I have better luck with Samsung when it comes to memory/SSDs and TVs. I think you can't beat Samsung when it comes to RAM, flash and LCDs/OLEDs. Samsung SSDs are all made in-house, unlike others which buy 3rd party controllers and NAND from SK Hynix/Intel-Micron Flash/Toshiba. There's reason why Apple and Lenovo use Samsung PCIe AHCI/NVMe SSDs in their higher-end machines.

My parents have some Samsung appliances, they're going back to Whirlpool when that time comes around. No problems with their Sammy gas range and a dishwasher in a rental property though. A fridge and washer needed a service call. In Korea, Samsung also runs shopping malls, issues credit cards and was involved in aerospace with GE and Boeing as Samsung Techwin(they also armed the Korean military) - it's now Hanhwa Techwin.

I dunno. Apple has always been brand agnostic. And if the teardown reports are correct, they've been making a lot of their own SSD controllers. And aren't Apple SSDs non-standard using unique pinouts and different protocols? Some are even permanent parts of the main board.

Also - SK Hynix has been making their own complete NVMe SSDs.



I know a few people who work at their office in Silicon Valley where their controllers are designed. They bought a startup company for that expertise.

For the rMBPs from 2012-2015, Apple used mSATA but physically incompatible with a OTS mSATA for a PC like what Lenovo made popular. That was on the 2012 to mid-2013 rMBPs. The late-2013 to 2015 rMBPs used PCIe AHCI SSDs but the drives are physically incompatible with M.2 slots keyed for PCIe SSDs. There are adapters to fit a OTS mSATA or M.2 PCIe SSD into a rMBP. And High Sierra/Mojave supports NVMe for the late-2013 and newer rMBPs.

The new touch bar/TouchID MacBooks are all soldered on, and pretty soon Lenovo and HP will jump on that. Microsoft is already using soldered-on SSDs on the Surface.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+6+Teardown/113786

Making their own controller or not really has nothing to do with the quality, it is more of how much R&D each company wants to spend and what they already make. Intel and Toshiba obviously don't make DRAM anymore and SK Hynix technically make all of them as well (but they are not anywhere close to the best in SSD). On the other hand WD Black is really great but they don't make DRAM at all.

BTW, every computer brand use at least 2 suppliers, and since Samsung has 30%+ market share, everyone has to buy Samsung as well.

Apple bought Anobit, a group founded by M-System veterans in Israel (after they left when SanDisk bought them). Apple wants to integrate the flash controller into their A processor and use it with the NAND they buy from various OEM. I'd not be surprised if their laptop will use this controller with custom file system instead of the standard NVMe command in the future.

I've heard of M-Systems, they were a early pioneer of solid-state storage for embedded systems beyond that used for BIOS.

Apple started using PCIe NVMe in the iPhone 7 to take advantage of parallelism with bigger NAND chips and the new MacBooks have their storage soldered on. I'm not shocked Apple wants to make their own controllers so they aren't dependent on Samsung, Marvell, or the Taiwanese(Phison and Silicon Motion).

Samsung decided to use UFS instead of eMMC to interface storage to their SoCs. And most Android phones use eMMC. I guess it makes adding external storage easier since they don't need to add a USB to SD card host?

I remember someone where I worked bought one of their early ones for $99. Might have been 8 MB. They had a specific industrial design that they didn't change for years. I remember after a couple of years SanDisk had basically caught up and was selling higher capacity for much less.