These are the price changes mentioned in the article:<p>Macs<p><pre><code> 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)
</code></pre>
iPads<p><pre><code> 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)
</code></pre>
More products:<p><pre><code> 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)</code></pre>
To be fair, Microsoft announced their third XBox price hike today.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-pay-later-2000710565" rel="nofollow">https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...</a><p>This is in addition to the other two recent price hikes.
And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.<p>Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
> And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.<p>I keep seeing FLOODS of comments from people saying "at least Sony didn't raise prices1" Well, they did a month or two ago, so I have no idea why they say that. Literally everything with RAM is more expensive now.
Microsoft should tell OpenAI to stop it
1.16x simple mean on XBOX
1.22x simple mean on Apple<p>Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.<p>Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently
1.67x on the ethernet version! $150 -> $250.
This isn’t the 1st increase they do on these consoles.
This isn't immediate though, it's from August
Go look at the <i>upgrade</i> prices - the 128 GB RAM jump on the MBP is now $2k!
Some very steep price rises here!<p>I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Apparently their long term contracts ran out in January and suppliers are asking for quarter to quarter prices now.<p>No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
AIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price.<p>Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
Delivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why.<p>They don't even <i>have</i> the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
The prices are set largely by what consumers will tolerate. If everyone else is raising prices so consumers expect that, why wouldn't you do it, too?
Long term contracts probably don’t last forever and probably don’t represent 100 percent of their demand. My guess is that they’re already having to pay inflated prices for some non-trivial fraction of their inventory.
2 year supply contracts are expiring and they need to lock in the next one.
Looking at a few retailers, it seems like prices haven't increased yet. Maybe in a few days?
Why Air series prices have not increased?
Planning to buy an M2 Air, 32+1TB
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.
> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
reply<p>I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.<p>All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.<p>I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.
Even the FireTV is shite compared to an apple TV.<p>The thing that is <i>so</i> frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.<p>I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing <i>amazon prime</i> content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.
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.<p>However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.<p>I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
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.
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...<p>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.
>> it will be consumers demanding<p>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.<p>>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs<p>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:<p>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.<p>When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.<p>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.<p>If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.
Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.
I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.<p>You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.<p>What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.<p>Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.<p>Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.
That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.<p>"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."<p>The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).
As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.
> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz<p>This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!
I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.
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.<p>If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that <i>their</i> 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.<p>What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware.<p>Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.<p>The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
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.<p>Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
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.
Yup. We're going back to time sharing for the majority of people. The terminal will be their dumb phone.
I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it.<p>Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.
Don’t worry - the cycle will reverse again at some point and we’ll go back to more powerful local machines.
No not going back to a mainframe computing…
In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU.<p>It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.
They're already producing as much as possible.<p>Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.
Yes. Several new memory fabs are expected to come online in 2028, one in late 2027:<p><a href="https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-tech/global-memory-chip-shortage-expected-to-last-till-2027/130395618" rel="nofollow">https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...</a><p>So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.<p>(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)#May's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...</a>
> <i>but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks</i><p>"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law</a>
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.
Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.<p>There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes.<p>Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.<p>So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.<p>Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
It's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
This subject gives me sudden nostalgia for the times when Steve Jobs was talking about the front side bus during Apple keynotes.<p>I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.
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.
Oh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995?<p>Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
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.
C API <i>was</i> 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.
I'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
> <i>instead of</i> unobservably <i>better performance</i><p>That's... quite the choice of words there
The problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
> instead of unobservably better performance.<p>It's imperceptible <i>because</i> the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.<p>The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
> work on things users care about<p>Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
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Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.<p>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.
I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.<p>Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
Also it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society
Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line <i>in person</i> was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
The problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.
Sometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.
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 <i>most</i> use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.<p>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.
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.
Fully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.
Because so much modern software <i>is a web browser.</i> The application bundles in its own version of Chromium.<p>Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.
a single leetcode tab is taking up up to 700mb of memory...
"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"
Something being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.
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.<p>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)<p>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)
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.<p><a href="https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_code_handwritten_" rel="nofollow">https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...</a>
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.<p>I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.
> This is such a reddit take<p>You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.
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.
Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman.
Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$?
Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
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.<p>Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-gets-feds-dudley-an-earful-idUSTRE72A4AC/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...</a>
I'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
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.<p>I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
> I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.<p>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 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.
You don't have to go retro, just 5 to 10y old is fine.<p>I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.<p>You don't miss what you haven't tried.
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.<p>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.
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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.
Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.
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
My 2012 thinkpad still works well.<p>I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?
