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primaprashant 2 hours ago [-]
These are the price changes mentioned in the article:
Macs
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
iPads
iPad: $449 (up from $349)
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599)
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749)
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999)
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)
More products:
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129)
HomePod: $349 (up from $299)
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99)
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)
GeekyBear 22 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, Microsoft announced their third XBox price hike today.
> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
zamadatix 11 minutes ago [-]
1.16x simple mean on XBOX
1.22x simple mean on Apple
Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
ErneX 7 minutes ago [-]
This isn’t the 1st increase they do on these consoles.
slantedview 2 hours ago [-]
Looking at a few retailers, it seems like prices haven't increased yet. Maybe in a few days?
seviu 2 hours ago [-]
Impulse bought a Pro with 48Gb ram on a retailer with old prices
Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out
z2 60 minutes ago [-]
Same here, reserved a 48GB M5 Pro shortly after seeing the news, and now I see the same retailer raised the price by over $1000. If they honor the sale, then this will be the most short term value I've gotten out of an HN submission ever.
seviu 21 minutes ago [-]
Same here. Buy now ask questions later. Pretty sure the shop where I bought it will happily cancel the order if I give the cancel order.
Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.
michaelchisari 1 hours ago [-]
Bought a MacBook Pro a year and a half ago and the equivalent configuration would be 47% higher today.
saaspirant 2 hours ago [-]
Why Air series prices have not increased?
Planning to buy an M2 Air, 32+1TB
turtlebits 43 minutes ago [-]
M2 is 3 years old and not sold by Apple anymore.
bredren 8 minutes ago [-]
The MBA m2 is still highly capable though!
I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.
bibimsz 32 minutes ago [-]
wow the almost 4 year old Apple TV 4k gets a 55% bump.
The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
knowaveragejoe 29 minutes ago [-]
Not to mention the non-first-party Google TV sticks/dongles. The Onn ones from Walmart range from $15-50 depending on how many bells and whistles you want. I really don't know why one would pick anything else.
zamadatix 22 minutes ago [-]
I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
jacobgold 3 hours ago [-]
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
bombcar 56 seconds ago [-]
I paid about $6k two days ago for a machine that's now above $8k.
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
zamadatix 2 minutes ago [-]
Performance was flying in the 90s. The last 1-2 decades if you bought a top end computer it'd easily last you the decade before it started to drag behind average. 3 decades ago if you bought a computer it'd reach the same point in 2-3 years.
mysterydip 3 hours ago [-]
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
dirkc 5 minutes ago [-]
I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
j1elo 2 hours ago [-]
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
CraigJPerry 16 minutes ago [-]
>> it will be consumers demanding
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
tyre 32 minutes ago [-]
I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
JumpCrisscross 22 minutes ago [-]
> If things don't work, they will blame the computer
Or the single app that slows it down.
jliptzin 36 minutes ago [-]
RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
AlexandrB 1 hours ago [-]
This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.
mbreese 1 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry - the cycle will reverse again at some point and we’ll go back to more powerful local machines.
AlecSchueler 20 minutes ago [-]
Why do you expect it would be cyclical when the power capture would be extremely valuable to the main players?
This is such a reddit take. Yeah electron takes a lot of resources, but there’s also a lot of software that never would’ve been made in the first place if we didn’t have it. It’s not as simple at pointing to (comparatively) inefficient software and saying that’s bad. Software is ubiquitous now and a big part of the reason for that is that frameworks and abstractions made software much easier to create.
I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.
AlecSchueler 19 minutes ago [-]
> This is such a reddit take
You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.
frollogaston 31 minutes ago [-]
I'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.
ac29 1 hours ago [-]
I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.
LoganDark 1 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't that all fit into less than 64k?
baron816 3 hours ago [-]
The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995?
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
SiempreViernes 2 hours ago [-]
Oh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
brookst 52 minutes ago [-]
C API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
fartcoin67 2 hours ago [-]
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AceJohnny2 3 hours ago [-]
> instead of unobservably better performance
That's... quite the choice of words there
alex7o 3 hours ago [-]
The problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
SteveNuts 2 hours ago [-]
> instead of unobservably better performance.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
AlexandrB 1 hours ago [-]
> work on things users care about
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
vlan0 3 hours ago [-]
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
35mm 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.
jurgenburgen 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Even beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
eloisant 1 hours ago [-]
Also it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society
frollogaston 30 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts.
Something being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.
betaby 3 hours ago [-]
"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"
iririririr 3 hours ago [-]
not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
koolba 2 hours ago [-]
Anytime inflation comes up and the relative power of computing devices is mentioned, I remember the classic[1] line that you can’t eat an iPad.
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
I'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.
normie3000 1 hours ago [-]
Try Google Meet. I have a similar spec Air, and that's where it falls down :'-(
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
> I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
my002 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.
thewebguyd 58 minutes ago [-]
Yeah that's pretty much what I play. Newer titles haven't interested me much lately except for a few. THis machine handles Diablo 4, Pragmata, all the elder scrolls titles, cities skylines, satisfactory, etc. just fine. Even managed to get AC:Shadows to run decently using the steam deck preset.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
dominicrose 3 hours ago [-]
Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
amlib 1 hours ago [-]
And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.
hamburglar 3 hours ago [-]
Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.
LeFantome 3 hours ago [-]
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
bartvk 1 hours ago [-]
Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?
RankingMember 1 hours ago [-]
Oh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.
nosioptar 3 hours ago [-]
My 2012 thinkpad still works well.
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
snootypoot 3 hours ago [-]
its worth noting that you were much less restricted with this 6k computer in 1996. today we are paying ever more for walled gardens that will eventually become nothing more than a portal to cloud services. we are not returning to a previous position, we are moving to a world where everything will be a thin client.
fl4regun 5 minutes ago [-]
depends on what the computer is, I'm running a desktop with linux, is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996?
cyberlurker 3 hours ago [-]
True but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah but these computers don't have sota performance by maybe more than a factor of 10. So an unfair comparison.
platevoltage 26 minutes ago [-]
If we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.
AbsurdCensor 1 hours ago [-]
Were you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
You may have equivalent power on that $6 computer but can you run the same applications?
jacobgold 3 hours ago [-]
In my case, yes, because I used to be a Linux user. I still am, but I used to be too.
Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
platevoltage 23 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure you can find an equivalent to ClarisWorks or Photoshop 3.0 that works on a Raspberry Pi.
breezeTrowel 3 hours ago [-]
1996 was 30 years ago. What about comparing prices from 3 years ago? 2023 vs 2026.
oceanyblues 3 hours ago [-]
Ordinary people do not buy devices for their computing power, they buy them for their utility. People will look at this and see only a device that delivers the exact same utility as before, but now with higher cost.
2 hours ago [-]
AIorNot 3 hours ago [-]
Well Conversely, in 1996 you, your spouse, your kids, didnt need a pc to live your lives - having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
zdragnar 2 hours ago [-]
> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
amlib 1 hours ago [-]
And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.
throw0101d 2 hours ago [-]
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
greenleafone7 3 hours ago [-]
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
throwawaytea 3 hours ago [-]
I come from th blue collar world of the central valley California. Every mechanic, car salesman, construction manager if not worker, owns their own home and has two kids. It's interesting how 60 miles east is a whole new world where you need a crazy fancy job to buy a home.
Brendinooo 3 hours ago [-]
>we...consider buying food a luxury
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
joenot443 2 hours ago [-]
Waste and sanitation jobs in Toronto start at $39k and get up to $120k+ if you’re driving the truck and leading a team
I would imagine we actually pay our municipal employees proportionally _more_ than we did back then.
Barrin92 1 hours ago [-]
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
spdionis 3 hours ago [-]
I mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.
silverquiet 3 hours ago [-]
How much do they make?
throwawaytea 3 hours ago [-]
There's many types. I sold Audi/Porsche and every now and then I'd sell a fancy car to a FedEx driver type that does long haul runs to other states (with a team driver next to him), and he'd be making $150k a year+. Not bad for 4 days a week work, and ability to live in a slightly lower cost area.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
spdionis 3 hours ago [-]
Often a mid level engineer salary at least.
bellowsgulch 3 hours ago [-]
And software is now so cheap, or free, that it's incredibly difficult to even start and maintain a single-member LLC software business.
kylec 3 hours ago [-]
And yet in some ways, modern computers feel slower than those from decades ago. Software today is so, so much less efficient than it was back then.
criddell 3 hours ago [-]
In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.
Great article. This is the kind of web design that I like.
russfink 3 hours ago [-]
Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
it'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
eatsyourtacos 2 hours ago [-]
That is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
dd8601fn 2 hours ago [-]
As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
throwaway613746 1 hours ago [-]
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bubbi 3 hours ago [-]
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pupppet 3 hours ago [-]
Computers got cheap due to necessity. The necessity is still there and raising prices is a rug pull.
as1mov 2 hours ago [-]
That's great, but then can you ask the manufacturers of the devices to support them for 20 years? Raw numbers mean jack shit if the device itself is completely abandoned and cannot run any applications. Banking, authentication and bunch of services require the device to be on the latest iOS/Android version, which is hard to do because the manufacturer dropped it like a hot brick after 5 years.
erxam 6 hours ago [-]
Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
cmdrmac 6 hours ago [-]
I share the same sentiment. I honestly thought that the price increases would occur as new products rolled out. Seems like with the "back-to-school" promotion right around the corner, Apple expects to sell more machines and find it harder to absorb the higher component price tags. I'm guessing that by changing the prices now, they'll still maintain their profit margins per unit at the expense of total unit sales.
ksec 3 hours ago [-]
And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
stouset 1 hours ago [-]
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
AbsurdCensor 1 hours ago [-]
Memory prices are certainly going up, but Apple already makes a 40% profit margin on their products. That $1 trillion+ bank account still gotta go up no matter what right?
choilive 2 hours ago [-]
Apple was on the USB Implementers Forum that designed USB-C so.. I would say they could definitely be credited as a co-inventor of USB-C, they also introduced one of the first devices that used USB-C.
brookst 42 minutes ago [-]
In addition to being the sole inventors of lightning (the connector), which directly informed the USB-C spec based on learnings from field use.
