These are the price changes mentioned in the article:
Macs
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
iPads
iPad: $449 (up from $349)
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599)
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749)
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999)
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)
More products:
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129)
HomePod: $349 (up from $299)
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99)
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)
I looked recently and a new Macbook 128gb ram was £5500 which was expensive for me but I could consider it! Now it’s £7000 which is absolutely ridiculous. AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
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!
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.
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.
They don't even have 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)
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.
I think Apple could easily swallow these price hikes in its profit margin if it wanted to, but then its shareholders wouldnt have as pretty numbers to look at in their quarterly reports.
This is the explanation for almost all things done by public companies. The shareholders own the company. The numbers in the quarterly reports are important to them.
The scale of Apple is such that I suspect they also set prices based on what would lead to shortages. If they had significantly lower prices, to avoid annoying customers by not having things in stock, they’d basically have to fund the construction of new factories. They do do that kind of stuff, but it’s not trivial.
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599) +16.7%
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099) +18.2%
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699) +17.7%
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199) +13.6%
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599) +13.9%
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999) +25.0%
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999) +32.5%
Pads
iPad: $449 (up from $349) +28.7%
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599) +25.0%
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749) +26.7%
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999) +20.0%
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499) +20.0%
More products
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129) +54.3%
HomePod: $349 (up from $299) +16.7%
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99) +30.3%
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499) +5.7%
Price elasticity, and supply and demand, and all that Econ 101 stuff... these numbers confirm there is no demand for the Vision Pro. (=
> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
reply
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.
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.
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
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...
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.
As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
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.
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.
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.
not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
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.
On one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
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
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.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
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.
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.
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.
> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
I am so glad this finally get mentioned and at least upvoted on HN. Many are taking hardware improvements and cheap pricing as granted.
Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
That perspective is misleading. By that logic someone in 1960 would have to pay $100k to have a vacuum computer that is equivalent to a random calculator today. So then any price below $100k is ok for a calculator and we shouldn't complain :).
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
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.
I think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
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.
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.
What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
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 shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
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.
That is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
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.
Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
The quote from Gruber in question (IMO, a little more reasonable than you give it credit for.)
> 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.
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.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
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.
Maybe they don’t want the price to absolutely dominate the headlines of their forthcoming product announcements. It won’t be forgotten, but the sting will be less “newsworthy”.
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.
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.
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.
The only news about this I saw was that Cook confirmed that price increases were inevitable, but he wouldn't say when or how they would come. I think most people erroneously took this to mean that they'd roll them out gradually as products were refreshed.
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.
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!
Sure do! Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man, we live the longest, our material welfare is the highest it has ever been! I have electricity, I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly, I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day. I could go on and on forever.
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
Ah yes ! You should have said that to the 10 000 people who died while trying to migrate to another country, due to drone wars, financial crisis and climate change. [1]
And you should also have said that to the Congolese children who died while mining for the natural resources used to produce components for the AI datacenters.
And yes, the future we're living in is wonderful for the 50 millions slaves all around the world to build things we don't really need. [2]
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
My generation can't afford to own homes nor have children and the already pithy value of our labour is being outsourced to cheap foreign labour while the cost of food and basic living shoots into the stratosphere
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
>Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
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.
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...
> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
Looking forward to being sent to a foggy planet in foreign start system to collect alien eggs for a daily nutripaste and bunk bed with corporate issuesd blanket.
I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects.
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
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.
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.
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same
But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :)
Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around.
Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
Reading the replies is amazing. OP: a specific manufacturer raised prices on some products. Thread: endless argument about everything that's good or bad about the current living situation, in historical perspective, across the entire world.
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
Honestly, 60-70% of this feeling is just inflation. If things were still affordable, the doom and gloom would be much less palpable. Inflation will get under control, but we still have other problems with the direction of social cohesion.
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
For most that hit the treadmill at 18 that may be true because the rat race starts then, live within your means save and invest start early or else or you will be left standing scratching your head later in life...
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.
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.
In 2024 I bought a used (2021 era) Dell for $400 to use as my home server. Just the ram that it came with now routinely goes for $600 or more. I'd sell it, but then I wouldn't have a server...
I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.
You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...
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 suspect that these prices are going to seriously dent sales. RAM is getting crushed. I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation onto all the hardware that the cloud companies bought up for AI and found wasn't possible to get any ROI out. Bezos was all over that already.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
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.
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.
You mean the same phones that we own less and less with each passing day? I cannot even turn off OS updates anymore. Is it even my phone if I can't do whatever I want with it?
The MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. That's still significantly more powerful than anything you could buy at that price point last year.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
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'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.
> I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
I know some organisations were already moving to thin clients last year. Citing cutting costs and improving security (the data doesn't stay in employee's laptop and all access to virtual desktop is thoroughly centrally logged).
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
We aren't quite there yet where I work but those conversations are starting. We've already pushed refresh cycles out for the non-tech folks from 3 years out to 5 years with justification (basically has to be broken or battery shot, otherwise its run it til it dies or no longer gets updates, no more automatic refresh).
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
I'm sure they've done the math. Mac has ~8% revenue share for Apple and I (naively) assume they'll just account for a 20% drop in sales with 20% higher prices. Personally, if my Mac were to die right now, I'd scream and shout (well, I'd use Apple Care...), but I won't go back to a Linux laptop, since I'm too deep into the ecosystem. And I suspect I'm not alone.
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
Same boat here. If I had to, I could grab an Air instead and do more work over ssh. I prefer to keep things local, but it's not a huge deal breaker for my work. I'm too deep in the ecosystem to get anything else, and I need Xcode anyway.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
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.
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.
Begging? Component price goes up, they increase their prices. Where's the begging?
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.
Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
Because Apple doesn't sell socketed memory, but instead integrated SOC products that usually stimulate growth in their much more profitable services segment?
Like SOC'S? Something is probably coming Motorola, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm (out in 2027-2028), and Broadcom said no then Apple did something and replaced them the Apple Silicon design group can certainly do memory wasn't a company called Anobit bought by Apple years ago and money isn't a problem Apple didn't flush billions down Sam Altman's toilet like Microsoft.
Timeline 2-3 years 10-20 billion dollars...
Note:(Microsoft thru the end of this year will spend 60-80 billion dollars on Capex and Google will spend 180 billion dollars).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.
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.
That’s a fair critique of my limited, Ameri-centric perspective in my comment, but also a stinging rebuke of the decline of American hegemony abroad. As recently as last year having those Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list meant that those memory modules were unsellable outside of China and a handful of other countries that rebuked American power; the fact even American companies are now openly courting them for parts shows how weak the Empire’s power really is just two years later.
You mean the 2TB SSDs for $2 that flourish on AliExpress? I actually like AliExpress and trust them more than Amazon, but their failure to police these obvious scams is a blot on their record.
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, https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr... 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.)
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
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.
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 thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
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.
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)
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.
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.
The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.
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.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
So, it finally happened. The Project is so thirsty for RAM that not even the world's most well-capitalized computer company could have the final word any longer. There's only so many more powerful organizations in the world than Apple. Well... we'll find out soon enough if such a thing could be built, or should I say, summoned.
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.
People for some reason forget that for most election apps you can run it in a browser tab and avoid almost all of the overhead.
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
Realistically this will just be used to force people into even more subscriptions.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
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.