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.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.<p>During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
I had a similar thought. I bought a computer for $3600 CAD 3 years ago and it shows no signs of limiting my work in any way. I have another from 2020 from my employer that is just fine, likely costing them about $2500 CAD when they bought it.<p>Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.<p>I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
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.<p>I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
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.
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.
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?
If we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.
Were you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.
Speak for yourself. I have a modern machine running Fedora. What walled gardens are you talking about? Buying a Mac is a choice that you may make, but I never will.
You may have equivalent power on that $6 computer but can you run the same applications?
In my case, yes, because I used to be a Linux user. I still am, but I used to be too.<p>Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
I'm sure you can find an equivalent to ClarisWorks or Photoshop 3.0 that works on a Raspberry Pi.
1996 was 30 years ago. What about comparing prices from 3 years ago? 2023 vs 2026.
We paid like $3500 in 1995 money for a PC which was completely outdated after 4 years. The early to mid 90s were exciting times, but damn some of the machines were expensive and didn't last long.
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.
I gladly paid $1,499 for an iBook G4 in 2005. (~$2,572 inflation adjusted)
I paid about $6k two days ago for a machine that's now above $8k.<p>I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
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<p>Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury<p>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.
And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
* <a href="https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shac...</a><p>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):<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_TL_series" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...</a>
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.<p>But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Wow, I didn't know that Camcorders were that expensive at the time. That's $2k today according to <a href="https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm</a> .
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.<p>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.
That was a niche product, these are mass market consumables.
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.
Reminds me of this story about every app being sluggish on a relatively new machine, compared to equivalent apps running on a 20+ year old machine:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983</a> - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)
In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.<p><a href="https://danluu.com/input-lag/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/input-lag/</a>
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.
Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.
And software is now so cheap, or free, that it's incredibly difficult to even start and maintain a single-member LLC software business.
unc?
it'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my <i>2011 MBP</i>. 12 years later!<p>This is absolute madness we have never seen.
M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.
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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.<p>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.
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.<p>If it were <i>just</i> that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
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.<p>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.
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.
>we...consider buying food a luxury<p>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.<p><a href="https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spend-as-much-of-our-incomes-on-food-as-our-ancestors-did/" rel="nofollow">https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...</a>
> 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.<p>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.
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.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver<p>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
I mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.
How much do they make?
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.<p>Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
Often a mid level engineer salary at least.
Computers got cheap due to necessity. The necessity is still there and raising prices is a rug pull.
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.
Apple did not have to be in this situation. Begging for capacity lost to startups. Everyone else can complain, but not Apple. They had a 250B warchest, exactly for such situations.<p>Now somehow openAI has capacity and Apple does not. And think about it Apple is not in a better position than Valve for example. A teeny tiny company in comparison.<p>It is an unprecedented managerial failure.
Begging? Component price goes up, they increase their prices. Where's the begging?<p>Just like US had oil but as the world prices went up, US oil prices went up. No one will sell it cheap inside the country for patriotism. Same thing here.<p>Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
Are you suggesting Apple should have invested in internal DRAM production?
This is not Apple's fault and it is just the beginning of AI. Unlike every other software/algorithm/program known to mankind, AI based on neural networks threatens to extract exponentially the entire humanity's supply of computational capacity. Moore's Law hit a fundamental snag in the last decade (e.g. Dennard scaling) and cannot and likely will not keep up. This then would be the worst case scenario with serious long term consequences far beyond the price of consumer goods.
Micron said that they tried to tell 2 of their largest customers (one almost certainly Apple) that the prices they were demanding would result in the cancellation of a lot new construction in 2023, which wasn't in the industries best interests.<p>It is sort of Apple's fault. They are probably the biggest single buyer of DRAM and NAND globally and they pride themselves on their supply chain management under Cook.<p>It seems they over optimised this too far.
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!
I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future?<p>I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future.<p>It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.<p>I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism but what is the point anymore?
I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting.<p>I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.<p>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.
The "worst" part of this comment, is that it's not even exaggeration.
In the last 6 months, my competition increased 5x. People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do. My margins will keep shrinking while hardware and servers gets more expensive.<p>It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.<p>Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...
It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.
A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.<p>A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.<p>In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.
Like the famous Market for Lemons, where a similar information asymmetry produces market failure that ends up making things worse for both buyers and sellers.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons</a>
New signals of trustworthiness will emerge (are already emerging.)<p>More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.<p>The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.
Now we have 100 fly by night vendors! Awesome!