Apple doesn't get solo credit for USB-C, but they were certainly essential to it. Just compare the USB-C physical interface to the USB-3 micro or super speed type B ports and compare design sensibilities.
AlexandrB 1 hours ago [-]
And then they went too far and introduced laptops that only used USB-C before finally setting at a (so far) happy medium.
Kirby64 46 minutes ago [-]
> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
rootusrootus 37 minutes ago [-]
> a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple
That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.
copperx 2 hours ago [-]
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
kube-system 1 hours ago [-]
They mean stick as in criticism.
And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.
Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.
MBCook 5 hours ago [-]
I thought they would but not this fast.
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
If anything they seem to be ones who managed to delay increasing prices more than the rest.
akmarinov 6 hours ago [-]
They didn’t increase prices on iPhones, Apple Watch and Airpods
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
Those are next in line, it’s almost guaranteed.
5 hours ago [-]
conductr 5 hours ago [-]
September new versions will likely start at a price point than they would have
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and seems they are only releasing the Pros and the foldable this year, and will release the base and e models in Spring.
akmarinov 5 hours ago [-]
For sure but an iPhone has more RAM than a Neo and those went up $100, so they’re at least eating the price difference for another ~3 months
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, iPhone is nearly half of Apple's revenue or more, it's in their interest to eat a little margin away to keep it moving, increase will come with the 18 this fall.
All their other products are lower volume.
benoau 4 hours ago [-]
Only the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air have 12GB of RAM, and they're ~10 weeks away from new models so probably well past their peak sales.
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah I don’t think they will touch current models.
furyofantares 2 hours ago [-]
Why would AirPod prices increase?
kube-system 44 minutes ago [-]
Everything competing for fab capacity is more expensive. The Apple H2 is 7nm and TSMC has raised prices for that capacity.
MBCook 5 hours ago [-]
I’d say they’re subsidizing them with the rest but the computers and iPads don’t sell much compared to phones so that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
dajonker 6 hours ago [-]
It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
sockaddr 2 hours ago [-]
I read the same comment and thought it made sense too.
cassianoleal 6 hours ago [-]
Didn't they literally say they would, just a few days ago? Why would you all say they wouldn't? What would they gain by lying about price hikes?
angoragoats 5 hours ago [-]
The only news about this I saw was that Cook confirmed that price increases were inevitable, but he wouldn't say when or how they would come. I think most people erroneously took this to mean that they'd roll them out gradually as products were refreshed.
5 hours ago [-]
TalkingCodeMonk 6 hours ago [-]
The fact that a dozen companies are allowed to buy up the entire global supply of core components, and increase the cost of living for every human on Earth, is full blown dystopian.
Matl 6 hours ago [-]
That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
Aurornis 6 hours ago [-]
> That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
Matl 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's better to not do anything right? After all 'the market' is working for some.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
> But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
Matl 52 minutes ago [-]
There's solutions to everything you mention and as I said, usually when sanctions are applied to countries, companies and individuals are meant to deal exactly with this.
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
Aurornis 17 minutes ago [-]
> If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to,
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
Matl 1 minutes ago [-]
> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM
That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI megacorporations to completely buy out the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.
If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not 'o people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.
It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.
If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
I'd argue that's incentive enough.
klibertp 3 hours ago [-]
> but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
FridgeSeal 1 hours ago [-]
> The demand for AI data centers is global
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
jrflowers 51 minutes ago [-]
>another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Fascist trillionaire
15155 1 hours ago [-]
> Yes, it's better to not do anything right?
Ah yes, "We have to do something! Something must be better than nothing!"
Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.
Matl 49 minutes ago [-]
I applaud you for standing for Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI's freedom to price everyone else out of the market, because noone else will.
Teever 25 minutes ago [-]
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices.
How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
> > That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
> Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
> People have problems DISCUSSING the idea.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
mmcnl 23 minutes ago [-]
The AI "market" is not a free market. It needs regulation.
alex43578 6 hours ago [-]
What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.
Matl 6 hours ago [-]
> What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
Aurornis 6 hours ago [-]
It’s a global phenomenon. The latency concerns for data centers are minimal, so they could be built anywhere.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
JumpCrisscross 15 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, imagine doing that for oil. American and EU companies that “hoard” oil get punished. The net effect would be everyone else gets to buy more and prices remain exactly the same.
testing22321 6 hours ago [-]
The old race to the bottom.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
It’s the old supply and demand in a global market.
It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.
m4rtink 6 hours ago [-]
Not saying this is the solution, but strategic reserves of important commodities exist.
Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?
So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
Good news, you get the DDR2 that has been languishing in a salt cave for the last 20 years.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
win311fwg 6 hours ago [-]
So, in practice, if, say, the agriculture industry buys up the supply of seeds (they already effectively do) and we see it start driving significant inflation for food (a common concern), the agriculture industry would be restricted from buying seeds?
Matl 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, because we can't apply specific regulation for specific industries where it makes sense, we have to write them as if we were LLMs so they can be proven to 'not work'.
win311fwg 5 hours ago [-]
We can, but that isn't how the proposed regulation is written.
mghackerlady 6 hours ago [-]
The only thing the US could feasibly implement is forcing micron to allocate a certain amount of its production for consumer use
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
Why? Why is consumer use vs corporate use a higher and better priority meriting such an intrusive regulation?
angoragoats 5 hours ago [-]
Because extreme corporate use, that is, what is happening now where a majority of supply is locked up ahead of time via B2B back-room deals, is anti-consumer. Unregulated, it is easy to see how this could lead to a perpetual "rent everything" dystopian environment for consumers.
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
Every use of DRAM is a corporate use, with the best consumer-friendly examples like Apple’s efforts to hold down prices (until today) being thanks to “back room deals”. Nobody’s buying some DRAM to build a memory stick in their garage.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
angoragoats 5 hours ago [-]
Barring any single company from negotiating to buy more than a certain percentage of a given existing market of goods would be a start. Companies would still be free to build their own factories/fabs if they didn't like it.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago [-]
What evidenced-backed regulation would solve this problem?
groundzeros2015 6 hours ago [-]
The cure for high prices is high prices. This increase in demand is encouraging economization. Factories which make components are trying to operate for more hours. Producers who haven’t gotten into RAM may try it out. Large companies like Apple may test alternative suppliers. Consumers who don’t really need an upgrade will wait, allowing others who need it to buy one.
hackingonempty 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, RAM is more like a taxi than an umbrella.
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
No? It’s an interchangeable component which is manufactured at scale by many suppliers.
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
hackingonempty 5 hours ago [-]
Building a RAM factory is a major investment and takes a lot of time. There is a big risk that by the time you enter production the rain will have stopped in the form of reduced demand and/or algorithmic improvements that reduce the memory required to produce good results. All of the attention is on the well funded frontier labs who may be buying up RAM as much to starve out competitors as anything else while in the background there is an army of researchers all over the world who only have a handful of consumer GPU to work with.
groundzeros2015 5 hours ago [-]
I already mentioned 3 ways we get more RAM and none of them require building new factories. Although, I would not doubt that effort is also ongoing.
hackingonempty 5 hours ago [-]
The only one you mentioned was existing factories extending production hours. AFAIK they already operate 24/7! Apple can't switch suppliers because everyone is selling out. Semiconductor factories are specialized and can't be easily switched to other types. It takes time and money and it stops making money for the duration, leading to a similar risk analysis as building a new one.
groundzeros2015 4 hours ago [-]
1. existing factories increasing production
2. factories but are not making ram switch
3. Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something.
This means:
1. You wait for build out and prices go down.
2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.
And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.
throw2ih020 3 hours ago [-]
> existing factories increasing production
All existing factories have maximized their production.
> factories but are not making ram switch
It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.
> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
What alternative exists for NAND flash?
groundzeros2015 10 minutes ago [-]
> All existing factories have maximized their production.
Citation needed.
This is almost certainly not true because capacity is not binary but an efficiency curve. As the cost of RAM increases it becomes economical to operate the factory at higher capacities.
> It takes 2-3 years to switch
Citation needed. Who sets the max speed limit for changing?
> What alternative exists for NAND flash?
There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah but if you think about it... you don't really _NEED_ any of this stuff. It's all "want" and not "need" deep down. We don't really need smartphones, we're just led to believe we can't live without them.
Libcat99 5 hours ago [-]
This is true in the same sense you don't need to own a pair of shoes.
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
kube-system 40 minutes ago [-]
Technology and semiconductors are part of the supply chain for all modern necessities.
as1mov 5 hours ago [-]
It's 2026, the _WANTS_ are reserved for the ultra wealthy. The rest of us plebs should be happy we're getting 1500 calories everyday with a room to go back to in the evening, after increasing shareholder value everyday. Oh and don't forget to reduce your plastic usage to save the planet.
angoragoats 5 hours ago [-]
I want to believe this is true, but I am increasingly encountering situations IRL where saying "I don't have a smartphone" would be a serious hindrance to doing whatever it is I'm doing.
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
What helped me come to my conclusion is trying to come up with concrete examples, so like "I need a smartphone cause I need maps going to a place I've never been before" instead of "I need a smartphone for whatever it is I'm doing."