My niece graduated and is headed off to college in the fall and I picked her up a macbook as a graduation present, knew that apple's prices were still artificially low and a price hike was coming and ordered it the day before they announced that prices were going to go up.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
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.
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”.
Unfortunately the configuration I need is not available through any of those retailers.
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
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.
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
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.
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 at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
> you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
Inflation is an average of many things. Computer components have a huge spike in demand with insufficient increase in supply, which is going to lag for years, so we might as well be buying at auction. It's not a price that flows through the entire economy, like the price of oil.
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
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.
Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
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.
It's funny seeing this kind of comment get made over and over. I don't think those regurgitating this line realize that getting "left behind" (whatever that even actually means) is appealing when the direction the future is heading is very unappealing.
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%.
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.
Apple Share price fell 6.12% yesterday. Perhaps indicating that expectations are of a reduced demand in response to the price rather than buyers accepting it.
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.
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?
It's the flamebait detector. Any post which gets a lot of comments in a short time gets pushed down quickly. Though the mods usually push it back up if it doesn't involve touchy topics like politics.
Oh interesting! Thanks for the context I had no idea that was a mechanic - also it seems like the mods merged it with another thread and now it’s back on the front page.
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.
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.
They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.
I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
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.
I think nowadays the Apple TV is more about smart home than TV. But as long as they keep calling it a "TV", most of the people will compare it with the built-in apps in their smart TVs and think it's unnecessary. Even if you tell them that it can do much more than watching TV, they will think the money they spend on the TV related functionalities is a waste. The old price was already hard for them to justify, the new price is almost impossible.
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
What smart home features does Apple TV have? All I've ever used it for is to watch TV. To be fair, I pretty much dismissed Apple for anything smart home after they launched that ridiculously priced Pod thing.
It's a thread border router and matter controller, providing Remote access to local-only devices, scheduling, automation... with better track records on security and privacy than competitors.
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.
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets.
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
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.
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.
Until they raise the price on that too. Dell has explicitly stated it's a "limited time" price, so don't be shocked if it becomes the $699 XPS13 almost immediately.
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.
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.
I got Mint back in 2022 for my desktop built in 2014. Everything worked fine and I was even able to customize my install (though I regret some choices). It used considerably fewer resources than Win10 (never mind Win11, which I don't think would even install on this machine) out of box. I'm talking 40% less RAM use at the desktop before opening programs; and that's for Cinnamon (Xfce would be leaner still). And grindy I/O that touches a lot of small files is about three times the speed. No fancy configuration necessary. I did a simple install for a relative on even older hardware, again no problems.
If I needed to change a kernel version, it's literally as easy as selecting it from a menu in a pre-installed GUI "update manager", letting it do its thing and rebooting. I can get up to the bleeding edge (although I have no good reason to).
Yeah, everyone always misses the little things when it comes to the masses moving to Linux.
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
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.
I was considering getting M5 Max mbp with 128GB, but at that price it is just ridiculous, 64 version costs now roughly what 128 was before and that was a stretch for me. At this point might as well stick to my ol reliable M1 Pro mbp.
Edit: I'll say that now it seems also very hard to justify buying top of the line apple hardware for the enterprise. Getting top laptops for just a team of 10 people now means extra $20k just for RAM on top of already a higher base price.
My prediction is that the semiconductor price increases is going to cause a lot of demand destruction. The semiconductor companies revenues is not based on new products but rather on the fact that there is scarcity. Once that scarcity is removed then I suspect that we're going to have some reckoning happening across the industry.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
Old enough to remember several memory price boom cycles. In the late 80s at the place I worked we bought a bunch of DRAM for a production run that became delayed because the CPU needed wasn't ready. The DRAM was in a large cardboard box under my desk for a while, acting as a foot rest. I remember the price of DRAM spiked and we calculated that box/foot-rest was now worth more than...one million dollars.
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
I feel sick to my stomach. Been saving up all year for a new 16" M5 Max to replace my M1 Max in July (I do indie game dev, so I routinely use everything it can give). It was already a was already a big stretch at $6k, now it's completely out of reach at $8k. There's no world where I can justify that price even if I could afford it.
You know what's extremely good value right now? The old "space bin" Mac Pros. You could get a maxed out one for less than 1k - 128GB RAM and with the dual D700 GPU's those produce around 12GB VRAM too. I've been eyeing these for local LLM purposes. To be fair the jump between the M1 Max and M5 is not that big in real usage, unless you're absolutely memory bound on the M1 - the M1 is likely to be supported for a few years more...
I have to have a laptop with how I work, unfortunately. And yeah, I really need more RAM and particularly GPU power, so the M5 Max would have been a very big improvement for my workflow.
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
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.
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
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.
"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.
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
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.
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.
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.
The biggest reason is I move around a lot and the 16" MBP has weighed on me. It's a really chunky and heavy laptop. Sometimes I don't even want to carry it anywhere.
The M5 is also significantly faster than an M1 Pro. I definitely feel the snappiness on day to day use. I'm also upgrading from 16GB/512GB to 24GB/1TB.
The screen is quite a downgrade and the battery life, surprisingly, is only marginally better than my 5 year old M1 Pro with only 79% capacity left.
Other than that, I don't miss anything else about the M1 Pro. I hear rumors that they're making a smaller MBP in the M6 Pro/Max generation which is why I wanted to wait originally.
The Studio I looked at yesterday jumped from $2600 to $3400 (30%). I was saving for it and was about 1/2 way there. I was expecting these increases in 2027, so planned to buy late in the year. Apple moved faster than I expected after the price increase announcements.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
With memory manufacturers running gross margins in excess of 80% how long until we see upstarts come online to eat away at that or is that unlikely to happen in the near future?
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
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.
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.
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.
Yep - the incumbent memory cartel bathes in money for a bit longer - then Chinese manufacturers eat their market share while they sleep on their laurels.
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
These "hidden" costs of AI/LLM driving up IT (and energy) related price inflation are starting to feel more and more as a kind of an inescapable, AI-imposed tax. We should start calculating these increased hardware costs (that at this point basically affects any product with storage and RAM inside) into the real price we for our AI/LLM usage, and not only think of the price in terms of a monthly subscription or $/tokens. How much have you, both personally and at your workplace, in reality spent extra on equipment and on price increases of services per year since the LLM-boom started?
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?
Website runs on a server, which requires components that AI labs are buying years in advance, driving component prices to astronomical levels. What happens when only AI labs can afford to have a server?
I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
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.
Fabs are notoriously costly and time consuming to setup by which time you become obsolete, assuming you even have access to equipment which will take years to reach you. I wouldn't be surprised though if Apple was considering becoming a fab at this point regardless. Apple has a history of not letting its suppliers toy them around. Given the political and AI pressures going on, I think apple could just decide to make its own SOCs and memory at some point in America. Unfortunately the person who could can pull this off is retiring.
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.
Yes Gruber's comment about not making Ternus debut with a shit sandwich was right on the money, so I wondered why that alone didn't sway him to think that Apple would do the price increase sooner.
Fighting words, it’s Apple’s fault (doesn’t he know that Apple can actually (in House for good) replace them? Maybe not today, but certainly in three years)
Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
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.
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.
Just don't buy an Xbox. It's hot garbage and requires a pricey yearly subscription to play online. A PC pays for itself quickly once you factor the subscription in and cheaper games.