Not sure if your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, if not, it’s totally narcissistic. I hope in next 6 months your competition would increase 10x
While I understand both of your perspectives, please think about how frustrating it can be to have poured years into building a product genuinely solving a problem and building a relationship with clients only for a dozens AI copy cats to come in. Even if your product is clearly better, the SEO slop alone will raise your marketing cost, price cutting will affect you as not all clients are able to tell quality before purchase or will know of your project, etc.
And in the end, everyone is worse of. We get less for the products we build. Customers in many cases get a worse solution. And the AI copy cats multiply until none of them can make a living from it.
If your product is really good, then people will choose it over AI copy cats. If that’s not the case then it’s time to take a really hard look at your product and see if that’s really as good as you think
Exactly. People on a forum dedicated to a VC should know that disruption happens everywhere, AI just makes it easier but it's been happening for a long time, that is the nature of startups in general.
> And in the end, everyone is worse of.<p>I don't know, it really depends on the product. If we were all still paying for proprietary UNIX in the current year, then it's likely that these startups would never exist in the first place. Sometimes a SAAS has to admit that it's not providing real value before actual innovation becomes the status quo. I don't weep many tears for dying businesses because nobody lives forever.
The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.
Wish I could shake the hidden hand in gratitude
Welcome to the cyberpunk future.
I would never want to compel someone else to buy services from me if they had a better option available. My goal is to make money by contributing to society, not force others to pay me for services they don't want from me. If AI makes it so programmers aren't needed anymore, well, I had a good run and made good money while it lasted. I'll find something else productive to do.
Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.<p>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.<p>Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.<p>>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.<p>That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.<p>Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
The quote from Gruber in question (IMO, a little more reasonable than you give it credit for.)<p>> For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. ... But unlike with the MacBook Pros in March, I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on my hunch here. However out of character it would be for Apple to raise prices midway through product cycles, the global RAM shortage is unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple pushes price increases moments after I hit “Publish” on this post.<p><a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/22/apple-device-prices-when" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/22/apple-device-pr...</a>
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.
In addition to being the sole inventors of lightning (the connector), which directly informed the USB-C spec based on learnings from field use.<p>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.
That's not what Grubber claimed tho. They claimed solo inventor, which Apple is not.
And then they went too far and introduced laptops that <i>only</i> used USB-C before finally setting at a (so far) happy medium.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning<p>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?
> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.<p>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.
> a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple<p>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.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.<p>I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
They mean stick as in criticism.<p>And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.<p><a href="https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/InFO.htm" rel="nofollow">https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...</a>
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.
Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.
They didn’t increase prices on iPhones, Apple Watch and Airpods
Those are next in line, it’s almost guaranteed.
I've heard that the iPhone price is going up, and they've already started paying you more to trade-in the last generation.
September new versions will likely start at a price point than they would have
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
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.<p>All their other products are lower volume.
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.
Yeah I don’t think they will touch current models.
There are many rumors that the new iPhone 18 Pro will start at ~$1300.<p>So maybe their mobile hardware will be next.
Why would AirPod prices increase?
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.<p>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.
Tim Cook said prices were going to increase a few days ago
><i>I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry.</i><p>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?
It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
I read the same comment and thought it made sense too.
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?
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.
That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.<p>Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
> That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.<p>The question is always: What specific regulation?<p>Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.<p>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.
Yes, it's better to not do anything right? After all 'the market' is working for some.<p>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.
> But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc.<p>You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What you’re missing is that this is a <i>global</i> supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with <i>domestic</i> regulations.
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.<p>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'<p>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.
> If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to,<p>There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.<p>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.<p>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.
> 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead<p>These 10 countries need the US/EU market for their exports.<p>But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!<p>> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM<p>That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI goons to completely buy the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.<p>If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not merely 'so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.<p>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'.<p>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.<p>I'd argue that's incentive enough.
> But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!<p>The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.<p>You can't sanction your way into squeezing blood from a stone.<p>> 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.<p>If a country came along and declared that companies couldn't buy the resources they need from other companies, the second order effect would be every major company relocating their headquarters out of that country as soon as possible, along with a sharp decrease in startups being formed in that country.<p>The economic impacts of this level of command-and-control government would be devastating to the economy. Much more than having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a laptop every 5-10 years.
> The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.<p>You keep arguing as if there's only one side to this, the producers/DRAM companies who can't scale production fast enough.<p>But there's two sides to a market, the producers (DRAM makers) and the consumers, (AI industry). I am arguing for increasing the supply by taking some away from the AI industry. This is BECAUSE on the production side there's no way to address this fast enough.