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
qaq 6 hours ago [-]
If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
coldtea 6 hours ago [-]
People will consume a lot of things offered below actual cost thanks to VC and cheap loans.
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
qaq 5 hours ago [-]
Most of Anthropic revenue looks to be companies paying for Claude Code at API prices ...
Insanity 6 hours ago [-]
They are reserving future HW productions to meet their hypothetical usage as well. Which is why others (like Apple) can’t reserve it for their future products.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
qaq 6 hours ago [-]
Yes 65B ARR that Anthropic has is clear indication there is no path to revenue.
Insanity 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I should have said "profit path", good catch!
They have revenue, but their cost scales with revenue and they're losing more than they are making.
Their costs do not scale linearly with revenue. Inference is expensive, but it's a variable cost. Anthropic's overall costs include massive fixed costs in training, which are the same regardless of usage.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
qaq 5 hours ago [-]
If people are sure they can always short NVIDIA
mrbungie 6 hours ago [-]
How much money does that revenue cost though? If I had to steel-man GPs argument I'd ask for profits rather than revenues.
qaq 6 hours ago [-]
We will see once they go public Dario did claim profit margin on inference is 40% if memory serves me right
mrbungie 5 hours ago [-]
That's convenient accounting. The reality is that they can't stop training since they risk losing customers if they do so. So they shouldn't factor it out of profitability analysis.
qaq 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of factors there we will see how it plays out.
overgard 5 hours ago [-]
Yes Dario is well known for his honesty
qaq 5 hours ago [-]
hence the bit about us learning the actual state of things once they are a public company.
danabrams 6 hours ago [-]
This is not sustainable forever unless their hypothetical usage is realized, and eventually the bill will come due.
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
butlike 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like the fact Apple raised their prices means they foresee this lasting a lot longer than 3-6 months.
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
This is going to be the 1st increase of a series of increases. I don’t think this will ease in the next 2-3 years.
rpgbr 6 hours ago [-]
Ask every Windows 11 or Google consumer that doesn't give a damn for AI and, yet, has been almost forced to use Copilot and Gemini…
crypttales 6 hours ago [-]
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stavros 6 hours ago [-]
What's OpenAI going to do? Not secure supply for their product? If you don't like the hardware price increases, don't use LLMs.
Insanity 6 hours ago [-]
You are assuming the HW shortage is the result of meeting a real demand and not just build-outs for a hypothetical demand that might never materialize.
coldtea 6 hours ago [-]
>What's OpenAI going to do?
Close down would be a good idea.
mmcnl 20 minutes ago [-]
The world would be a better place without AI, OpenAI, Anthropic and all others. It only immerses the world into chaos, dystopia and increased inequality. So far nothing for the public good has come out of it.
crypttales 6 hours ago [-]
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robin_reala 6 hours ago [-]
I broadly don’t use LLMs (once or twice a month), yet I’m still being hit by hardware price increases.
coldtea 6 hours ago [-]
>I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
balls187 2 hours ago [-]
Not OpenAI’s fault that the cost of a shipping container doubled.
I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.
suddenexample 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, sure shipping is more expensive but that’s definitely not the cause of Apple’s price increases.
quentindanjou 1 hours ago [-]
The cause is the whole thing, cost of shipping (container, gas, etc), cost of components (RAM, SSD, etc), cost of tariff, cost of lobbying and lawsuits, and overall inflation cost.
And AI is the reason why developers are being laid off.
Don't trust a fox to count your chickens.
tavavex 5 hours ago [-]
Anyone else here enjoy living in the future? Look at us, we get AI megacorporations ruling the world and bestowing us with the power to use their servers for just $20-200/month. It's practically charity, and all we had to give up for it is all consumer hardware, the quality of the internet and our own jobs. I love it here!
throwaway-11-1 53 minutes ago [-]
Wish I could shake the hidden hand in gratitude
Theodores 1 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
lastofthemojito 4 hours ago [-]
This feels like the car market during COVID.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
mcv 3 hours ago [-]
I just received my new MacBook yesterday. Today it's more than €700 more expensive than what I paid.
base698 2 hours ago [-]
I was going to upgrade my M3 Max to an M5 Max with more RAM. The machine I priced out was $5400 yesterday and costs $7500 today.
RulerOf 1 hours ago [-]
I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door.
The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.
A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
Yep, I had the exact same (but in euros), also a discounted m5 in December. I feel pretty lucky with that timing, not that it benefits me in any way but that feels like getting one of the last ticket for a concert
tempoponet 3 hours ago [-]
I bought an irresponsible pile of homelab equipment in 24/25. Hard drives, SSD, memory, GPUs.
I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.
At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.
websap 3 hours ago [-]
Naaah, no way anyone buying that for profit
rogerrogerr 3 hours ago [-]
Why not?
frankus 4 hours ago [-]
If you're in the US, Costco has certain models at the old price through Saturday (or while supplies last). Just pulled the trigger on a 24GB/1TB 13" MbA for $250 off the new price.
iammiles 3 hours ago [-]
Appreciate the tip. Just ordered the 24GB/1TB M5 Pro at $50 below the old price point.
GeekyBear 2 hours ago [-]
Amazon has Prime Day discounts off the old price today.
hoten 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
yegle 4 hours ago [-]
Oh the bright side they do offer $AAPL with a 5% discount today.
piinbinary 6 hours ago [-]
I have a suspicion these new prices will stick around, even after the RAM shortage ends.
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
revolvingthrow 6 hours ago [-]
>what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending?
Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
forestingfisher 16 minutes ago [-]
China won’t invade Taiwan. Be realistic
15155 1 hours ago [-]
> Taiwan invasion
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
haunter 6 hours ago [-]
It’s a permanent price hike
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
ErneX 5 hours ago [-]
The new Xbox CEO said recently they are expecting storage prices to be 5x what they were late 2025 by late 2027. And that RAM should be similar.
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
brandrick 6 hours ago [-]
Considering what's causing it, I can't imagine it's a particularly short timeline.
jorvi 6 hours ago [-]
With new fabs built and AI demand shrinking, they will have to. If they don't, considering the last lost price fixing case, they will be absolutely crushed by the EU and probably other governments as well.
mDyJzDPmBdG 6 hours ago [-]
On supply side 3 years is about right, new plants won't come online faster. Demand might collapse faster if some AI companies go bankrupt or at very least fail next funding round.
thewebguyd 4 hours ago [-]
Depends on who goes bankrupt and what happens to their IP when it happens. If OpenAI or Anthropic liquidate, and the IP gets scooped up by MS, Amazon or Google, demand will remain, the public clouds will still want to run them. Maybe some pressure will come off if they lose the appetite to train new models for a while, inference is cheaper, but they'll still finish some of the buildout.
dwa3592 6 hours ago [-]
Until China floods the market with their memory which is starting
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing it with NAND.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
dwa3592 3 hours ago [-]
right, but that seems to be the only viable path for any reduction in prices unless the bubble suddenly pops which these ultra qualified people (sam, dario, elon, oracle and so many more) won't let happen.
justincormack 6 hours ago [-]
At least 3 years maybe more.
locallost 47 seconds ago [-]
To be honest, Apple's pricing has been up to a point pretty user friendly the last few years. Two years ago I bought an iPad for around 400 because everyone thought they'll announce a new one. That didn't happen until last year where they announced the new one but for 350 or so. Macbooks are also "cheap" considering what you get for them with the M chips.
draginol 3 hours ago [-]
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
> So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
bitmasher9 1 hours ago [-]
512GB unified memory is targeting local inference of large models, or local training of non-frontier models.
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
I doubt you can run a model that requires hundreds of GB of RAM at an acceptable speed (tok/s) on a MacBook.
ghaff 14 minutes ago [-]
Just got a new MacBook Air.
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
I suspect that these prices are going to seriously dent sales. RAM is getting crushed. I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation onto all the hardware that the cloud companies bought up for AI and found wasn't possible to get any ROI out. Bezos was all over that already.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
paulmist 5 hours ago [-]
Personal anecdote on ROI - I was at an early stage startup earlier this year where we had some burstable long-running GPU tasks (<100 VMs). Accross GCP and OCI we couldn't get our hands on L40S on-demand, and had to resort to T4s (released 2018). Sometimes even these were unavailable, and we would have a P4 (2016!) fallback. AWS sells A100s (2020) at $4/hr except they don't even have capacity for x1 versions, you have to rent x8.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
AWS runs a hell of a lot of old junk. I was surprised at how we managed to save a lot of money not using it as well.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
> I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
The MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. That's still significantly more powerful than anything you could buy at that price point last year.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
Get an XPS13 for the same money, and put Linux on it. It's a much better hardware/software combo, and Apple can't unilaterally kill it by refusing to provide upgrades a few years from now.
frollogaston 53 minutes ago [-]
Yeah it'll just be dead on arrival instead
infecto 5 hours ago [-]
Supply chain crunches are not unique or new. It happens. Earth is flooded with powerful smartphones, Mac’s are already on M5 generation. Most people already get most of their computing from their phone. We will be fine.
gonzalohm 5 hours ago [-]
You mean the same phones that we own less and less with each passing day? I cannot even turn off OS updates anymore. Is it even my phone if I can't do whatever I want with it?
infecto 5 hours ago [-]
What does this have to do with this thread? Go buy any other device then. My point is the doom and gloom is overblown, we have massively powerful devices already, no dark age is coming.
This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [-]
Pixels (and Motorolas now?) are nearly the only devices left with unlocked bootloaders.
And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.