If you don’t need the lastest models, I recommend https://eshop.macsales.com/ for refurbished that I can trust. Their prices seem reasonable to me. I have been buying from them since I was a kid in the 90s and it was a (the) mail order catalog for the Mac ecosystem. I bought a beefy 3 year old mini for a home server earlier this year from them.
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.
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.
Yeah, for a few short months Apple had a really nicely priced entry-level machine. Now so much with a 20% price hike on an 8GB machine with soldered RAM
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.
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.
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?
Apple doesn't like to be held hostage, it has the cash coffers, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're somehow buying dedicated production capacity for the future.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway
> Cook said Apple is willing to deploy its balance sheet to help secure supply and called for all options to be examined, including a review of national security restrictions on Chinese memory suppliers. He ruled out building Apple's own memory factories.
Above all else, any focus to corner supply for them will be focused on the iPhone. It's their cash cow, nearly half of their revenue. They'll sacrifice other products to save the iPhone.
Just got a MacBook Neo (512GB model) for CZK 19 990 (roughly US$950) from a local reseller, which was the original list price back when the model entered the market.
Models with US keyboards currently still sell for CZK 19 990, Czech keyboard models sell for CZK 21 990 ($1050), probably someone forgot to update the price on the US models.
Ordered a refurb M3 two weeks ago specifically because I had a bad feeling about Q3. Now refreshing the refurb store to see if the prices there tick up too. The thing about "absorbing tariff costs" is that it's a great sentence to say when you also want to reset price anchors upward permanently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
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.
Well I guess that changes the keep vs sell calculation on my 128GB Studio. Have already been thinking about downsizing; seeing what the prices are now I may go ahead with that.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
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 was considering an upgrade this fall. I think I can do another year or two without. who knows, I might the same spec for even more $$. Just as the trend goes....
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
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, not increasing the prices on iPads would undermine Macbook marketshare, would it not?
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.
That just proves that Mediamarkt are scammers. It's not special price if it's the current MRSP. "Future price hikes" are not something you can legally base your "sales" on.
I suspect this is because the next models are more imminent. Not imminent per se, but Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag on most of a factory run of 512GB Studios.
What a beautiful way for Tim Cook to end his career at Apple. supply chain genius can’t overcome market forces so they can keep a healthy profit margin.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
The price increases are unsurprising considering Tim Cook said it was "unsustainable" for Apple to keep absorbing the increases. Glad I ordered a new machine a couple days ago.
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
Forgive me because I do not understand the supply chain for memory. With Micron et al effectively scalping their customers with an oligopoly on probably the lowest intellectual IP in the chain, does this not guarantee 10 years from now a) We are either overbuilt as hyperscalers cut capex, or b) hyperscalers vertically integrate. Or is it truly that hard to make memory?
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
Building a new memory fab takes 3-4 years, extremely capital intensive. Micron is spending $25B+ on Capex and more than half of that is for new memory capacity, a 3x increase over 2 years.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
It *is* hard to make memory, especially HBM (...which is what the AI market wants, and is what the manufacturers are focusing on) and bringing on new capacity takes years. There's the additional wrinkle that the manufacturers we have left are the ones who survived periods where the market was glutted with oversupply in the wake of previous shortages.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
I mean lets not pretend that Apple hasn't done this for years. I had a cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, but I had a choice with memory - I could upgrade from the base 32GB to 192GB one of two ways - pay Apple $3,000 for 160GB, or get the base 32GB model, and buy 192GB of the exact same sticks of memory (same manufacturer, timings, etc.) from OWC for $1,050. And I could sell the 32GB if I wanted.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
>If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
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.
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.
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."
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
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.
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.
Farming implements and looms are bad, I miss having to scratch my own food from the earth and knit my own clothing from whatever fibers and animals I could find...
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.
$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.
> All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
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.
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.
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.
It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.
> So your family would prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers dying in war at age 40 in 1960s Algeria? Or maybe they'd prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers in two-tier French colonial Algeria, working as landless servant day laborers in the 1920s? Or maybe illiterate subsistence farmers in pre-colonial Algeria?
Perhaps genuinely. It’s at the very least regularly observable that less educated, less ambitious individuals living closer to traditional lifestyles are happier and more content.
"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.
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.
You're right it's not only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
maybe in our lives people will start to realize there is really only one political party and its always going to be them vs us until we are all serfs earning below subsistence wages.
Bought my CTO M5 Pro just a month ago, i was a little bit skittish, thinking i should wait for the OLED one, but i think i'll be happier with the 64GB of RAM rather than that overpriced monitor.
Definitely not justified. You think Apple doesn't have warehouses of hardware. It's climate inflation based on a narrative they can exploit because of data centers being in the headlines. Smart, obvious, move because no one will jump ship.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.
They absolutely don't have warehouses of hardware. Tim Cook is a supply-chain-efficiency hawk from before he was CEO -- he was famous for reducing Apple's inventory.
> We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
Who said that? It was Apple, who sold their iPhones at astronomic margins, created walled gardens. There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
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
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
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.
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.
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
These are the price changes mentioned in the article:
Macs
iPads
More products:
To be fair, Microsoft announced their third XBox price hike today.
> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...
This is in addition to the other two recent price hikes.
And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
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> To be fair, Microsoft
Not sure what Microsoft has to do with this and why it's fair.
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1.16x simple mean on XBOX 1.22x simple mean on Apple
Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
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GTA 6 is coming out.
Now IS the time they will hike prices up, as sales of hardware are going to go through roof.
How is that a comparison? Consoles are well known tobe sold as loss leaders.
Apple doesn't sell anything remotely close to a loss leader.
This isn't immediate though, it's from August
Go look at the upgrade prices - the 128 GB RAM jump on the MBP is now $2k!
I looked recently and a new Macbook 128gb ram was £5500 which was expensive for me but I could consider it! Now it’s £7000 which is absolutely ridiculous. AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
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and 2tb -> 8tb storage is +$3k!
And you can't even upgrade the Studio past 96GB now.
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Some very steep price rises here!
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.
No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
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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.
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.
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Delivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why.
They don't even have 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)
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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?
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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.
Or simply they have an opportunity to raise prices? They probably will announce record revenues in a year or so.
Happens with all kind of companies: oil goes up, prices go up, record revenues for the companies. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with Apple.
I think Apple could easily swallow these price hikes in its profit margin if it wanted to, but then its shareholders wouldnt have as pretty numbers to look at in their quarterly reports.
This is the explanation for almost all things done by public companies. The shareholders own the company. The numbers in the quarterly reports are important to them.
It seems like they have been doing that for a while now. Most other companies raised prices a while ago. At some point that becomes unsustainable.
All these AI companies need to stop hoarding RAM.
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The scale of Apple is such that I suspect they also set prices based on what would lead to shortages. If they had significantly lower prices, to avoid annoying customers by not having things in stock, they’d basically have to fund the construction of new factories. They do do that kind of stuff, but it’s not trivial.
How do you know they're not also swallowing a portion of the supplier costs?
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Why would Apple do that?
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Macs
Pads
More products
Price elasticity, and supply and demand, and all that Econ 101 stuff... these numbers confirm there is no demand for the Vision Pro. (=
Darn, Vision Pro for $3,699 is just a little too much for me!
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
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.
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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.
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Wake me when any TV streamer besides the Apple TV 4K can stream a high bitrate 4k HDR video from a Plex server because I sure haven’t found anything.
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HomePod mini? Up 30%?