The DRAM producers have also agreed to work together to raise the prices in the past and are probably rather enjoying it being their turn to get a ton of money again. d Free markets break down when cartels form, because then you wind up with an effective monopoly despite having multiple suppliers<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal</a><p><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_586" rel="nofollow">https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...</a>
> but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.<p>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.<p>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.
> The demand for AI data centers is global<p>Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.<p>> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them<p>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.
Yes it is far better to do nothing than to something that makes the situation worse
> Yes, it's better to not do anything right?<p>Ah yes, "We have to do <i>something!</i> Something must be better than nothing!"<p>Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...</a>
> > 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.<p>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.
> People have problems DISCUSSING the idea.<p>My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.<p>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.<p>When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
> businesses can be colossally stupid too<p>Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.
> What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work.<p>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.
It’s a global phenomenon. The latency concerns for data centers are minimal, so they could be built anywhere.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
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.
The old race to the bottom.
Not saying this is the solution, but strategic reserves of important commodities exist.<p>Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?<p>So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
Good news, you get the DDR2 that has been languishing in a salt cave for the last 20 years.<p>Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.<p>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.
A strategic reserve of a commodity that (historically) depreciates at ~50% per year is a terrible trade for occasionally avoiding demand-driven price spikes.
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?
The market will take care of itself. The Chinese are going use this to ramp up and build more memory, and some companies out there will take it in-house, In short, they won’t be caught with their pants down again.
The only thing the US could feasibly implement is forcing micron to allocate a certain amount of its production for consumer use
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.<p>That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
The AI "market" is not a free market. It needs regulation.
What evidenced-backed regulation would solve this problem?
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.
Unfortunately, RAM is more like a taxi than an umbrella.<p>> 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.<p><a href="http://shirky.com/2001/01/" rel="nofollow">http://shirky.com/2001/01/</a>
No? It’s an interchangeable component which is manufactured at scale by many suppliers.<p>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.
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.
"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."<p>--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith)
_Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
This is true in the same sense you don't need to own a pair of shoes.<p>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.<p>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.
We were talking here about whether it is necessary for the government to intervene because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products.<p>In that context, it is not only technically true that you do not need to buy those products. This simply does not strike me as an issue where the government would need to step in and regulate the market.
The Chinese won’t be sitting around? They will consider it a vital area. And they will keep the engines going sitting back and daydreaming will only leave you further behind…<p>I don’t think government needs to get involved in the West, but some of those companies affected that have the resources are gonna have to reconfigure themselves and design around the three memory companies. The Chinese certainly will.
I mean…<p>My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.<p>Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.<p>Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.<p>It’s gross.
Technology and semiconductors are part of the supply chain for all modern necessities.
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.
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."<p>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.
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.
If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
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.<p>Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
Yes 65B ARR that Anthropic has is clear indication there is no path to revenue.
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.<p>See: <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/</a> for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
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.<p>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?
If people are sure they can always short NVIDIA
How much money does that revenue cost though? If I had to steel-man GPs argument I'd ask for profits rather than revenues.
This is not sustainable forever unless their hypothetical usage is realized, and eventually the bill will come due.<p>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)
People will consume a lot of things offered below actual cost thanks to VC and cheap loans.<p>Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.<p>So it's a distorted market.
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…
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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.
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.
><i>What's OpenAI going to do?</i><p>Close down would be a good idea.
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.
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I broadly don’t use LLMs (once or twice a month), yet I’m still being hit by hardware price increases.
Not OpenAI’s fault that the cost of a shipping container doubled.<p>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.
The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing; there is a push from who-knows-who to shift the balance of power back to (essentially) mainframes and corporate computing.<p>Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
This feels like the car market during COVID.<p>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.
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.
Hello, fellow traveler on this particular boat.
I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door.<p>The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.<p>A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
I bought exactly that, in 14", last April. Before tax, it was $5,853 and is now $7,849
I just received my new MacBook yesterday. Today it's more than €700 more expensive than what I paid.
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
I bought an irresponsible pile of homelab equipment in 24/25. Hard drives, SSD, memory, GPUs.<p>I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.<p>At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.
Naaah, no way anyone buying that for profit
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.
Oh the bright side they do offer $AAPL with a 5% discount today.