"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)
infecto 3 hours ago [-]
Again, what does this have to do with the discussion at hand. Replace phone with a laptop, desktop. A locked down phone has nothing to do with doom and gloom for the dark ages of computing. This is so far off topic I should not even be replying.
otter-in-a-suit 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they've done the math. Mac has ~8% revenue share for Apple and I (naively) assume they'll just account for a 20% drop in sales with 20% higher prices. Personally, if my Mac were to die right now, I'd scream and shout (well, I'd use Apple Care...), but I won't go back to a Linux laptop, since I'm too deep into the ecosystem. And I suspect I'm not alone.
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
Same boat here. If I had to, I could grab an Air instead and do more work over ssh. I prefer to keep things local, but it's not a huge deal breaker for my work. I'm too deep in the ecosystem to get anything else, and I need Xcode anyway.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
overgard 5 hours ago [-]
GPU farms aren't that useful for general purpose work
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah but there's a huge amount of generic estate to support those GPUs.
varispeed 5 hours ago [-]
I know some organisations were already moving to thin clients last year. Citing cutting costs and improving security (the data doesn't stay in employee's laptop and all access to virtual desktop is thoroughly centrally logged).
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
frollogaston 29 minutes ago [-]
It's been like this for over a decade, and for legit reasons.
thewebguyd 4 hours ago [-]
We aren't quite there yet where I work but those conversations are starting. We've already pushed refresh cycles out for the non-tech folks from 3 years out to 5 years with justification (basically has to be broken or battery shot, otherwise its run it til it dies or no longer gets updates, no more automatic refresh).
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
khriss 4 hours ago [-]
I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
y1n0 4 hours ago [-]
Apple has been weathering this for a while. Maybe it was bad timing with a contract rollover but they seem to have lost their primacy with TMSC.
I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.
But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
theturtletalks 3 hours ago [-]
Even when the M5 Pro MacBook 16 released, they did raise the price $100 but upped the hard drive to 1TB. I really thought they would wait to raise prices until the next cycle but this is a bit alarming.
3 hours ago [-]
ClarityJones 3 hours ago [-]
If they never raise their prices, they can't drop them.
TheJoeMan 2 hours ago [-]
Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
Or it's just a bluff since their memory upgrade prices were actually some of the lowest compared to the rest of manufacturers.
layer8 3 hours ago [-]
The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.
paxys 1 hours ago [-]
It’s not a storm anymore but the new normal. People waiting for prices to come down are going to be very disappointed.
Analemma_ 4 hours ago [-]
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)
matthewfcarlson 3 hours ago [-]
That's a double edged sword. Assuming it's an 18 month contract, even when ram prices do go back to "normal" it's a year and a half until Apple has savings to pass onto to customers.
ClarityJones 3 hours ago [-]
Raising prices allows Apple to reduce demand, possibly creating some flexibility in the durations of the current contracts.
dofm 4 hours ago [-]
Right — if we can know how long ago the contracts were agreed we can predict how much more the price will have to rise, because 20% sounds like the beginning of the problem.
stouset 3 hours ago [-]
Apple is notorious for their prices being extremely stable for a given SKU. If anything, this is Apple getting out ahead of where they expect memory prices to be long-term, so they can rip off the band-aid once and don’t have to do it again.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
Well, hopefully :-)
I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.
stouset 1 hours ago [-]
This kind of broad mid-cycle price update is essentially unprecedented for Apple. Their price points are extremely reliable, and even only occasionally do they tweak an individual product price up or down during a refresh.
I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.
If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
Its a very, very long “storm”, at some point you have to re-adjust, even if it is very painful
3 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
breezeTrowel 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this is the real reason Tim Cook is resigning as CEO. He's a supply chain guy and semiconductor supply chains seem utterly borked right now.
avgDev 4 hours ago [-]
Personal computing is in shambles right now. It has been for a bit. It was hard to buy video cards for a while, now other components are affected too.
toddmorey 4 hours ago [-]
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
vlovich123 4 hours ago [-]
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
tverbeure 4 hours ago [-]
When fabs are full, you produce silicon with the highest margins.
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
Personal computing was essentially dead when companies figured that renting hardware and software and charging monthly subscriptions was a lot more profitable.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
It's not dead. I refuse to rent hardware and software. I host all of my stuff at home on my own hardware, and encourage those around me to do the same. I have converted countless e-waste laptops to Linux and will continue to do so. Personal computing is only dead if you accept that outcome.
pasc1878 2 hours ago [-]
But the latter mindset from companies was a main reason why personal computing took off.
Scroll_Swe 3 hours ago [-]
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...
Dont get the panic. :)
ryzenn 9800x3d
32GB ram
9070xt
about 2k
sneak 3 hours ago [-]
This is ridiculous. A used M1 MBAir is the best personal computing value ever offered in the history of the world.
frollogaston 54 minutes ago [-]
Yep, replaced my old Mac Pro with an M1 Mac mini that's actually faster. MacBook Neo is probably faster and nicer for most people's uses than what they already have, except of course video games.
akulbe 4 minutes ago [-]
I bought a full spec M5 Max MBP. Yesterday.
I'm relieved.
akulbe 4 hours ago [-]
WOW. I'm glad I bought the beast yesterday.
The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
archvile 4 hours ago [-]
Mac Studio?
I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
akulbe 3 hours ago [-]
No, M5 Max MBP with all the options.
I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.
I have an M2 Max, as well, and I wonder what I could get for it on resale... or maybe I should just keep it.
sneak 3 hours ago [-]
Crippled how?
ojbyrne 3 hours ago [-]
Only available with 1 memory config - 96 gb. They used to have 512 and 256.
efficax 3 hours ago [-]
my M1 mac studio from 2022 is still going strong and i can't see a reason to replace it in the next few years anyway
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
Wow, how much did you pay? $10k? That’s a beefy config
akulbe 2 hours ago [-]
$7349, and as of today, it'd be $10149
dgellow 24 seconds ago [-]
That price hike hurts to see
Aurornis 6 hours ago [-]
I was considering a 128GB MacBook Pro earlier this week.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
theYipster 9 minutes ago [-]
Two weeks ago I purchased an M5 Max MacBook Pro 16 inch with 128GB RAM and a 4TB SSD from Microcenter for $5100. (They had a $900 discount on the machine.) Not sure if that deal is still around, or if Microcenter still has any stock, but if you're in the market, I'd make a run for it! $5100 is now $8000 on Apple (and if ordered via Apple, it won't ship until August.)
kamranjon 6 hours ago [-]
Damn I was considering an m5 max with 128gb just a few days ago and it was 5099 and now it’s 6699 - 1.6k increase - definitely a massive increase and has dissuaded me - this is pretty insane.
mirashii 6 hours ago [-]
There are some Apple resellers that haven't quite caught up to the price increase yet. I just got a 14" M5 Max 128G, 2TB for $5100 off Amazon through Adorama, https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr... seems to have them in stock as well.
sixothree 6 hours ago [-]
Already gone at least from what I'm seeing.
mirashii 6 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm glad I snap bought, looks like I may have gotten the last one on Amazon for the 14" at least. I see a couple 16" options around at slightly higher than they were at retail but steal cheaper than Apple's new prices.
6 hours ago [-]
ErneX 9 minutes ago [-]
I got a Mac Mini on Amazon in July 2025 for 575€, the exact model is currently 969€ in the Apple Store.
ChicagoDave 3 hours ago [-]
I was literally ordering an M5 MacBook Pro tomorrow. The total is $900 more now. Might have to hold off and just live with my M4 Mini.
jghn 3 hours ago [-]
I came very close to pulling the trigger on an M5 Air the other night to replace my venerable M1 Air. Wound up deciding I'd wait until M6. Doh!
freediddy 2 hours ago [-]
Go to Amazon, they still have old pricing.
honeycrispy 3 hours ago [-]
I mean the writing was very clearly on the wall.
mkhpalm 2 hours ago [-]
I was just about to buy a new macbook myself but I guess I'm out now. Not sure what else to do except install linux on my current macbook to keep things supported.
dwaite 3 hours ago [-]
Third party retail may very well have not reflected the price increase yet. If not BTO, you could order today possibly for store pickup tomorrow.
freediddy 2 hours ago [-]
Go to Amazon quickly. They still have yesterday's prices.
SamuelAdams 3 hours ago [-]
Check your local Costco, I snapped up a 512 GB model for 1197 last Saturday.
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
I hate it when my time machine does that.
sleepybrett 3 hours ago [-]
My niece graduated and is headed off to college in the fall and I picked her up a macbook as a graduation present, knew that apple's prices were still artificially low and a price hike was coming and ordered it the day before they announced that prices were going to go up.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
dwaite 3 hours ago [-]
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
sleepybrett 2 hours ago [-]
That's kind of my point, the existing manufacturers are falling short, in apple's eyes. Every single device they sell requires storage and ram, every single item's price is going up. That's going to hit them very hard.
mullingitover 1 hours ago [-]
Obviously AI hardware crunch will get blamed for this, rightfully, but there's another story here: inflation is back.[1]
I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.
The personal computer is getting more and more expensive. Here we are, where it's getting harder and harder to get a computer to create your art but you can get a subscription to any AI company for a fraction of the computer's cost and get your "prompt" art.
And that's ridiculous.
Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
voidfunc 2 hours ago [-]
> And that's ridiculous.
Change and the future are uncomfortable. You can embrace it or be left behind. You cant stop it.
mnls 2 hours ago [-]
> be left behind
Left behind on what exactly?
isoprophlex 2 hours ago [-]
Mediocrity
rpgbr 5 hours ago [-]
Devs reading this, please start making your apps less memory hungry.
All the people running any computer appreciate.
protoster 2 hours ago [-]
Don't get your hopes up. The industry is well underway in migrating everything possible away from native apps to Electron.
nxc18 38 minutes ago [-]
People for some reason forget that for most election apps you can run it in a browser tab and avoid almost all of the overhead.
