Comment by wincy
12 hours ago
I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 for the 128GB RAM 14” MacBook Pro model.
> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins.
They bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet.
Commodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out".
I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.
Their margins may not have changed actually. https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o
This is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.
M5 Max starts at 36GB memory at $3599. M4 Max started at the same memory at $3199. They have doubled the default storage from 1TB to 2TB, that's a $400 increase I'm paying even if I don't want the extra 1TB.
They raised the base price by $200.
Apple's previous policy of price gouging for RAM means no need to raise prices yet, they still have a buffer.
They also have long term contracts with the suppliers in all likelihood
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In practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB during the old Intel days.
They advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit.
Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling.
Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.
If anything, it's less, because you're giving up more RAM to the GPU.
Which, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating if it's time to upgrade my m2 max.
But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it isn't for me.
RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
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I know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me.
> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth
Isn't this it?
Ah yeah you’re right, thanks. I tried to at least make my post useful and pull up prices for the different tiers. Overall, those prices are surprisingly competitive now compared to the rest of the laptop market!
On the M5 Pro tier (not the base M5 tier that was released last November), the base memory is 24GB.
My M3 Pro from a few years ago for the same price had 18GB.
Apple doesn't tend to use "RAM" in their marketing materials, they usually use "memory", which appears 9 times in the press release.
>Anyway, it starts with 16GB of RAM. $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB
Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared.
They sell you 1gb LPDDR5X for $25 while buying it at $5, don't worry for their margins...
Fair chance that Apple has price/purchase agreements already in place. Consumers are left to fight over the excess capacity after megabuyers get their orders filled.
> Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared.
Apple has had enough war chests with the ability of buying the entirety of TSMC's new capacity years in advance in the past.
If I were to guess, Apple locked in their entire BOM and production capacity two years ago. That's something even the large players cannot replicate because they run cash-lean and have too many different SKUs, and the small players (Framework, System76, even Steam) are entirely left to the forces of the markets.
Preorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can’t order the base RAM model today, either.
It starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max. It's been like this.
The price hasn't changed between the M4 and M5. I honestly don't know how they did it. But I had a standing order for a maxed-out M4 (128 GB RAM, 2 TB drive) and the price is the same as the M5 so I cancelled my M4 order and will pre-order the M5 MAX instead.
Well, guess I was wrong about that.
No, that's not how it works at all. They still source all their RAM from Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc.
that is ... not at all how that works. RAM is a separate chip, that is placed on top of the substrate that holds the main dies. It is bought from normal ram manufacturers like micron. it is not "embedded in the chip" by any possible meanings of those words.
on Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory"
I'm honestly just glad they don't brand this as "1016 MB of unified memory". Swap and ramdisks are a thing, after all...
Insane for the "Pro" to have only 16GB of memory. My 11 year old Intel i3 laptop has 16GB of memory.
Don't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my understanding, anyway.
My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
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The benefits are in speed not capacity.
More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.
Apple's RAM price bumps were already insane, now they'll get worse.
They’re literally not changing
If they can just absorb the current ram price hike, you know they having insane margins.
It did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line. So even the 16GB version is more expensive.
I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it didn't change!!!"
And no power adapter included.
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