How is this excused by increased memory prices?
Sounds more like broad across the board inflation to me.
The HomePod mini has 32GB of flash storage in it, from what I can find.
Yeah. Even the AirPods are expected to be pricier. This all seems a bit crazy to me.
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999) is quite a jump.
$200 up for an in years barely changed iPad Pro. Who would buy these things and for what?
In fact I wonder that about the majority of the product palette nowadays
Did the price of upgrades also increase across the board or just the base spec? I’d assume so.
Why Air series prices have not increased? Planning to buy an M2 Air, 32+1TB
M2 is 3 years old and not sold by Apple anymore.
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I meant to say M5 air, typo!
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Looking at a few retailers, it seems like prices haven't increased yet. Maybe in a few days?
Impulse bought a Pro with 48Gb ram on a retailer with old prices
Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out
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Pushed me to buy a Macbook Air in Costco today. I was on the fence for replacing my really old MBP for a while.
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
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...
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...
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> but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks
"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
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.
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Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.
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.
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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.
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Also it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society
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Sometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.
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not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
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.
I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
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On one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.
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.
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a single leetcode tab is taking up up to 700mb of memory...
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.
https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
Something being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.
"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"
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Anytime inflation comes up and the relative power of computing devices is mentioned, I remember the classic[1] line that you can’t eat an iPad.
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
I'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
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.
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Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
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Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.
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Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
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My 2012 thinkpad still works well.
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?
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Well Conversely, in 1996 you, your spouse, your kids, didnt need a pc to live your lives - having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
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And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman. Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$? Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
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.
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!".
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.
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.
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If we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.
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?
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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.
Were you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.
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.
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.
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> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
1996 was 30 years ago. What about comparing prices from 3 years ago? 2023 vs 2026.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I paid about $6k two days ago for a machine that's now above $8k.
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
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.
Software was leaner!
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
I am so glad this finally get mentioned and at least upvoted on HN. Many are taking hardware improvements and cheap pricing as granted.
Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
That perspective is misleading. By that logic someone in 1960 would have to pay $100k to have a vacuum computer that is equivalent to a random calculator today. So then any price below $100k is ok for a calculator and we shouldn't complain :).
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
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.
But back then the contemporaneous llm was the single digit mb file word_list.txt.
I think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
What would be the relative power scaled equivalent today and what would that cost?
It's easy enough to build a $10k rig. Apple sells a studio that's closer to $7k.
That was a niche product, these are mass market consumables.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
* https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shac...
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...
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
Wow, I didn't know that Camcorders were that expensive at the time. That's $2k today according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm .
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.
In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
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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.
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.
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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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)
And you can buy the compute power equivalent to the entire NASA Apollo program for $15, now what?
start launching moon missions, what else?
I gladly paid $1,499 for an iBook G4 in 2005. (~$2,572 inflation adjusted)
And software is now so cheap, or free, that it's incredibly difficult to even start and maintain a single-member LLC software business.
it'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.
What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
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.
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>we...consider buying food a luxury
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
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.
I mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.
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why not compare the prices a couple years ago instead?
unc?
“unc” is the new “boomer”
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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.
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.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
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.
Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
The quote from Gruber in question (IMO, a little more reasonable than you give it credit for.)
> 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.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/22/apple-device-pr...
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.
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> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
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> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
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> a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple
That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.
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> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
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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.
Maybe they don’t want the price to absolutely dominate the headlines of their forthcoming product announcements. It won’t be forgotten, but the sting will be less “newsworthy”.
Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.
I thought they would but not this fast.
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>I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
come on now, we all know who the biggest culprit is
They didn’t increase prices on iPhones, Apple Watch and Airpods
Those are next in line, it’s almost guaranteed.
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I’d say they’re subsidizing them with the rest but the computers and iPads don’t sell much compared to phones so that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
Why would AirPod prices increase?
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There are many rumors that the new iPhone 18 Pro will start at ~$1300.
So maybe their mobile hardware will be next.
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.
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
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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.
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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.
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If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
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It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
Tim Cook said prices were going to increase a few days ago
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 only news about this I saw was that Cook confirmed that price increases were inevitable, but he wouldn't say when or how they would come. I think most people erroneously took this to mean that they'd roll them out gradually as products were refreshed.
Not OpenAI’s fault that the cost of a shipping container doubled.
I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.
I mean, sure shipping is more expensive but that’s definitely not the cause of Apple’s price increases.
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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.
>What's OpenAI going to do?
Close down would be a good idea.
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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.
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!
Sure do! Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man, we live the longest, our material welfare is the highest it has ever been! I have electricity, I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly, I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day. I could go on and on forever.
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
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I could afford to put a roof over my head and food on my plate easier ten years ago than today.
Sure big screen TVs have progressed, but let's not ignore that the changes of the world are regressive for some.
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And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
Those living the longest are those born 75-85 years ago. Later generations will have to wait to assess how it ended for them.
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You are right. But there is also the stress for the low and middle class and there horrible conditions of the poorest countries.
Not so sunshiny when you think about the millions of people struggling to have a meal each day.
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Ah yes ! You should have said that to the 10 000 people who died while trying to migrate to another country, due to drone wars, financial crisis and climate change. [1] And you should also have said that to the Congolese children who died while mining for the natural resources used to produce components for the AI datacenters. And yes, the future we're living in is wonderful for the 50 millions slaves all around the world to build things we don't really need. [2]
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
[1] : https://www.iom.int/fr/news/2024-ete-lannee-la-plus-meurtrie... [2] : https://news.un.org/fr/story/2025/12/1157994
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> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
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I read “Enlightenment Now” and it is full of beautiful graphs of quality of life over time improving. More GDP, less hunger, longer life spans.
There was one odd graph. It showed that rising GDP lead to more happiness in every country except one: the USA.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/europe-h...
[1] https://www.gu.se/en/news/democratic-backsliding-reaches-wes...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty
My generation can't afford to own homes nor have children and the already pithy value of our labour is being outsourced to cheap foreign labour while the cost of food and basic living shoots into the stratosphere
But at least we have iPhones
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When it crashes, it's going to be bad.
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
>Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
Nice cherry picked stats.
> There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Yes, there are. You're obviously in a bubble.
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.
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...
It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.
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> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
I sincerely hope things work out for you.
Looking forward to being sent to a foggy planet in foreign start system to collect alien eggs for a daily nutripaste and bunk bed with corporate issuesd blanket.
I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future?
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.
It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
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 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects.
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
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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.
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.
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I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
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With all due respect, we have pills for obesity and computers think. If that doesn’t get you excited about the future, nothing will.
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I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
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I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
I was excited about the future...
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
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> "glory days" of cars
You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?
The glory days are always in the past by definition.
I'm excited for the future and think things are getting better. But in the US in particular it is happening at a snail's pace.
We are seeing the effects of the hockey stick curve of wealth inequality. It's only going to accelerate from here.
I’m optimistic, but I’ve been like 99th percentile lucky.
Don't worry, it's always ups and downs.
Give Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher a quick read if you get the chance. I get the sense you'll resonate with it.
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same
But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :)
Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around.
Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
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Reading the replies is amazing. OP: a specific manufacturer raised prices on some products. Thread: endless argument about everything that's good or bad about the current living situation, in historical perspective, across the entire world.
It's always a wave. There will be a backlash.
Yeah this could end up being a good thing. We need more diversity in the computing space and this might make some space for that.