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
bigyabai 3 hours ago [-]
Message recieved, porting my webapp to Electron ASAP.
as1mov 5 hours ago [-]
Realistically this will just be used to force people into even more subscriptions.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
GeekyBear 3 hours ago [-]
If you wanted to buy in the near term, Amazon is offering Prime Day discounts off of the old prices today.
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
Resell them, or make a tiny hosted cloud farm to help devs that don't own a mac build an app for ios
BigTTYGothGF 6 hours ago [-]
Seems like an awful lot of work.
6 hours ago [-]
worldsavior 6 hours ago [-]
Sell them.
znpy 3 minutes ago [-]
> M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
discopicante 6 hours ago [-]
Quite convenient outcome for the AI labs + hyperscalers that the barrier of entry to running (usable + performant) open source models on your own hardware is getting higher, not lower.
brandon272 6 hours ago [-]
Was looking at upgrading my M1 Air (16/1TB) to an M5 Air (24/2TB). This price increase changes the time horizon of that upgrade from “now” to “let’s try and get 18-24 more months out of this thing”.
electriclove 5 hours ago [-]
Prices have not updated at some retailers yet (Amazon, Best Buy, Costco). Get a move on! Prices are not going to come down anytime soon
brandon272 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately the configuration I need is not available through any of those retailers.
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
sirbutters 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly the M1 Air still has many years of life still. It's an amazing machine.
kamranjon 4 hours ago [-]
How does something with 232 comments and 207 points over just 2 hours get pushed to the 3rd page in hacker news? I’m just really curious how it works, like why would something with so much engagement be push down so quickly?
as1mov 2 hours ago [-]
It's the flamebait detector. Any post which gets a lot of comments in a short time gets pushed down quickly. Though the mods usually push it back up if it doesn't involve touchy topics like politics.
kamranjon 2 hours ago [-]
Oh interesting! Thanks for the context I had no idea that was a mechanic - also it seems like the mods merged it with another thread and now it’s back on the front page.
zchrykng 41 minutes ago [-]
Dodged that bullet. Heard Tim Cook's comments and decided to pull the trigger on the machine I was debating as I didn't think Gruber was right on them waiting until new models to change prices.
lanthissa 23 minutes ago [-]
3 months ago "mac mini, neo, and air prices are to good to be true"
and then the monkeys paw curled
darioush 6 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%
hibikir 6 hours ago [-]
Inflation is an average of many things. Computer components have a huge spike in demand with insufficient increase in supply, which is going to lag for years, so we might as well be buying at auction. It's not a price that flows through the entire economy, like the price of oil.
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
timacles 3 hours ago [-]
You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
Kirby64 29 minutes ago [-]
> You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?
No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
> Inflation is an average of many things
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
rsanek 3 hours ago [-]
Turns out, BLS actually lists this stuff when they release CPI figures.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
Eggs. That was the last omg inflation is crazy story and now they're about as cheap as they've ever been.
RaSoJo 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
5 hours ago [-]
yardie 5 hours ago [-]
The base model 13" MBA was $799. I remember because I needed a laptop for our son to continue attending school during COVID shutdown.
draw_down 6 hours ago [-]
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drchiu 3 hours ago [-]
My prediction is that the semiconductor price increases is going to cause a lot of demand destruction. The semiconductor companies revenues is not based on new products but rather on the fact that there is scarcity. Once that scarcity is removed then I suspect that we're going to have some reckoning happening across the industry.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
fckgw 6 hours ago [-]
If you were planning on buying a Mac, do it right now through a third party vendor like Best Buy or Costco. They have not yet adjusted their pricing and in fact, have sales currently running. Both have the Macbook Air on sale for $949, for example.
haritha-j 2 hours ago [-]
Buy out all the hardware to price me out and sell me back the compute at $200 a month. well played.
theturtletalks 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they will give more for trade-ins now or keep the old rate and just resell it at these higher prices.
bochoh 3 hours ago [-]
I just checked this. I bought a secondhand 15" M4 Air last weekend and the trade-in value is still $630. So no, trade-in values didn't go up 20%.
3 hours ago [-]
crest 3 hours ago [-]
That's cute.
qingcharles 3 hours ago [-]
My sweet summer child.
tra3 4 hours ago [-]
I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
powersurge360 3 hours ago [-]
I had an M1 Pro MacBook and I agree with you about not needing a new computer. However, it seems like things are at best going to be the same if not worse over the next 5 years with AI prices. I went ahead and updated because although I’m still happy with my M1 Pro today, I am unsure how it will fair over the next 5 years.
akulbe 3 hours ago [-]
That's why I updated, as well.
tensor 3 hours ago [-]
My M1 Max is still great. I was considering upgrading before prices went up but decided to just wait. I will admit though, a tiny voice in my head is telling me prices will never come back down, even if the ram shortage goes away. :-(
dofm 3 hours ago [-]
I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.
matthewfcarlson 3 hours ago [-]
It's a pretty huge cost to support an entirely different set of hardware with different kernel extensions and an entirely different build (x86 instead of arm64e). Could apple choose to do that? Absolutely. But the cost of supporting an M1 is very different than the cost of supporting Intel.
dofm 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I also meant that this is an inflexion point with Apple Intelligence at the OS level.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
I wasn't implying that new releases of the OS and new software that depends on new hardware would be made to work on the old hardware. I interpreted "extend support for anything they make themselves" to mean keeping it updated with bug/security fixes and generally usable as it was when it was purchased. I don't find the fact that they made it themselves vs purchased it from Intel to be a big factor in that decision.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
Right but I said nothing about bug fixes, which we'll continue to receive for some time.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
3 hours ago [-]
Bud 3 hours ago [-]
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gyomu 4 hours ago [-]
I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
M5 Air is still incredibly cheap on Amazon and Best Buy ($950). This is perhaps the best deal you are ever going to get for a MacBook, because they are all going to raise prices.
jurmous 4 hours ago [-]
You can also buy something now that not all shops have adjusted to the new pricing.
dofm 3 hours ago [-]
Though this window is very short. Apple don't leave much in retail channels.
stodor89 4 hours ago [-]
Pfft. It's been 6 years, they just introduced a shittier version, and it's a smash hit. Most ahead-of-its-time computer ever made.
archvile 3 hours ago [-]
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jfrbfbreudh 4 hours ago [-]
The M5 Max 128GB RAM MBP I was eyeing went up by $1600. Thankfully Amazon and some other retailers haven’t updated their prices yet, so I immediately picked one up this morning.
yokoprime 3 hours ago [-]
14 or 16 inch?
NichoPaolucci 3 hours ago [-]
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
enmerk4r 5 hours ago [-]
Wow, I guess no one is immune from supply chain issues. To Apple's credit, I remember the time (a while back) when people overpaid for the Apple brand while not getting as much performance for their money as they would have with other laptop / smartphone manufacturers. Things have really changed over the recent years. Thanks to all the vertical integration, Apple is about as cost-effective as you can get for top-of-the-line hardware. So the fact that they are raising prices is an alarming sign.
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
What surprised me was that they increased across the current lineup. When Cook announced that they'd have to raise prices, I had assumed he was referring to new launches, as is Apple tradition I did not expect such a large and widespread bump across the whole line up.
accrual 2 hours ago [-]
Same, I was reading discussion just yesterday that these were expected to go in place with the September releases.
brandrick 6 hours ago [-]
The shine of the Neo just rubbed off somewhat.
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
The $599 XPS13 is a better value, and it can run Linux unlike the Neo.
Kirby64 28 minutes ago [-]
Until they raise the price on that too. Dell has explicitly stated it's a "limited time" price, so don't be shocked if it becomes the $699 XPS13 almost immediately.
Quothling 6 hours ago [-]
No kidding, I was considering one to replace my 8g air m1. Which was questionable to begin with performance wise, but it's so worn after all these years. Certainly won't do it now.
lapcat 6 hours ago [-]
Yes and no. Relatively speaking, MacBook Neo is still quite cheap, especially since iPad and MacBook Air received even greater price increases. And Apple's competitors are surely experiencing the same component shortages.
seemaze 6 hours ago [-]
Base iPad went up almost 30%, including refurbs. Was recommending one to my parents for $299 - now it’s $379.
intrasight 6 hours ago [-]
Is Apple also offering more money for trade-ins?
baggachipz 5 hours ago [-]
Ha, as if.
leeman2016 6 hours ago [-]
I bought one last month for $299. Now the Apple Store is showing $449
SirMaster 4 hours ago [-]
Just bought a new iPad A16 128GB from Staples website a few minutes ago for $279
I love the "year of the linux desktop" meme but even so I feel compelled to say it. Year of the Linux desktop?? You don't need a new machine if your new OS uses 1/4 of the resources.
akazantsev 5 hours ago [-]
Unlikely Linux will become mainstream until people stop saying "install Linux" and not a particular distro. I recently installed Ubuntu on a new laptop: something doesn't work because I need a more recent kernel, so... I installed the second "user-friendly" distro - Fedora. Scrolling is 10x faster in Chromium-based browsers, making it unusable. The fix - install KDE... Then I had to make hardware video acceleration work so that playback wouldn't drain the battery. That was a pain in the ass.
So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.
I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.
Yeah, everyone always misses the little things when it comes to the masses moving to Linux.
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
bigyabai 3 hours ago [-]
The flip side is that the pot is now boiling. Windows and macOS are both replete with advertisements and service upsell, which is something that nontechnical and technical users both pick up on. It's been expanding the discussion of alternatives, and gave Linux a piece of the spotlight in the PC gaming world. Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already. Many of them bought a Steam Deck and switch to the desktop, getting their first "preinstalled" Linux desktop experience.