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.<p>My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.<p>Look, this is going to suck for several more years. The western memory cartel was never truly dismantled or punished after their price fixing in the early 2000s, and now this is the result. With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative but to suck it up and ride out whatever this market is, be it bubble or blessing.<p>That said, China isn’t stupid and is gladly steering their domestic firms to produce more kit not just for data centers and AI customers, but to shore up domestic electronics manufacturing in general. If China can make a device that appeals to Americans en masse, western companies are arguably at their most vulnerable in the face of sky-high part costs and supply chain issues. Combined with rising public sentiment against data centers and a general “fed-up” attitude towards tech in general, and this could be quite the explosively expensive powder keg depending on how things end up shaking out.
> With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative<p>American companies, you mean.<p>Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.
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.<p>We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
> I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation<p>This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.<p>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%.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
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.
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.<p>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.
Same boat here. If I <i>had</i> 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.<p>I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
GPU farms aren't that useful for general purpose work
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).<p>Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
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).<p>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.
It's been like this for over a decade, and for legit reasons.
I have a suspicion these new prices will stick around, even after the RAM shortage ends.<p>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.
>what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending?<p>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.<p>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.
> Taiwan invasion<p>Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
China won’t invade Taiwan. Be realistic
If you wanted to be realistic, you wouldn't say for sure that they won't.
And Russia would never invade Ukraine. And Germany could never make it past the Maginot Line
Uh oh 5 years ago nobody would believe there will be a war in Europe with almost 1,000,000 dead.<p>And now China knows that both US and EU are weak and cant even deal with Russia or Iran.<p>And they also have their own semiconductors manufacturing and cut off from what TSMC produces anyway.
It’s a permanent price hike<p>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.
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-in-historically-high-memory-prices-for-five-years/5261854" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-...</a><p>:(
Until China floods the market with their memory which is starting
I'm seeing it with NAND.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
The problem with these drives is that you can't ensure the grade of the NAND chips. They could be A+ grade with great endurance but they could also be bottom of the barrel.<p>I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.<p>I have another one which is 5 years old by now.
> Look at the AWS Prime ssds available<p>Where?
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.
Considering what's causing it, I can't imagine it's a particularly short timeline.
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.
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.
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.
At least 3 years maybe more.
When the AI bubble pops.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.<p>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".<p>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.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.<p>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.
> So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.<p>Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They <i>should</i> 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.<p>Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
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.<p>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.<p>But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
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.
Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.
Or it's just a bluff since their memory upgrade prices were actually some of the lowest compared to the rest of manufacturers.
The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock <i>themselves</i> 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.
It’s not a storm anymore but the new normal. People waiting for prices to come down are going to be very disappointed.
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not <i>that</i> 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)
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.
If Apple knows it's been overpaying, you can be sure that they will leverage that in future negotiations.
Raising prices allows Apple to reduce demand, possibly creating some flexibility in the durations of the current contracts.
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.
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.
Its a very, very long “storm”, at some point you have to re-adjust, even if it is very painful
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.
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.
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.<p>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.
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.<p>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.<p>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.<p>* 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.
When fabs are full, you produce silicon with the highest margins.
Personal computing was essentially dead when companies figured that renting hardware and software and charging monthly subscriptions was a lot more profitable.
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.
But the latter mindset from companies was a main reason why personal computing took off.
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...<p>Dont get the panic. :)<p>ryzenn 9800x3d
32GB ram
9070xt<p>about 2k
This is ridiculous. A used M1 MBAir is the best personal computing value ever offered in the history of the world.
Such great value that it’ll stop getting updates next year.
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.
I was considering a 128GB MacBook Pro earlier this week.<p>I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.<p>I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
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.
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, <a href="https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pro-or-max-standard-display-space-black" rel="nofollow">https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr...</a> seems to have them in stock as well.
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.)
WOW. I'm glad I bought the beast <i>yesterday</i>.<p>The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
Mac Studio?<p>I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
No, M5 Max MBP with all the options.<p>I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.<p>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.
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
Wow, how much did you pay? $10k? That’s a beefy config
I had plans to buy two Airs, was not sure if I needed 13 or 15, 24 or 32, which was better for my wife and what's the best strategy to buy one for her first and then understand my needs test-driving it. Maybe I actually needed Pro. Lot's of procrastination as none of us had a real need for an upgrade. It's all in the past tense now. I've just bought a 16GB model with 1TB on Amazon at 480 EUR cheaper that the new price, and it seems cheaper than the official old price. I will forget about MacBooks until a real need comes, or maybe good ARM laptops happen sooner. It's funny that if they did not have the dichotomy between 13 and 15, I would have thought less and bought M4 as soon as it was out with the support for 2 external displays + built-in.
