Comment by RaSoJo

4 months ago

>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle

This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!

Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.

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RaSoJo

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basisword  4 months ago

Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).

  • close04  4 months ago

    > Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now

    Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.

    > It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).

    That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.

    [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

  • philipallstar  4 months ago

    PS5's increased to compensative for the many Sony gaming flops, like the $100m Concord (closed down within a couple of weeks) and the $200m Marathon (still on life support but they had to cancel the much more popular Destiny 2 to prioritise it).

  • pdpi  4 months ago

    Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).

    It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.

    • RaSoJo  4 months ago

      Yes, exactly. Price hikes mid-cycle is not something I have seen Apple do historically.

      If true, one reason could be that: Cook is retiring, while Ternus is on his way in. Ternus wouldn't wanna start off with his first announcement being a ginormous price hike. Makes him look bad.

      So Cook becomes the fall guy. i.e., he increases the price by 15% in the existing M5 range.

      When Ternus comes in, he keeps prices stable on the M6 range. Makes Ternus look like an awesome guy...and gets him off on a flying start in his CEO tenure.