The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.
If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but it's already enough to make an impact.
thewebguyd 1 hours ago [-]
Fair point, but I'd say
> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.
Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.
I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.
mark_l_watson 40 minutes ago [-]
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
aurareturn 5 hours ago [-]
I was planning to upgrade my 16" M1 Pro to the M6 Pro 16" MBP later this year.
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
senordevnyc 5 hours ago [-]
I supposedly just snagged the exact same model on Amazon for $1549, as opposed to $1999 on Apple’s site today!
aurareturn 3 hours ago [-]
I doubt these discounts will last much longer.
codazoda 5 hours ago [-]
The Studio I looked at yesterday jumped from $2600 to $3400 (30%). I was saving for it and was about 1/2 way there. I was expecting these increases in 2027, so planned to buy late in the year. Apple moved faster than I expected after the price increase announcements.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
segmondy 1 hours ago [-]
What we want to really know is the cost of Ultra Mac Studio 512gb if that will happen or 256gb.
post_break 2 hours ago [-]
Xbox just increased prices this morning. I think Apple was the canary, expect large increases in tech soon. If you need something remotely in the future buy it now.
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
Just don't buy an Xbox. It's hot garbage and requires a pricey yearly subscription to play online. A PC pays for itself quickly once you factor the subscription in and cheaper games.
int32_64 3 hours ago [-]
Does somebody have a price increase by currency table? A lot of losers vs. USD since apple last set their prices.
Marsymars 2 hours ago [-]
Some of the price increases seem disconnected from the component cost increases.
e.g. The HomePod and HomePod Mini share the same amount of RAM, but the HomePod is up $50 while the HomePod Mini is only up $30.
balls187 2 hours ago [-]
I guess the days of engineers getting to be so casual about memory footprint and CPU cycles is over.
aenis 47 minutes ago [-]
Nope.
1: most of them dont use their own products
2: someone else pays for their laptops
HlessClaudesman 4 hours ago [-]
As an app developer, having to eat an ever increasing Mac hardware cost upfront may push people like me to just focus on Android.
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
You think the situation is better on Android? The margins for Android OEMs are even thinner.
meindnoch 3 hours ago [-]
Hold on! Even people like you?
Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
robertoandred 3 hours ago [-]
Except you only need to eat that hardware cost once a decade.
HlessClaudesman 3 hours ago [-]
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets.
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
jaimebuelta 7 hours ago [-]
The configuration I’m interested in (I’m waiting until new M5 models are launched) just increased $1000 :-/
jdiff 4 hours ago [-]
Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.
zonkerdonker 22 minutes ago [-]
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
dfunckt 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
Telemakhos 4 hours ago [-]
Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.
jerlam 3 hours ago [-]
Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
npunt 2 hours ago [-]
Bingo. Cook is the heat shield now
FireBeyond 3 hours ago [-]
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
toddmorey 4 hours ago [-]
I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.
bel8 3 hours ago [-]
why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?
cyanydeez 4 hours ago [-]
capitalism needs its profits.
also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
kingleopold 4 hours ago [-]
"luxury brand" that offers best base models for bucks than any other windows machine is my favorite luxury. if you compare same $$ priced macbook air to windows laptops, speed and long term reliability difference is few times big.
spwa4 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Although it's investment that's the problem here, not profit.
whatever1 4 hours ago [-]
Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.
spandrew 4 hours ago [-]
Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?
whatever1 3 hours ago [-]
I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
whatever1 2 hours ago [-]
Apple is not new in the game of booking the entire capacity of a fab.
matchbok3 2 hours ago [-]
They should have predicted AI?
lol.
whatever1 13 minutes ago [-]
Should they lose capacity to OpenAI?
baal80spam 4 hours ago [-]
If they could, they would.
rtkwe 3 hours ago [-]
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
AustinDev 6 hours ago [-]
With memory manufacturers running gross margins in excess of 80% how long until we see upstarts come online to eat away at that or is that unlikely to happen in the near future?
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
m348e912 6 hours ago [-]
The memory manufacturing industry is historically notorious for its "feast or famine" cycles, bouncing violently between periods of extreme supply gluts and crushing shortages. We're in a shortage with massive demand right now, but manufacturers are hesitant to significantly invest in new manufacturing capacity due to the risk of being left holding the bag if demand drops.
benoau 6 hours ago [-]
The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.
Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.
tavavex 5 hours ago [-]
Probably American markets, not Western. The EU, Canada, Australia and others would have no reason to reject cheaper supply, and they don't have the same anti-democratic tech forces ready to do anything to ban their competition like the US does.
erxam 6 hours ago [-]
Even the upstarts are cashing in. I believe CXMT is making some serious cash now.
m4rtink 6 hours ago [-]
Yep - the incumbent memory cartel bathes in money for a bit longer - then Chinese manufacturers eat their market share while they sleep on their laurels.
r0fl 6 hours ago [-]
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
dagmx 5 hours ago [-]
Where would they make that which isn’t constrained already?
dylan604 6 hours ago [-]
As has been said here every time this question comes up, years away if ever. It takes years to bring a new fab online as well as a huge amount of capital investment. Once the AI bubble pops, you now have a glut of RAM chips with prices crashing. If that new fab has been paid off while the getting was good, it's now an albatross on the books. Not something investors are eager to get into
paxys 3 hours ago [-]
FYI - other retailers still have the old prices. Some even have discounts. The cheapest MacBook Air is now $1300 on Apple and $950 on Amazon and Best Buy. I imagine this will change soon, so grab them while you can.
rchaud 6 hours ago [-]
Apple soaked up all the good press about the PC-killer Macbook Neo's price point, waited until those articles seeded search results, influencer videos and AI queries, then jacked up the price by 17%.
groundzeros2015 6 hours ago [-]
I went looking for a comparable PC product a few months ago and nothing is even close in price for the same feature set.
rchaud 3 hours ago [-]
You're proving my point. It's no longer at the same price.
juancn 5 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn't like to be held hostage, it has the cash coffers, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're somehow buying dedicated production capacity for the future.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
thewebguyd 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway
> Cook said Apple is willing to deploy its balance sheet to help secure supply and called for all options to be examined, including a review of national security restrictions on Chinese memory suppliers. He ruled out building Apple's own memory factories.
Above all else, any focus to corner supply for them will be focused on the iPhone. It's their cash cow, nearly half of their revenue. They'll sacrifice other products to save the iPhone.
hodder 5 hours ago [-]
Forgive me because I do not understand the supply chain for memory. With Micron et al effectively scalping their customers with an oligopoly on probably the lowest intellectual IP in the chain, does this not guarantee 10 years from now a) We are either overbuilt as hyperscalers cut capex, or b) hyperscalers vertically integrate. Or is it truly that hard to make memory?
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
matwood 5 hours ago [-]
It's not that it's hard, it's that it requires a large up-front investment. The last time prices were higher, some made that investment, prices cratered and many companies never recovered the investment/went out of business.
archontes 3 hours ago [-]
Wild that they increased the ipad prices as well; the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool to avoid cutting into macbook marketshare.
apetresc 3 hours ago [-]
How does that contradict the price increase? iPads still have RAM, yeah? If anything, not increasing the prices on iPads would undermine Macbook marketshare, would it not?
steve-atx-7600 6 hours ago [-]
If you don’t need the lastest models, I recommend https://eshop.macsales.com/ for refurbished that I can trust. Their prices seem reasonable to me. I have been buying from them since I was a kid in the 90s and it was a (the) mail order catalog for the Mac ecosystem. I bought a beefy 3 year old mini for a home server earlier this year from them.
darreld 4 hours ago [-]
I put a iPad Air in my bag on Apple's store yesterday. It went up $135 overnight. Cancelled. I'm not sure I do specifically iPad things on it (YouTube, web). Will look at some Android tablets I think. I don't think an iPad Air is worth 835.
revolvingthrow 6 hours ago [-]
Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
TalkingCodeMonk 6 hours ago [-]
They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
fckgw 6 hours ago [-]
The majority of the component cost in the AppleTV is likely the storage so that's a big hit.
Marsymars 5 hours ago [-]
Having the ethernet port and Thread radio gated behind the 128gb model is obnoxious.
I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)
thejazzman 42 minutes ago [-]
at a (previously) $20 price difference, why would they add a 3rd model?
0cf8612b2e1e 6 hours ago [-]
That’s infuriating. I was hovering over the buy button last week, and now that’s a deal breaker. I was already going for the premium price point for hard-to-justify reasons.
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
Update: while I am terribly unhappy to give them money, there are still retailers who are listing the previous price and I was able to scoop one up before the hike went into effect.
elicash 6 hours ago [-]
I think the Neo was eating into their Air sales, and not merely bringing the Mac to a new market.
thomascountz 5 hours ago [-]
RAM impacts engineers' machines. We learn to build smaller again. More breakthroughs happen around less-memory intensive local inference. Model provides' bottom lines are impacted. They bail on RAM contracts. The market floods. Private inference becomes flush with resources. The third-wave of local models begins, but RAM trauma keeps things lean. Nature heals?
asveikau 3 hours ago [-]
With all the inflation going on and the AI boom affecting things like memory prices, I was surprised that eg. MacBook neo was priced where it was.
bluescrn 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, for a few short months Apple had a really nicely priced entry-level machine. Now so much with a 20% price hike on an 8GB machine with soldered RAM
jonplackett 2 hours ago [-]
Weird that it’s the Neo that is affected why it famously has hardly any ram.
john-titor 5 hours ago [-]
I was eyeing a 24GB macbook air configuration that used to go for ~1250 USD in my region, which was a fairly good deal. This went up by 500. I guess I'll be going with a frame.work instead. Was willing to pay the premium for repairability anyways and now this has made the price difference a no-brainer.
arcticbunny 2 hours ago [-]
Just stop buying new gadgets for 18 months and then see what happens
sylens 5 hours ago [-]
The Macbook Pro jump is probably the most meaningful, as it now puts the 16GB/1TB configuration of the 14" at $1999. That is now more than a Framework 13 Pro with Intel Core Ultra 3, 16 GB/1TB, whereas the Framework looked more expensive when it was originally announced.
dweekly 4 hours ago [-]
Mac Studio M3 Ultra: $5299 (+$1300)
Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
DocTomoe 4 hours ago [-]
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?