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Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
Honestly, 60-70% of this feeling is just inflation. If things were still affordable, the doom and gloom would be much less palpable. Inflation will get under control, but we still have other problems with the direction of social cohesion.
> Inflation will get under control
I wouldn't be so sure of that. But look at the bright side: By the time this administration's over, we'll all be billionaires!
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Wish I could shake the hidden hand in gratitude
You will own nothing and be happy
Why is this downvoted?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
For most that hit the treadmill at 18 that may be true because the rat race starts then, live within your means save and invest start early or else or you will be left standing scratching your head later in life...
Welcome to the cyberpunk future.
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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.
I Me My Me Me I I
This feels like the car market during COVID.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
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.
I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door.
The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.
A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
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Hello, fellow traveler on this particular boat.
I just received my new MacBook yesterday. Today it's more than €700 more expensive than what I paid.
In 2024 I bought a used (2021 era) Dell for $400 to use as my home server. Just the ram that it came with now routinely goes for $600 or more. I'd sell it, but then I wouldn't have a server...
I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.
You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...
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.
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.
Naaah, no way anyone buying that for profit
Sounds like hope...
Why not?
I suspect that these prices are going to seriously dent sales. RAM is getting crushed. I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation onto all the hardware that the cloud companies bought up for AI and found wasn't possible to get any ROI out. Bezos was all over that already.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
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.
AWS runs a hell of a lot of old junk. I was surprised at how we managed to save a lot of money not using it as well.
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.
You mean the same phones that we own less and less with each passing day? I cannot even turn off OS updates anymore. Is it even my phone if I can't do whatever I want with it?
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The MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. That's still significantly more powerful than anything you could buy at that price point last year.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
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.
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I'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.
I'd love that. I'd also love to see the Jets win the super bowl. Pretty sure neither happens in my lifetime.
> I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
I know some organisations were already moving to thin clients last year. Citing cutting costs and improving security (the data doesn't stay in employee's laptop and all access to virtual desktop is thoroughly centrally logged).
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
We aren't quite there yet where I work but those conversations are starting. We've already pushed refresh cycles out for the non-tech folks from 3 years out to 5 years with justification (basically has to be broken or battery shot, otherwise its run it til it dies or no longer gets updates, no more automatic refresh).
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
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It's been like this for over a decade, and for legit reasons.
I'm sure they've done the math. Mac has ~8% revenue share for Apple and I (naively) assume they'll just account for a 20% drop in sales with 20% higher prices. Personally, if my Mac were to die right now, I'd scream and shout (well, I'd use Apple Care...), but I won't go back to a Linux laptop, since I'm too deep into the ecosystem. And I suspect I'm not alone.
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
Same boat here. If I had to, I could grab an Air instead and do more work over ssh. I prefer to keep things local, but it's not a huge deal breaker for my work. I'm too deep in the ecosystem to get anything else, and I need Xcode anyway.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
The current analyst estimate is a 15% decline in sales.
GPU farms aren't that useful for general purpose work
Yeah but there's a huge amount of generic estate to support those GPUs.
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.
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.
It is an unprecedented managerial failure.
Begging? Component price goes up, they increase their prices. Where's the begging?
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.
Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
Is your thesis that Apple is planning for the same number of sales as the previous price?
If not, they ordered less chips. Hence lost capacity.
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Apple should have burned billions in cash, so that they would be able to sell RAM at below-market-rate prices? But why?
Because Apple doesn't sell socketed memory, but instead integrated SOC products that usually stimulate growth in their much more profitable services segment?
Are you suggesting Apple should have invested in internal DRAM production?
In the past they regularly have co-funded construction of fabs / nodes and getting exclusive access as a return.
Like SOC'S? Something is probably coming Motorola, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm (out in 2027-2028), and Broadcom said no then Apple did something and replaced them the Apple Silicon design group can certainly do memory wasn't a company called Anobit bought by Apple years ago and money isn't a problem Apple didn't flush billions down Sam Altman's toilet like Microsoft.
Timeline 2-3 years 10-20 billion dollars...
Note:(Microsoft thru the end of this year will spend 60-80 billion dollars on Capex and Google will spend 180 billion dollars).
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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.
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.
It seems they over optimised this too far.
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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.
Appreciate the tip. Just ordered the 24GB/1TB M5 Pro at $50 below the old price point.
Amazon has Prime Day discounts off the old price today.
Thank you!
Same with Best Buy!
I have a suspicion these new prices will stick around, even after the RAM shortage ends.
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
>what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending?
Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
> Taiwan invasion
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
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China won’t invade Taiwan. Be realistic
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It’s a permanent price hike
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
The new Xbox CEO said recently they are expecting storage prices to be 5x what they were late 2025 by late 2027. And that RAM should be similar.
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
Until China floods the market with their memory which is starting
I'm seeing it with NAND.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
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Considering what's causing it, I can't imagine it's a particularly short timeline.
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-...
:(
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.
as the line goes "wheat price goes up , bread price goes up. Wheat price goes down, bread price stays up"
At least 3 years maybe more.
When the AI bubble pops.
Oh the bright side they do offer $AAPL with a 5% discount today.
And I'll happily take that discount!
Oof.
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.
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.
> With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative
American companies, you mean.
Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.
That’s a fair critique of my limited, Ameri-centric perspective in my comment, but also a stinging rebuke of the decline of American hegemony abroad. As recently as last year having those Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list meant that those memory modules were unsellable outside of China and a handful of other countries that rebuked American power; the fact even American companies are now openly courting them for parts shows how weak the Empire’s power really is just two years later.
So yeah, you’re more right than you may realize.
You mean the 2TB SSDs for $2 that flourish on AliExpress? I actually like AliExpress and trust them more than Amazon, but their failure to police these obvious scams is a blot on their record.
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I was considering a 128GB MacBook Pro earlier this week.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
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, https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr... seems to have them in stock as well.
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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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...
Dont get the panic. :)
ryzenn 9800x3d 32GB ram 9070xt
about 2k
Then you overpaid a year ago. A 2x16GB DDR5 kit was around $90 a year ago and is over $400 today.
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This is ridiculous. A used M1 MBAir is the best personal computing value ever offered in the history of the world.
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.
Such great value that it’ll stop getting updates next year.
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I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
Apple has been weathering this for a while. Maybe it was bad timing with a contract rollover but they seem to have lost their primacy with TMSC.
I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.
But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
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.
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Or it's just a bluff since their memory upgrade prices were actually some of the lowest compared to the rest of manufacturers.
Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.
Apple is perpetually doomed with the stock market Intel and IBM have more pull.
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)
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.
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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.
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The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.
It’s not a storm anymore but the new normal. People waiting for prices to come down are going to be very disappointed.
Its a very, very long “storm”, at some point you have to re-adjust, even if it is very painful
Including Covid, it’s been like 6 straight years of supply constraints
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.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
> So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
512GB unified memory is targeting local inference of large models, or local training of non-frontier models.
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So, it finally happened. The Project is so thirsty for RAM that not even the world's most well-capitalized computer company could have the final word any longer. There's only so many more powerful organizations in the world than Apple. Well... we'll find out soon enough if such a thing could be built, or should I say, summoned.
WOW. I'm glad I bought the beast yesterday.
The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
Mac Studio?
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.
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.
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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
$7349, and as of today, it'd be $10149
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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.
A small but notable change: Apple now appears to require university verification through UNiDAYS for EDU pricing.
