You folks above are missing the point- increased demand and shorter supply means much lower pricing power and lower fab utilizations! In bizarro world!

The only real problem is if this causes a bubble - while you can build out more factory capacity, once the demand from Apple goes away you are back into an situation of over-supply. So you have to walk a fine line between building out too much capacity for the long term or not builing out enough and pissing off your customers. In any event, short term this should be good for the memory folks as it will give them pricing power and let them run their fabs at higher utilizations.

I don't get it. How is Apple buying 100mil chips a bad thing for the chip industry?

Isn't this the sort of thing they need right now?

Smartphones should help the tech sector ride out the recession. People "need" their mobile phones, and a regular contract upgrade path should help business.

This economic downcrunch redepression thing just keeps getting worse and worse.

Now of all things Apple has placed an order to buy chips from a company.

This could be devastating as buying things (AKA stuff) will only accellerate the downward spiral back towards the barbarism of the 1990's. Oh, and the impending doom of our species.