Macs

  MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)
  13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)
  15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
  M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)
  M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)
  M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
  iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
  M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)
  M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)

  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)

  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)

> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.

https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...

This is in addition to the other two recent price hikes.

Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.

Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.

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

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!

Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out

Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.

I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.

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.

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.

It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.

About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.

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.

However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.

All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.

But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.

>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs

I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:

When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.

When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.

I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.

If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.

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.

What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.

Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.

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.

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."

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.

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.

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.

If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.

What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.

Or the single app that slows it down.

Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.

Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.

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.

https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...

So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.

(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.)

"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

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 always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.

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”.

Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.

I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.

Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.

That's... quite the choice of words there

It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.

The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.

Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.

Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro

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.

your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)

your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)

https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...

I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.

You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.

Maybe “common myth I’ve noticed spread on reddit” would work.

Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...

I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.

That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.

the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.

That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster.

https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...

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.

What garbage.

You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.

I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.

Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.

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.

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!".

Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.

I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.

Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy

Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.

So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.

We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.

https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...

Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.

you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them

Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.

I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.

    There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
   
    So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
    
    * All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
    * AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
    * In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
    * Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
    * Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
    * VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
    * Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
    * Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
    * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
    * Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
    * 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
    * Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
    * Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
    * BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
   
    You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. 

That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...

But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.

I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?

Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.

So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.

Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!

This is absolute madness we have never seen.

Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.

If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.

And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.

Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.

>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.

That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.

Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.

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.

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?

I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.

That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.

I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?

And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.

https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...

So maybe their mobile hardware will be next.

All their other products are lower volume.

I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.

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?

Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.

The question is always: What specific regulation?

Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.

You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.

You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.

> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.

I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.

No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.

You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.

The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.

The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.

What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.

This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'

If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.

There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.

If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.

I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.

These 10 countries need the US/EU market for their exports.

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!

> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM

That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI goons to completely buy the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.

If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not merely 'so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.

It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.

If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.

I'd argue that's incentive enough.

The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.

You can't sanction your way into squeezing blood from a stone.

> 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.

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.

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.

You keep arguing as if there's only one side to this, the producers/DRAM companies who can't scale production fast enough.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...

Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.

> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them

One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.

Fascist trillionaire

Ah yes, "We have to do something! Something must be better than nothing!"

Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.

Then, let's see how quickly I can reinterpret whatever power you've grabbed in the name of "doing something" and pervert it for some other nefarious purpose, or just generally bypass the intent entirely as a motivated actor with limitless funds.

Many regulations, once passed, impact only those incapable of navigating around them - typically, the less-fortunate. Invariably, power taken in the name of some transient issue is never later relinquished.

My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.

What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.

When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.

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.

You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices. How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.

Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.

Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.

There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?

The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.

Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?

Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.

If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.

This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.

If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.

It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.

Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?

So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.

Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.

I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.

Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.

Hopefully you'll agree that there's a difference between even a large buyer like Apple reserving a large chunk of DRAM supply to put in their products that they sell to consumers, and the anti-competitive behavior by OpenAI that I describe above.

That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.

> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.

http://shirky.com/2001/01/

Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.

And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something. This means: 1. You wait for build out and prices go down. 2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.

And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.

All existing factories have maximized their production.

> factories but are not making ram switch

It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.

> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply

What alternative exists for NAND flash?

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/manufacturing/fab-f...

And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.

The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.

=-=-=-=

"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.

“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.

“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/memory-stocks-cyclical-boom-...

Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.

So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.

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.

--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_

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.

Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.

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.

It’s gross.

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.

Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.

See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.

It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?

Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)

Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.

So it's a distorted market.

Close down would be a good idea.

I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-r...

Don't trust a fox to count your chickens.

It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.

Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...

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.

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.

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.

I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.

In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.

The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.

A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.

I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.

At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.

My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.

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.

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.

American companies, you mean.

Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.

Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.

Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.

If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.

Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?

And now China knows that both US and EU are weak and cant even deal with Russia or Iran.

And they also have their own semiconductors manufacturing and cut off from what TSMC produces anyway.

Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.

Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.

Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.

CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.

We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.

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.

I have another one which is 5 years old by now.

Where?

We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.

This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.

I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.

So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.

I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.

We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.

I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.

Arrant nonsense, the Core 5 comfortably beats the A18.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+5+320&id...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro+%28Ma...

This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.

And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.

"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)

fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.

I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.

Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.

Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.

What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".

So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.

If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.

It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.

Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.

* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.

Dont get the panic. :)

ryzenn 9800x3d 32GB ram 9070xt

about 2k

Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra

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.

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.

Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.

Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.

Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.

I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.

But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.

I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.

I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.

If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.

The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.

I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.

I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.

I have an M2 Max, as well, and I wonder what I could get for it on resale... or maybe I should just keep it.

I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.

I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.

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.

This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.

What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.

Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.

They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).

Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone

Left behind on what exactly?

All the people running any computer appreciate.

You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.

Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.

Thank you and have a nice day!

Breakdown by segment (FY 2025):

Mac: $33.71 B — 8.10% of total revenue

iPad: $28.02 B — 6.73% of total revenue

> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)

M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/

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.

So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.

Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is

No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.

What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?

And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.

Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm

Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.

Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.

Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]

[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...

I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...

Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.

They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.

I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.

I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.

The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.

More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).

You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).

But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.

I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.

Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.

ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).

A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.

I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…

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.

https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...

Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.

So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.

I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...

Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.

But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"

Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.

Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.

Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.

The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.

If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but it's already enough to make an impact.

> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.

Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.

I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.

I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.

Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).

But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.

The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.

On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.

I’m interested in running local AI models.

I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.

Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.

> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.

Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!

Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.

More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.

There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.

A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.

So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.

I can see how they succumed to the pressure.

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...

[2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...

I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.

(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".

Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market

lol.

and then the monkeys paw curled

And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.

Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.

In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.

  > 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.

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’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.

Treat yoself Tim Apple!

I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)

That's the kind of pricing that makes me start to consider the Google 4K Streamer even if it's a UX downgrade - for $300 I get ethernet and Thread on every TV.

Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.

amusing nonsense

1: most of them dont use their own products

2: someone else pays for their laptops

I'm relieved.

Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.

This is just the new normal.

While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.

A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.

What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.

Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.

One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.

Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.

Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.

If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.

If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.

In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.

Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?

but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive

Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?

Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.

To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.

It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.

They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.

It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.

This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.

These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).

There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.

Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.

Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.

https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny

https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id

The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."

Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.

In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.

“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”

The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.

Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.

I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.

Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!

I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...

I also wouldn’t be surprised if memory providers weren’t intimately involved, as they’ve been caught price fixing in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.

There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.

I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.

I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.

GLM 4.7 Flash is a 30b model that was far behind SOTA at launch, and I know that because I pay for z.ai inference and have run the model locally. Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash have the same issue, and beg the question; are you really going to process a 64k agentic context at 450tok/s? That's 2+ minutes that you spend waiting for the first token to generate! Of course nobody can sell that as competitive inference, and it only gets worse with larger models. We're talking about non-interactive speeds, here.

If you're satisfied with small local models, more power to you. It puts you in the same barrel as Strix Halo enthusiasts or the guys that bought 2x3090s on Reddit. You are completely ignoring the market if you think that any of those SOCs are unprecedented or unparalleled for inference workloads, though. The free DS4 API is faster at prefill and decode, you could not give away Mac inference at zero cost and compete with what China provides for free. That's how far behind Macs are for local inference, to put things into perspective.

There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.

Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!

How is that calculated?

$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.

Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.

It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.

This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.

> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.

AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.

Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.

I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…

https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/

I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.

I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.

What do you mean "eventually"?

Samsung $1.529 T SK Hynix $1.345 T Micron $1.343 T

There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.

Cool.

M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)

M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999

How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?

Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.

No, no they don't. CPUs and GPUs do, broadly, but SSDs and RAM use specific processes catered only to their respective usages. You can't use a NAND flash process for anything else. Likewise for a RAM process.

Is this really the future we wanted?

Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.

Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.

I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.

Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.

I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.

Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.

I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.