Previously, at least in the U.S., you could just use the education store and get the discount without much (if any at all) verification.
That's a big change!
Devs reading this, please start making your apps less memory hungry.
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.
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.
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Message recieved, porting my webapp to Electron ASAP.
Realistically this will just be used to force people into even more subscriptions.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
I do. No one cares.
Saw a post two days ago right here about Apple raising its prices, and asking "when ?", should have bought 10 macbooks yesterday : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643079
What would I do with ten macsbook?
They would make an excellent Beowulf cluster.
Resell them, or make a tiny hosted cloud farm to help devs that don't own a mac build an app for ios
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Sell them.
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.
My niece graduated and is headed off to college in the fall and I picked her up a macbook as a graduation present, knew that apple's prices were still artificially low and a price hike was coming and ordered it the day before they announced that prices were going to go up.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
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I bought the 16” M5 Pro 48gb 1tb black at Best Buy with the $150 membership savings.
Once I move from the mini to the MacBook it looks like I can get $800 for the mini. I got 0% financing too.
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.
Go to Amazon quickly. They still have yesterday's prices.
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
I hate it when my time machine does that.
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.
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.
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.
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
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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.
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 at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
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> you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
You save a lot less after paying import duties.
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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.
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?
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
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> Inflation is an average of many things
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
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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.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
The base model 13" MacBook Air released in 2020 was $1,299. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to... $1,299.
The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.
And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.
Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
The base model 13" MBA was $799. I remember because I needed a laptop for our son to continue attending school during COVID shutdown.
Politicians pretend it’s much lower. Or claim that deflation is occurring through statements like “we are bringing prices down”.
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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%!
Yep, I knew this was coming and did the same. Can't believe my MBP is now an appreciating asset!
The personal computer is getting more and more expensive. Here we are, where it's getting harder and harder to get a computer to create your art but you can get a subscription to any AI company for a fraction of the computer's cost and get your "prompt" art. And that's ridiculous.
Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
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It's funny seeing this kind of comment get made over and over. I don't think those regurgitating this line realize that getting "left behind" (whatever that even actually means) is appealing when the direction the future is heading is very unappealing.
> be left behind
Left behind on what exactly?
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Buy out all the hardware to price me out and sell me back the compute at $200 a month. well played.
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%.
I went looking for a comparable PC product a few months ago and nothing is even close in price for the same feature set.
You're proving my point. It's no longer at the same price.
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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.
Same, I was reading discussion just yesterday that these were expected to go in place with the September releases.
Apple Share price fell 6.12% yesterday. Perhaps indicating that expectations are of a reduced demand in response to the price rather than buyers accepting it.
Also investors seeing this announcement as an indicator that their margins have reduced
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.
Base iPad went up almost 30%, including refurbs. Was recommending one to my parents for $299 - now it’s $379.
Is Apple also offering more money for trade-ins?
A few weeks ago they bumped up Mac trade-in value, and it slightly went down now but not too previous levels.
Ha, as if.
I bought one last month for $299. Now the Apple Store is showing $449
Just bought a new iPad A16 128GB from Staples website a few minutes ago for $279
https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...
damn I was in the market for a new iPad
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?
It's the flamebait detector. Any post which gets a lot of comments in a short time gets pushed down quickly. Though the mods usually push it back up if it doesn't involve touchy topics like politics.
Oh interesting! Thanks for the context I had no idea that was a mechanic - also it seems like the mods merged it with another thread and now it’s back on the front page.
If you wanted to buy in the near term, Amazon is offering Prime Day discounts off of the old prices today.
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
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.
That's why I updated, as well.
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.
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.
They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.
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I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
You can also buy something now that not all shops have adjusted to the new pricing.
Though this window is very short. Apple don't leave much in retail channels.
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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Damn, this might trigger a hoarding + buying frenzy, further driving up prices.
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.
I think nowadays the Apple TV is more about smart home than TV. But as long as they keep calling it a "TV", most of the people will compare it with the built-in apps in their smart TVs and think it's unnecessary. Even if you tell them that it can do much more than watching TV, they will think the money they spend on the TV related functionalities is a waste. The old price was already hard for them to justify, the new price is almost impossible.
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
What smart home features does Apple TV have? All I've ever used it for is to watch TV. To be fair, I pretty much dismissed Apple for anything smart home after they launched that ridiculously priced Pod thing.
It's a thread border router and matter controller, providing Remote access to local-only devices, scheduling, automation... with better track records on security and privacy than competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Hold on! Even people like you?
Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
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.
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.
The $599 XPS13 is a better value, and it can run Linux unlike the Neo.
Until they raise the price on that too. Dell has explicitly stated it's a "limited time" price, so don't be shocked if it becomes the $699 XPS13 almost immediately.
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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 just checked this. I bought a secondhand 15" M4 Air last weekend and the trade-in value is still $630. So no, trade-in values didn't go up 20%.
That's cute.
My sweet summer child.
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.
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...
I got Mint back in 2022 for my desktop built in 2014. Everything worked fine and I was even able to customize my install (though I regret some choices). It used considerably fewer resources than Win10 (never mind Win11, which I don't think would even install on this machine) out of box. I'm talking 40% less RAM use at the desktop before opening programs; and that's for Cinnamon (Xfce would be leaner still). And grindy I/O that touches a lot of small files is about three times the speed. No fancy configuration necessary. I did a simple install for a relative on even older hardware, again no problems.
If I needed to change a kernel version, it's literally as easy as selecting it from a menu in a pre-installed GUI "update manager", letting it do its thing and rebooting. I can get up to the bleeding edge (although I have no good reason to).
Yeah, everyone always misses the little things when it comes to the masses moving to Linux.
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
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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.
14 or 16 inch?
I was considering getting M5 Max mbp with 128GB, but at that price it is just ridiculous, 64 version costs now roughly what 128 was before and that was a stretch for me. At this point might as well stick to my ol reliable M1 Pro mbp.
Edit: I'll say that now it seems also very hard to justify buying top of the line apple hardware for the enterprise. Getting top laptops for just a team of 10 people now means extra $20k just for RAM on top of already a higher base price.
My prediction is that the semiconductor price increases is going to cause a lot of demand destruction. The semiconductor companies revenues is not based on new products but rather on the fact that there is scarcity. Once that scarcity is removed then I suspect that we're going to have some reckoning happening across the industry.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
Old enough to remember several memory price boom cycles. In the late 80s at the place I worked we bought a bunch of DRAM for a production run that became delayed because the CPU needed wasn't ready. The DRAM was in a large cardboard box under my desk for a while, acting as a foot rest. I remember the price of DRAM spiked and we calculated that box/foot-rest was now worth more than...one million dollars.
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
I feel sick to my stomach. Been saving up all year for a new 16" M5 Max to replace my M1 Max in July (I do indie game dev, so I routinely use everything it can give). It was already a was already a big stretch at $6k, now it's completely out of reach at $8k. There's no world where I can justify that price even if I could afford it.
You know what's extremely good value right now? The old "space bin" Mac Pros. You could get a maxed out one for less than 1k - 128GB RAM and with the dual D700 GPU's those produce around 12GB VRAM too. I've been eyeing these for local LLM purposes. To be fair the jump between the M1 Max and M5 is not that big in real usage, unless you're absolutely memory bound on the M1 - the M1 is likely to be supported for a few years more...