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.<p>Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
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.
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!
I replaced my M1 Air with M1 Max 64GB few weeks ago, not the biggest upgrade, but memory was that made me decide. It's hard to find even 64GB models nowadays.
Go to Amazon, they still have old pricing.
I mean the writing was very clearly on the wall.
Go to Amazon quickly. They still have yesterday's prices.
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.
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.
Check your local Costco, I snapped up a 512 GB model for 1197 last Saturday.
I regret not RamMaxxing my M4 mini
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?<p>Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.<p>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).
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.
I hate it when my time machine does that.
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.
Devs reading this, please start making your apps less memory hungry.<p>All the people running any computer appreciate.
Don't get your hopes up. The industry is well underway in migrating everything possible away from native apps to Electron.
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.<p>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.
Message recieved, porting my webapp to Electron ASAP.
Realistically this will just be used to force people into even more subscriptions.<p>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.<p>Thank you and have a nice day!
Saw a post two days ago right here about Apple raising its prices, and asking "when ?", should have bought 10 macbooks yesterday : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643079">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643079</a>
Glad I bought a fully loaded MBP a few weeks back and not now. The price on my exact configuration just went up a whopping 29%!
Damn, this might trigger a hoarding + buying frenzy, further driving up prices.<p>I have a macbook pro wit m1 pro and I was waiting for the mac mini m5 pro, but I might pull the trigger on the macbook pro m5 pro. Ugh.
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”.
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
Unfortunately the configuration I need is not available through any of those retailers.<p>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.
Honestly the M1 Air still has many years of life still. It's an amazing machine.
Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%
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.<p>So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?<p>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
> You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?<p>No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.
> Inflation is an average of many things<p>What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?<p>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.
Turns out, BLS actually lists this stuff when they release CPI figures.<p>Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!<p><a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm</a>
Eggs. That was the last omg inflation is crazy story and now they're about as cheap as they've ever been.
What doesn't inflation consider though? Government numbers on inflation make no sense to average folks.
Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.<p>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.<p>Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.<p>Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-label-economic-data.html" rel="nofollow">https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...</a>
Politicians pretend it’s much lower. Or claim that deflation is occurring through statements like “we are bringing prices down”.
The base model 13" MacBook Air released in 2020 was $1,299. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to... $1,299.<p>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.<p>And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.<p>Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-generation-of-mac/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...</a><p>That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
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If you wanted to buy in the near term, Amazon is offering Prime Day discounts off of the old prices today.<p>> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)<p>M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)<p><a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/</a>
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?
Buy out all the hardware to price me out and sell me back the compute at $200 a month. well played.
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.
Obviously AI hardware crunch will get blamed for this, rightfully, but there's another story here: inflation is back.[1]<p>I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-report-interest-rates-oil-rcna351636" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...</a>
I asked this ~6 months ago and I'm going to ask again - if AI is supposed to make creating digital things easier, where are we going to publish these digital things? On rocks? Is AI industry essentially eating its own tail?
Concerned about apple. First late to Ai, having to surrender to google and now a hit to their hardware. Very unfortunate for apple customers.
And "analysts" flip out on the stock, when these products are < 15% of Apple's revenue. Clowns.<p>Breakdown by segment (FY 2025):<p>Mac: $33.71 B — 8.10% of total revenue<p>iPad: $28.02 B — 6.73% of total revenue
I wonder if they will give more for trade-ins now or keep the old rate and just resell it at these higher prices.
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..
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.
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. :-(
I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.<p>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.<p>I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
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).<p>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…
You can also buy something now that not all shops have adjusted to the new pricing.
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.
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.
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Base iPad went up almost 30%, <i>including</i> refurbs. Was recommending one to my parents for $299 - now it’s $379.
Is Apple also offering more money for trade-ins?
I bought one last month for $299. Now the Apple Store is showing $449
damn I was in the market for a new iPad
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The shine of the Neo just rubbed off somewhat.
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.
The $599 XPS13 is a better value, and it can run Linux unlike the Neo.
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.
Matter of time before they where hit by the market prices. If you take the day of today, and calculate back. You can see how long apple locks in the prices for their hardware supplies. Interesting note to make. Wonder if they will increase the duration in the future or become more risk averse.
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.
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.<p>So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.<p>I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scrolling_with_a_trackpad_on_linux_is_way_way_too/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...</a>
Yeah, everyone always misses the little things when it comes to the masses moving to Linux.<p>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.<p>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?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>Year of the Linux Desktop will <i>never</i> happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Fair point, but I'd say<p>> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.<p>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.<p>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 <i>maybe</i> 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.
