or demand goes up (Apple designs the chip into the next version of the iPhone), then its price could definitely go up.

I'd guess that the markets for chips would be driven by similar dynamics as other commodities, such as oil.

Maybe the next step will be real-time feeds for chip prices, and after that people will start trading chip futures on Wall Street?




Economies of scale also play into this pricing. You can have chips whose demand is actually quite low but enough for there to be some market and they could increase in value relative to parts being used in the newest iPhone (even though the iPhone clearly has much greater "demand").

Apple gets really good prices on their components even though they generate huge demand because the parts manufacturers know they'll be able to sell millions of whatever the part is, so they can afford to sell it with less margin for themselves per unit. This isn't true of smaller volume chips where the manufacturer has to price some amount of lost opportunity cost into a relatively small market item.


What do you suppose is after futures on wall street, just curious.




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