I have to have a laptop with how I work, unfortunately. And yeah, I really need more RAM and particularly GPU power, so the M5 Max would have been a very big improvement for my workflow.
Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
I 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-...
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.
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
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(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
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.
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.
Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?
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They should have predicted AI?
lol.
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If they could, they would.
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
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.
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.
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 was planning to upgrade my 16" M1 Pro to the M6 Pro 16" MBP later this year.
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
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?
The biggest reason is I move around a lot and the 16" MBP has weighed on me. It's a really chunky and heavy laptop. Sometimes I don't even want to carry it anywhere.
The M5 is also significantly faster than an M1 Pro. I definitely feel the snappiness on day to day use. I'm also upgrading from 16GB/512GB to 24GB/1TB.
The screen is quite a downgrade and the battery life, surprisingly, is only marginally better than my 5 year old M1 Pro with only 79% capacity left.
Other than that, I don't miss anything else about the M1 Pro. I hear rumors that they're making a smaller MBP in the M6 Pro/Max generation which is why I wanted to wait originally.
The M5 air is much faster than M1 Pro (I have the same setup as OP)
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I supposedly just snagged the exact same model on Amazon for $1549, as opposed to $1999 on Apple’s site today!
I doubt these discounts will last much longer.
The Studio I looked at yesterday jumped from $2600 to $3400 (30%). I was saving for it and was about 1/2 way there. I was expecting these increases in 2027, so planned to buy late in the year. Apple moved faster than I expected after the price increase announcements.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
Does somebody have a price increase by currency table? A lot of losers vs. USD since apple last set their prices.
The configuration I’m interested in (I’m waiting until new M5 models are launched) just increased $1000 :-/
As Anakin Skywalker once famously said, "We need to build more Data Centers, AI needs it."
With memory manufacturers running gross margins in excess of 80% how long until we see upstarts come online to eat away at that or is that unlikely to happen in the near future?
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
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.
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.
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.
Which they will put back into the business, this will be remembered as the time when the Chinese entered the worldwide memory market in a big way.
Yep - the incumbent memory cartel bathes in money for a bit longer - then Chinese manufacturers eat their market share while they sleep on their laurels.
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon
> 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
These "hidden" costs of AI/LLM driving up IT (and energy) related price inflation are starting to feel more and more as a kind of an inescapable, AI-imposed tax. We should start calculating these increased hardware costs (that at this point basically affects any product with storage and RAM inside) into the real price we for our AI/LLM usage, and not only think of the price in terms of a monthly subscription or $/tokens. How much have you, both personally and at your workplace, in reality spent extra on equipment and on price increases of services per year since the LLM-boom started?
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?
What do you mean where to publish? On a website?
Website runs on a server, which requires components that AI labs are buying years in advance, driving component prices to astronomical levels. What happens when only AI labs can afford to have a server?
I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
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I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
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.
Fabs are notoriously costly and time consuming to setup by which time you become obsolete, assuming you even have access to equipment which will take years to reach you. I wouldn't be surprised though if Apple was considering becoming a fab at this point regardless. Apple has a history of not letting its suppliers toy them around. Given the political and AI pressures going on, I think apple could just decide to make its own SOCs and memory at some point in America. Unfortunately the person who could can pull this off is retiring.
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.
Yes Gruber's comment about not making Ternus debut with a shit sandwich was right on the money, so I wondered why that alone didn't sway him to think that Apple would do the price increase sooner.
Fighting words, it’s Apple’s fault (doesn’t he know that Apple can actually (in House for good) replace them? Maybe not today, but certainly in three years)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/micron-exec-suggests-apples-a...
Some of the price increases seem disconnected from the component cost increases.
e.g. The HomePod and HomePod Mini share the same amount of RAM, but the HomePod is up $50 while the HomePod Mini is only up $30.
Bring back upgradeable RAM and storage.
Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
The majority of the component cost in the AppleTV is likely the storage so that's a big hit.
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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.
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I think the Neo was eating into their Air sales, and not merely bringing the Mac to a new market.
And "analysts" flip out on the stock, when these products are < 15% of Apple's revenue. Clowns.
Breakdown by segment (FY 2025):
Mac: $33.71 B — 8.10% of total revenue
iPad: $28.02 B — 6.73% of total revenue
MSFT is also down 3.5% today, so there's just lots of volatility in big tech.
Buying opportunity.
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.
Just don't buy an Xbox. It's hot garbage and requires a pricey yearly subscription to play online. A PC pays for itself quickly once you factor the subscription in and cheaper games.
Obviously AI hardware crunch will get blamed for this, rightfully, but there's another story here: inflation is back.[1]
I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...
If you don’t need the lastest models, I recommend https://eshop.macsales.com/ for refurbished that I can trust. Their prices seem reasonable to me. I have been buying from them since I was a kid in the 90s and it was a (the) mail order catalog for the Mac ecosystem. I bought a beefy 3 year old mini for a home server earlier this year from them.
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.
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.
The increase to the old Apple TV or Homepod is egregious.
the 4 year old Apple TV getting a price doubling makes it a horrible value compared to any other TV streamer, quality be damned.
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.
Yeah, for a few short months Apple had a really nicely priced entry-level machine. Now so much with a 20% price hike on an 8GB machine with soldered RAM
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.
Just got a new MacBook Air.
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
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?
Apple doesn't like to be held hostage, it has the cash coffers, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're somehow buying dedicated production capacity for the future.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway
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.
They don't need to just design and engineer the memory and partner with TSMC in America somewhere why the Chinese are coming into the market.
Did any sci fi books predict an AI world where computer hardware was soaked up by AI mega corps and compute was undemocratized?
Just got a MacBook Neo (512GB model) for CZK 19 990 (roughly US$950) from a local reseller, which was the original list price back when the model entered the market.
Models with US keyboards currently still sell for CZK 19 990, Czech keyboard models sell for CZK 21 990 ($1050), probably someone forgot to update the price on the US models.
Ordered a refurb M3 two weeks ago specifically because I had a bad feeling about Q3. Now refreshing the refurb store to see if the prices there tick up too. The thing about "absorbing tariff costs" is that it's a great sentence to say when you also want to reset price anchors upward permanently.
Wonder how long this can continue. Wages are stagnating while consumer items are going up double digit percents.
And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.
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.
The price increases are absurd for some configurations. Glad I placed my order for a new mb pro a couple days ago.
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.
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.
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.
Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
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.
Well I guess that changes the keep vs sell calculation on my 128GB Studio. Have already been thinking about downsizing; seeing what the prices are now I may go ahead with that.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
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.
Check costco/another third party, they still have yesterday's pricing right now
I bought a base iPad 2 qeeks ago.
At least with the cheaper models, you get deals at Best Buy and Amazon.
I wonder whether this will also inflate the used market. I could have gotten more for my trade-in.
Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!
Just stop buying new gadgets for 18 months and then see what happens
I was considering an upgrade this fall. I think I can do another year or two without. who knows, I might the same spec for even more $$. Just as the trend goes....
The refurb M3 Ultra with 512gb of ram went from $8k+ to $14k+.
Mac Studio M3 Ultra: $5299 (+$1300)
Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?
This is just the new normal.
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
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Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
Not really usually they add more features and bump the price.
> We have shielded our customers from these increases so far
Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
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, not 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
amusing nonsense
So this is how Apple makes up for the margins on the Neos.
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.