This is just the new normal.
hiddendoom45 3 hours ago [-]
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
mortenjorck 3 hours ago [-]
While these new Mac prices are probably here to stay, the upside is that once the AI market saturates and RAM prices fall, future Macs will likely get a significant memory boost at all price tiers.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
dwaite 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
topgrain2 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
post_break 3 hours ago [-]
The increase to the old Apple TV or Homepod is egregious.
4 hours ago [-]
claudiacsf 4 hours ago [-]
So this is how Apple makes up for the margins on the Neos.
4 hours ago [-]
maxignol 2 hours ago [-]
I guess it was inevitable. Is it only RAM related ?
jlengrand 6 hours ago [-]
And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.
5 hours ago [-]
CobaltFire 5 hours ago [-]
Well I guess that changes the keep vs sell calculation on my 128GB Studio. Have already been thinking about downsizing; seeing what the prices are now I may go ahead with that.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
cmdrmac 6 hours ago [-]
The price increases are absurd for some configurations. Glad I placed my order for a new mb pro a couple days ago.
subarctic 5 hours ago [-]
Damn it, I was just about to buy a mac mini with 24gb ram yesterday, but waited until today to figure out some shipping logistics. Definitely didn't expect the price would go up so much in one day.
jkman 5 hours ago [-]
Check costco/another third party, they still have yesterday's pricing right now
qsxfthnkp2322 3 hours ago [-]
What a beautiful way for Tim Cook to end his career at Apple. supply chain genius can’t overcome market forces so they can keep a healthy profit margin.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
throwfaraway4 2 hours ago [-]
Tell me who can overcome market forces. Literally no one. I'm starting to think bots are writing these low-quality inflammatory comments.
qsxfthnkp2322 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe those bots should send micron or Samsung a gold bar and some glass to get them to care about consumers again.
In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.
bilsbie 2 hours ago [-]
They seem to confuse hard drive and ram memory on these articles
fckgw 2 hours ago [-]
Flash storage prices have also risen substantially, just not as exponentially as RAM
busymichael 4 hours ago [-]
Still no 256GB or 512GB Studio models at any price. 96 is the max for any Studio configuration on apple.com right now.
dwaite 3 hours ago [-]
I suspect this is because the next models are more imminent. Not imminent per se, but Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag on most of a factory run of 512GB Studios.
> We have shielded our customers from these increases so far
Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
reenorap 6 hours ago [-]
Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!
ajitid 4 hours ago [-]
Nano texture display option also got a price increase. Thankfully, AppleCare+ didn't.
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
Hard to make a case that's related to increased RAM or SSD component prices.
diebillionaires 6 hours ago [-]
Apple was already on the edge of "too expensive". Now it's obscene. I think this really opens the door for the new intel framework 13 pro.
petesergeant 5 hours ago [-]
> the new intel framework 13 pro
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
throawayonthe 3 hours ago [-]
no but you could even bring your own
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
6 hours ago [-]
khurs 6 hours ago [-]
After these increases, will Apple be maintaining the previous profit margin?
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
TheJoeMan 6 hours ago [-]
The ridiculous thing about profit margin, is that if RAM increases Apple's cost by $100, they have to increase the selling price by a multiple of that to maintain the same %. Same exact factory line, labor cost, shipping cost, but have to 1.5x everything at the shrine of the bean counters.
hodder 4 hours ago [-]
Forgive me because I do not understand the supply chain for memory. With Micron et al effectively scalping their customers with an oligopoly on probably the lowest intellectual IP in the chain, does this not guarantee 10 years from now a) We are either overbuilt as hyperscalers cut capex, or b) hyperscalers vertically integrate. Or is it truly that hard to make memory?
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
rnxrx 3 hours ago [-]
It *is* hard to make memory, especially HBM (...which is what the AI market wants, and is what the manufacturers are focusing on) and bringing on new capacity takes years. There's the additional wrinkle that the manufacturers we have left are the ones who survived periods where the market was glutted with oversupply in the wake of previous shortages.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
FireBeyond 2 hours ago [-]
I mean lets not pretend that Apple hasn't done this for years. I had a cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, but I had a choice with memory - I could upgrade from the base 32GB to 192GB one of two ways - pay Apple $3,000 for 160GB, or get the base 32GB model, and buy 192GB of the exact same sticks of memory (same manufacturer, timings, etc.) from OWC for $1,050. And I could sell the 32GB if I wanted.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
arpinum 3 hours ago [-]
Building a new memory fab takes 3-4 years, extremely capital intensive. Micron is spending $25B+ on Capex and more than half of that is for new memory capacity, a 3x increase over 2 years.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
>If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
It's not exploitative either. It's just supply and demand.
hodder 3 hours ago [-]
I agree man. I’m just quoting Donald.
HPsquared 4 hours ago [-]
It all depends on how much they're investing in increasing capacity.
The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."
Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.
panarky 3 hours ago [-]
Good luck applying your US antitrust law against Samsung and SK Hynix which have 75% of the market.
Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
adolph 3 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, the dynamics are similar to generic drugs where there is a large capital hurdle to new production facilities and a likelihood that prices will soon drop to a point that a new facility will lose money.
Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen
flyingshelf 6 hours ago [-]
That just proves that Mediamarkt are scammers. It's not special price if it's the current MRSP. "Future price hikes" are not something you can legally base your "sales" on.
fcoury 6 hours ago [-]
I am usually terrible at timing my purchases, but a couple of weeks back I bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max with 8TB SSD 128GB RAM.
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
6 hours ago [-]
drnick1 2 hours ago [-]
What is the point of posting a paywalled article? If you aren't going to paste the content somewhere else, please don't bother.
cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago [-]
They simply couldn't cut into their fat margins, could they?
bluescrn 2 hours ago [-]
The huge markup on memory/storage upsells are were they make all their money
tristor 6 hours ago [-]
The 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. During the same time from launch to now, I have seen local LLMs get significantly better, to the point that I wish more people had hardware like this to be able to localize their workloads. I can't help but think society is moving in the wrong direction with this technology by further centralizing in hyperscalars and damaging the hardware market to make strong general purpose computing even more difficult for individuals to obtain, when the right direction would be democratization of both the hardware and the software to allow most workloads to be run locally.
kamranjon 6 hours ago [-]
I really think this is a coordinated effort to restrict computing capacity for individuals and force adoption of centralized AI - I think there already is evidence of this from the moves OpenAI had made to lock up memory and gpu markets.
aroman 6 hours ago [-]
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
kamranjon 4 hours ago [-]
I think one of the more ominous things to see in recent years was all of the tech execs at the presidential inauguration, after having collectively donated several million dollars to the inauguration fund. So if we go with that list, which happens to overlap with many of the circular deals we’ve seen in the AI space recently, you’d have people like: Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin
We have to get real, here - most people are not replacing GPT or Claude with local inference, even on M5. If you can afford to do that (RAM shortage or not), then you are in the minority of customers.
Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
kamranjon 2 hours ago [-]
You’re out of the loop if you don’t think m series chips with unified memory aren’t one of the best platforms for running local inference
bigyabai 2 hours ago [-]
They aren't. Apple Silicon is unusable for interactive prefill and decode speeds in agentic workflows and SOTA LLMs.
kamranjon 2 hours ago [-]
You’re just out of the loop, and that’s fine but it’s worth learning about.
There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.
I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.
I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
aroman 53 minutes ago [-]
My hardware isn't powerful enough to try, so I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not to push back: what do you use DS4 for? Did it replace e.g Claude Code with Opus for you, or was it replacing something else?
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
jnwatson 5 hours ago [-]
I would get nervous carrying around a $10k laptop.
tristor 4 hours ago [-]
I get more nervous not carrying it around when I travel. It's a lot easier to steal things that aren't on your person. That said, I get what you mean. I cover my photography gear with insurance and the computer since it is used for my photography (in addition to local LLMs) is covered under that insurance also.
sixothree 6 hours ago [-]
I had one in my cart last night. It seems far less appealing today.
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
tristor 6 hours ago [-]
Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
jorvi 6 hours ago [-]
The EU price includes the warranty, which is at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
freediddy 5 hours ago [-]
Do you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.
stockresearcher 5 hours ago [-]
> you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
orlp 6 hours ago [-]
You save a lot less after paying import duties.
tristor 5 hours ago [-]
Do you pay import duties in the UK on items purchased for personal use? The situation is changing constantly in the US, but generally speaking you do pay duties only over a certain dollar amount in value if you intend to keep the item in country after importation (and a MBP would be over that amount), but it's a fairly small percentage (around $400 in duties on $3149 saved here). I'm not sure how it'd work in the UK.
orlp 2 hours ago [-]
It seems like there aren't extra duties (anymore), but then again it's all very confusing and hard to navigate so who knows.
cmdrmac 6 hours ago [-]
The price increases are unsurprising considering Tim Cook said it was "unsustainable" for Apple to keep absorbing the increases. Glad I ordered a new machine a couple days ago.