As an app developer, having to eat an ever increasing Mac hardware cost upfront may push people like me to just focus on Android.
You think the situation is better on Android? The margins for Android OEMs are even thinner.
Hold on! Even people like <i>you</i>?<p>Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
Except you only need to eat that hardware cost once a decade.
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets.<p>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.
Does somebody have a price increase by currency table? A lot of losers vs. USD since apple last set their prices.
Just got a new MacBook Air.<p>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.
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.<p>I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.<p>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).
I was planning to upgrade my 16" M1 Pro to the M6 Pro 16" MBP later this year.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm confused why you would replace your 16" M1 Pro with a 15" M5 Air... on which axes is that an upgrade over your M1 Pro?
I supposedly just snagged the exact same model on Amazon for $1549, as opposed to $1999 on Apple’s site today!
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.<p>On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.<p>I’m interested in running local AI models.
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.
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.
So Apple did not ge the benefit of the AI hype (in stock price) but caught the bad repercussions of the AI aftermath
The configuration I’m interested in (I’m waiting until new M5 models are launched) just increased $1000 :-/
Mac Studio Desktop, M3 Ultra Processor, 96GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Silver up by £1100 (£4,199.00 -> £5,299.00)
Is there anything new actually worth paying for?
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?<p>I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
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.
The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.<p>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.
> The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.<p>It's more likely that China will simply impose export controls. It's unlikely Chinese fabs will be able to fulfill local demand, leave alone global, for the foreseeable future. And they do need these components for their own manufacturing.
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.
Even the upstarts are cashing in. I believe CXMT is making some serious cash now.
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon</a><p>> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
Where would they make that which isn’t constrained already?
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
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.
Would MBP M5 32GB RAM be adequate for small model post-training and small RL experiments?<p>Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.
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%.
Bring back upgradeable RAM and storage.
You just know that upcoming OLED Macbook Pro is going to start at 3k for the base configuration.
Hikes coming soon to AWS/Azure/GCP bills ...
Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.
<i>(I know this is not how business works, but..)</i> 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<p>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.
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.<p>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.
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.
Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?<p>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.<p>(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)".
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.<p>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.<p>So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.<p>I can see how they succumed to the pressure.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reportedly-king-of-macs-by-long-way-achieving-60-more-sales-than-air/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-navigating-the-volatile-memory-market" rel="nofollow">https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...</a>
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.
why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?
capitalism needs its profits.<p>also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
"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.
Indeed. Although it's investment that's the problem here, not profit.
Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.
If they could, they would.
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?<p>And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
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.
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.<p>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.
They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.<p>Treat yoself Tim Apple!
The majority of the component cost in the AppleTV is likely the storage so that's a big hit.
Having the ethernet port and Thread radio gated behind the 128gb model is obnoxious.<p>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.)
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.
I think the Neo was eating into their Air sales, and not merely bringing the Mac to a new market.
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.<p>Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.<p>In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway<p><pre><code> > 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.
</code></pre>
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.
If you don’t need the lastest models, I recommend <a href="https://eshop.macsales.com/" rel="nofollow">https://eshop.macsales.com/</a> 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.
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?
Some of the price increases seem disconnected from the component cost increases.<p>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.
I got a Mac Mini on Amazon in July 2025 for 575€, the exact model is currently 969€ in the Apple Store.
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.
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.
> We have shielded our customers from these increases so far<p>Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
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.
And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.
3 months ago "mac mini, neo, and air prices are to good to be true"<p>and then the monkeys paw curled
The price increases are absurd for some configurations. Glad I placed my order for a new mb pro a couple days 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.
How does that contradict the price increase? iPads still have RAM, yeah? If anything, <i>not</i> increasing the prices on iPads would undermine Macbook marketshare, would it not?
> the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool<p>amusing nonsense
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.<p>Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
What we want to really know is the cost of Ultra Mac Studio 512gb if that will happen or 256gb.
Mac Studio M3 Ultra: $5299 (+$1300)<p>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.
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.
I guess the days of engineers getting to be so casual about memory footprint and CPU cycles is over.
So this is how Apple makes up for the margins on the Neos.
The increase to the old Apple TV or Homepod is egregious.
Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!
Still no 256GB or 512GB Studio models at any price. 96 is the max for any Studio configuration on apple.com right now.
I bought a full spec M5 Max MBP. Yesterday.<p>I'm relieved.