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
m4rtink 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, unsustainable to maintain their insane profit margins made possible by their locked down walled garden.
electriclove 5 hours ago [-]
They need to do layoffs and get rid of dead weight
Thomaschaaf 5 hours ago [-]
> The average price increase is $269.23.
How is that calculated?
4 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
ramon156 5 hours ago [-]
Markov chains
accrual 2 hours ago [-]
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ungovernableCat 5 hours ago [-]
2026 computing, brokies need not apply.
kalleboo 3 hours ago [-]
Computers are the new cars - only rich people (or people assuming debt) buy new ones, everyone else gets to buy used.
NSUserDefaults 2 hours ago [-]
Now tell me again how the Steam Machine is “overpriced”..
joshstrange 5 hours ago [-]
> M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
protoster 2 hours ago [-]
Uh oh. Should I grab an iPhone now before those prices are raised?
functionmouse 6 hours ago [-]
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
tencentshill 5 hours ago [-]
This is where regulators would normally step in and limit the clearly excessive buildout. It's well past harming consumer spending.
mrbungie 6 hours ago [-]
Ah, come on. I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space. AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
> I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space.
This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.
> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.
Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
Cryptocurrencies never did this because they were never popular. They were a big deal in tech spaces but the average person never really worked out what a bitcoin was or how they'd get one. AI, on the other hand, is seeing widespread use among ordinary people.
bix6 6 hours ago [-]
How is the mini not increased?
ndiddy 6 hours ago [-]
It is. They previously got rid of the 256 GB, $599 configuration, and the cheapest option was the 512 GB, $799 config. Now they brought back the 256 GB base model but at $799, and the 512 GB model is $999.
linguae 6 hours ago [-]
That’s terrible. I purchased my M4 Mac Mini (base 16/256 model) two months ago because I wanted an ARM Mac for a software project. I feared that the M5 Mac Mini would have a price bump, but I would’ve never guessed that Apple would dramatically hike prices for existing models.
I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
cmdrmac 6 hours ago [-]
I think they removed the "cheaper" configurations. In essence, the barrier to entry to mac mini was increased without actually changing the original price tag. I suspect the new mac mini (if one is coming) will sport a higher price tag.
AndroTux 5 hours ago [-]
Models with more ram have also increased in price around 20%. The M4 Pro base configuration went up $200. It’s just that nobody cares about Mac minis.
elicash 6 hours ago [-]
I think when they eventually announce the M5 Mac Mini (September?) it'll just be at a higher price.
Scroll_Swe 3 hours ago [-]
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...
Dont get the panic. :)
jingw222 2 hours ago [-]
memory and storage companies are like oil oligarch right now
jl6 6 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
wrxd 5 hours ago [-]
I wish but I am not hopeful that's actually going to happen
jl6 5 hours ago [-]
It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.
deadbabe 6 hours ago [-]
Holy shit, if Apple is being pushed to do this, something they never would have done before before a refresh, then it must mean there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps at this rate.
linguae 6 hours ago [-]
The only other event I could remember in the history of Apple that is remotely comparable is the release of the original Power Mac G4 towers in 1999. They were originally going to have 400MHz, 450MHz, and 500MHz models, but due to issues regarding processor availability, Apple lowered the specifications by 50MHz for each model, but without lowering the prices.
I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.
I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
asats 4 hours ago [-]
>there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T
SK Hynix $1.345 T
Micron $1.343 T
varispeed 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed, maxed out model I've been saving to buy is now £2000 more expensive than just few weeks ago. Madness.
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
submeta 6 hours ago [-]
What?
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
flyingshelf 6 hours ago [-]
It's not just a RAM problem. All
silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
sxates 7 minutes ago [-]
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Kenji 6 hours ago [-]
Inflation babyyyyyyyyyy. See if your salary also raises by 10-20% this year. You're getting priced the fuck out of everything, have fun.
lapcat 6 hours ago [-]
Can we now all admit that AI is bad? The technology itself may be neat, but the side effects are killing us. How can AI make computing easier when ironically it's now significantly harder to get computers? AI is driving price increases, unemployment, economic inequality, illiteracy, misinformation, slop on the internet, possibly global warming and water shortages, etc.
Is this really the future we wanted?
cpursley 6 hours ago [-]
Farming implements and looms are bad, I miss having to scratch my own food from the earth and knit my own clothing from whatever fibers and animals I could find...
lapcat 6 hours ago [-]
This is not a serious response to my comment.
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
aroman 5 hours ago [-]
The point you’re making is that AI is an intrinsically bad technology, but that does not follow from this news story, which merely evidences that AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
lapcat 5 hours ago [-]
> The point you’re making is that AI is an intrinsically bad technology
Not really. I said, "The technology itself may be neat."
There's a larger societal question: how many resources should we devote to this technology? The current answer appears to be "unlimited resources".
> AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
The point is that we're currently suffering the many negative side effects of AI production, some of which I listed. Will there be a utopian future when the negative side effects are all eliminated? Maybe... or maybe not. In any case, it sucks right now, and relief does not appear imminent. Indeed, the Apple price increases are a sign that the component shortages are not just temporary, and even the wealthiest corporation in the world can't ride out the storm.
bbg2401 5 hours ago [-]
You're going to have to work remarkably hard to link your comment to the parent without looking like a disingenuous ass.
nalekberov 6 hours ago [-]
> We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
ElProlactin 6 hours ago [-]
Apple has never been a charity.
nalekberov 6 hours ago [-]
Who said that? It was Apple, who sold their iPhones at astronomic margins, created walled gardens. There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
foldr 6 hours ago [-]
>There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
Why would they set prices at anything other than the level which maximizes profit?
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.
bazzmt 5 hours ago [-]
"Apple has increased the price of MacBooks and iPads by about 20 per cent worldwide, one of the broadest price rises in its history, as the iPhone maker blamed memory chip shortages caused by the AI infrastructure boom."
resters 4 hours ago [-]
Expect this trend to continue -- firms have delayed price adjustments to avoid retaliation from Trump as doing so would draw attention to Trump's many inflationary policies.
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
gchamonlive 4 hours ago [-]
As much as I despise trump's administration, isn't this more because of AI farms pressure onto the semiconductor forges?
resters 3 hours ago [-]
You're right it's not only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
api 4 hours ago [-]
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
snootypoot 1 hours ago [-]
maybe in our lives people will start to realize there is really only one political party and its always going to be them vs us until we are all serfs earning below subsistence wages.
api 43 minutes ago [-]
They're not all the same.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.
DiabloD3 4 hours ago [-]
This is a weird way for Apple to admit the Mac is dead.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
If this is your interpretation of “Mac is dead” you might as well say “personal computers are dead.”
DiabloD3 31 minutes ago [-]
If it wasn't for Linux and open source, I very much could!
zackmorris 3 hours ago [-]
Catering to the top of the k-shaped economy is indistinguishable from evil
Macs
iPads More products:> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...
Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out
Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.
I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
Or the single app that slows it down.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.
You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
That's... quite the choice of words there
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
Apple doesn't get solo credit for USB-C, but they were certainly essential to it. Just compare the USB-C physical interface to the USB-3 micro or super speed type B ports and compare design sensibilities.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.
I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.
https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...
All their other products are lower volume.
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI megacorporations to completely buy out the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.
If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not 'o people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.
It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.
If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
I'd argue that's incentive enough.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Fascist trillionaire
Ah yes, "We have to do something! Something must be better than nothing!"
Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices. How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.
Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?
So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
http://shirky.com/2001/01/
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something. This means: 1. You wait for build out and prices go down. 2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.
And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.
All existing factories have maximized their production.
> factories but are not making ram switch
It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.
> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
What alternative exists for NAND flash?
Citation needed.
This is almost certainly not true because capacity is not binary but an efficiency curve. As the cost of RAM increases it becomes economical to operate the factory at higher capacities.
> It takes 2-3 years to switch
Citation needed. Who sets the max speed limit for changing?
> What alternative exists for NAND flash?
There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
Close down would be a good idea.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-r...
Don't trust a fox to count your chickens.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.
A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.
At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.
And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.
"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.
But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.
I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.
If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
Dont get the panic. :)
ryzenn 9800x3d 32GB ram 9070xt
about 2k
I'm relieved.
The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.
I have an M2 Max, as well, and I wonder what I could get for it on resale... or maybe I should just keep it.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...
Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
Change and the future are uncomfortable. You can embrace it or be left behind. You cant stop it.
Left behind on what exactly?
All the people running any computer appreciate.
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
and then the monkeys paw curled
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.
And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.
Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...
So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.
I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.
If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but it's already enough to make an impact.
> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.
Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.
I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
e.g. The HomePod and HomePod Mini share the same amount of RAM, but the HomePod is up $50 while the HomePod Mini is only up $30.
1: most of them dont use their own products
2: someone else pays for their laptops
Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
I can see how they succumed to the pressure.
[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...
[2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
lol.
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)
Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
This is just the new normal.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.
Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."
Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.
Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-c...
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
I also wouldn’t be surprised if memory providers weren’t intimately involved, as they’ve been caught price fixing in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.
I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.
I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
How is that calculated?
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.
> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.
Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.
I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
Dont get the panic. :)
https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/
I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.
I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T SK Hynix $1.345 T Micron $1.343 T
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
Is this really the future we wanted?
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
Not really. I said, "The technology itself may be neat."
There's a larger societal question: how many resources should we devote to this technology? The current answer appears to be "unlimited resources".
> AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
The point is that we're currently suffering the many negative side effects of AI production, some of which I listed. Will there be a utopian future when the negative side effects are all eliminated? Maybe... or maybe not. In any case, it sucks right now, and relief does not appear imminent. Indeed, the Apple price increases are a sign that the component shortages are not just temporary, and even the wealthiest corporation in the world can't ride out the storm.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.