Weird that it’s the Neo that is affected why it famously has hardly any ram.
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.
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.<p>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.<p>Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.<p>Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.<p>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.<p>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.
Just stop buying new gadgets for 18 months and then see what happens
Different article, but accessible to non-subscribers: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ryj81ywlro" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ryj81ywlro</a>
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.<p>Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.<p>Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
After these increases, will Apple be maintaining the previous profit margin?<p>Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
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.
Back to old expensive apple pricing
Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen
Tell me again how AI is a benefit to actual people?
Nano texture display option also got a price increase. Thankfully, AppleCare+ didn't.
2026 computing, brokies need not apply.
They seem to confuse hard drive and ram memory on these articles
I guess it was inevitable. Is it only RAM related ?
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.<p>I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.<p>Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.<p>This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
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 <i>years</i>. 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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
>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<p>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.
It all depends on how much they're investing in increasing capacity.
Quite a bit:<p><a href="https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny" rel="nofollow">https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny</a><p><a href="https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id" rel="nofollow">https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id</a><p>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."
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-by-200-or-more-on-some-models-a7463f99" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-b...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>“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.”<p>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.
Good luck applying your US antitrust law against Samsung and SK Hynix which have 75% of the market.<p>Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
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.<p><a href="https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-coming" rel="nofollow">https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-c...</a>
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.
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.
I would get nervous carrying around a $10k laptop.
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.
I had one in my cart last night. It seems far less appealing today.<p>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.
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...
The EU price includes the warranty, which is <i>at least</i> 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.
You can get AppleCare+ in the U.S. for $149/year which is just as good (or better) than any warranty.
Do you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.
> you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City<p>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!
You save a lot less after paying import duties.
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.
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.<p>I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
Did any sci fi books predict an AI world where computer hardware was soaked up by AI mega corps and compute was undemocratized?
> The average price increase is $269.23.<p>How is that calculated?
They simply couldn't cut into their fat margins, could they?
Thanks AI!
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.
> M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)<p>I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
> M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)<p>$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.
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
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.<p>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.<p>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 is where regulators would normally step in and limit the clearly excessive buildout. It's well past harming consumer spending.
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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.<p>AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.<p>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.
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.
Uh oh. Should I grab an iPhone now before those prices are raised?
How is the mini not increased?
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.
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.<p>I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
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.
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.
I think when they eventually announce the M5 Mac Mini (September?) it'll just be at a higher price.
What is the point of posting a paywalled article? If you aren't going to paste the content somewhere else, please don't bother.
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...<p>Dont get the panic. :)
memory and storage companies are like oil oligarch right now
Now tell me again how the Steam Machine is “overpriced”..
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.
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.<p><a href="https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/" rel="nofollow">https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/</a><p>I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.<p>I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
>there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps<p>What do you mean "eventually"?<p>Samsung $1.529 T
SK Hynix $1.345 T
Micron $1.343 T
Indeed, maxed out model I've been saving to buy is now £2000 more expensive than just few weeks ago. Madness.<p>There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.<p>Cool.
What?<p>M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)<p>M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999<p>How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?<p>Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
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Inflation babyyyyyyyyyy. See if your salary also raises by 10-20% this year. You're getting priced the fuck out of everything, have fun.
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.<p>Is this really the future we wanted?
> 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.<p>In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.<p>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.<p>It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
"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."
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.<p>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.
As much as I despise trump's administration, isn't this more because of AI farms pressure onto the semiconductor forges?
You're right it's not <i>only</i> trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)<p>I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.<p>Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
Catering to the top of the k-shaped economy is indistinguishable from evil
This is a weird way for Apple to admit the Mac is dead.
This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity.<p>Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.<p>The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions<p>High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.<p>The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.
Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.<p>I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
Or in a few years time memory chip production will meet demand, and prices will decrease.
Or the winners of the AI race will make enough money to buy up the majority of global production indefinitely...<p>But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
> Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.<p>Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
> This is just pure greed<p>Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.
Pretty sure greed existed long before capitalism was a twinkle in any economist's eye. The East India Company was rapacious and evil and full of greed. But it was mercantilist. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism</a>
This is unfortunately the market and “capitalism” working as it should. Price goes up, incentive to produce more goes up too.
Not necessarily. If the entire industry triples its prices and alienates 40% the market, it's still coming out ahead. It only incentivizes producing more if there are enough people unwilling to pay for the new prices, or if it were easy for a newcomer to come in (it's not)
best way to handle this is to stop buying/upgrading