> the new intel framework 13 pro
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
no but you could even bring your own
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
After these increases, will Apple be maintaining the previous profit margin?
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
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.
Concerned about apple. First late to Ai, having to surrender to google and now a hit to their hardware. Very unfortunate for apple customers.
Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen
That just proves that Mediamarkt are scammers. It's not special price if it's the current MRSP. "Future price hikes" are not something you can legally base your "sales" on.
Still no 256GB or 512GB Studio models at any price. 96 is the max for any Studio configuration on apple.com right now.
I suspect this is because the next models are more imminent. Not imminent per se, but Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag on most of a factory run of 512GB Studios.
Absolutely no point selling those now with the M5 or M6 coming up.
So Apple did not ge the benefit of the AI hype (in stock price) but caught the bad repercussions of the AI aftermath
You didn't think it would be any other way? Smile...
Would MBP M5 32GB RAM be adequate for small model post-training and small RL experiments?
Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.
No price increase in iPhone to save the sales number, this clearly shows that Apple is iPhone first company.
I am usually terrible at timing my purchases, but a couple of weeks back I bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max with 8TB SSD 128GB RAM.
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
Mac Studio Desktop, M3 Ultra Processor, 96GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Silver up by £1100 (£4,199.00 -> £5,299.00)
2026 computing, brokies need not apply.
Computers are the new cars - only rich people (or people assuming debt) buy new ones, everyone else gets to buy used.
Both my personal and work machines are M1 Max - guess I’ll be holding onto them for a few more years
I got a Mac Mini on Amazon in July 2025 for 575€, the exact model is currently 969€ in the Apple Store.
Different article, but accessible to non-subscribers: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ryj81ywlro
I guess the days of engineers getting to be so casual about memory footprint and CPU cycles is over.
Nope.
1: most of them dont use their own products
2: someone else pays for their laptops
1: true. 2: that someone else has to get approval for the cost
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> M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
You just know that upcoming OLED Macbook Pro is going to start at 3k for the base configuration.
What we want to really know is the cost of Ultra Mac Studio 512gb if that will happen or 256gb.
3 months ago "mac mini, neo, and air prices are to good to be true"
and then the monkeys paw curled
I was planning to take a Mac Book Air next month, should have taken it this month. :(
Nano texture display option also got a price increase. Thankfully, AppleCare+ didn't.
Hard to make a case that's related to increased RAM or SSD component prices.
Exactly. It's the "why not" which makes you wonder whether they actually need to bump prices at all and their contracts are still in place...
When Apple made MacBook Neo with a reasonable, and then destroy it with the price...
It was only a matter of time. I wonder how long this silicon drought will last.
What a beautiful way for Tim Cook to end his career at Apple. supply chain genius can’t overcome market forces so they can keep a healthy profit margin.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
Tell me who can overcome market forces. Literally no one. I'm starting to think bots are writing these low-quality inflammatory comments.
Maybe those bots should send micron or Samsung a gold bar and some glass to get them to care about consumers again.
In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.
This is sudden, I thought of buying macbook air, but now i have to hold it
Weird that it’s the Neo that is affected why it famously has hardly any ram.
The price increases are unsurprising considering Tim Cook said it was "unsustainable" for Apple to keep absorbing the increases. Glad I ordered a new machine a couple days ago.
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
Yeah, unsustainable to maintain their insane profit margins made possible by their locked down walled garden.
They need to do layoffs and get rid of dead weight
Forgive me because I do not understand the supply chain for memory. With Micron et al effectively scalping their customers with an oligopoly on probably the lowest intellectual IP in the chain, does this not guarantee 10 years from now a) We are either overbuilt as hyperscalers cut capex, or b) hyperscalers vertically integrate. Or is it truly that hard to make memory? And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
Building a new memory fab takes 3-4 years, extremely capital intensive. Micron is spending $25B+ on Capex and more than half of that is for new memory capacity, a 3x increase over 2 years.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
It *is* hard to make memory, especially HBM (...which is what the AI market wants, and is what the manufacturers are focusing on) and bringing on new capacity takes years. There's the additional wrinkle that the manufacturers we have left are the ones who survived periods where the market was glutted with oversupply in the wake of previous shortages.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
I mean lets not pretend that Apple hasn't done this for years. I had a cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, but I had a choice with memory - I could upgrade from the base 32GB to 192GB one of two ways - pay Apple $3,000 for 160GB, or get the base 32GB model, and buy 192GB of the exact same sticks of memory (same manufacturer, timings, etc.) from OWC for $1,050. And I could sell the 32GB if I wanted.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
>If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
It's not exploitative either. It's just supply and demand.
I agree man. I’m just quoting Donald.
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.
https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-c...
It all depends on how much they're investing in increasing capacity.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-b...
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.
Quite a bit:
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."
Good luck applying your US antitrust law against Samsung and SK Hynix which have 75% of the market.
Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
Total failure by Apple supply chain! Reflected in $AAPL right now.
Let's see if they increase the new product next September.
They seem to confuse hard drive and ram memory on these articles
Flash storage prices have also risen substantially, just not as exponentially as RAM
Hikes coming soon to AWS/Azure/GCP bills ...
Tell me again how AI is a benefit to actual people?
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
I guess it was inevitable. Is it only RAM related ?
Is there anything new actually worth paying for?
> The average price increase is $269.23.
How is that calculated?
Markov chains
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I bought a full spec M5 Max MBP. Yesterday.
I'm relieved.
i just realized that i could sell my (almost to the day) year old mac mini for a profit
that never happened before :)))
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.
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.
>there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T SK Hynix $1.345 T Micron $1.343 T
Back to old expensive apple pricing
Stock is not going brrr.
Can we now all admit that AI is bad? The technology itself may be neat, but the side effects are killing us. How can AI make computing easier when ironically it's now significantly harder to get computers? AI is driving price increases, unemployment, economic inequality, illiteracy, misinformation, slop on the internet, possibly global warming and water shortages, etc.
Is this really the future we wanted?
Farming implements and looms are bad, I miss having to scratch my own food from the earth and knit my own clothing from whatever fibers and animals I could find...
This is not a serious response to my comment.
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
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You're going to have to work remarkably hard to link your comment to the parent without looking like a disingenuous ass.
> M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...
Dont get the panic. :)
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
640k ought to be enough for anybody...
They simply couldn't cut into their fat margins, could they?
The huge markup on memory/storage upsells are were they make all their money
What is the point of posting a paywalled article? If you aren't going to paste the content somewhere else, please don't bother.
Indeed, maxed out model I've been saving to buy is now £2000 more expensive than just few weeks ago. Madness.
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
Thanks AI!
What?
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
It's not just a RAM problem. All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
> All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
I wish but I am not hopeful that's actually going to happen
It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.
Uh oh. Should I grab an iPhone now before those prices are raised?
Oh wow, now I‘m even happier I got my M5 Pro last month.
memory and storage companies are like oil oligarch right now
Now tell me again how the Steam Machine is “overpriced”..
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> So your family would prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers dying in war at age 40 in 1960s Algeria? Or maybe they'd prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers in two-tier French colonial Algeria, working as landless servant day laborers in the 1920s? Or maybe illiterate subsistence farmers in pre-colonial Algeria?
Perhaps genuinely. It’s at the very least regularly observable that less educated, less ambitious individuals living closer to traditional lifestyles are happier and more content.
Being African doesn't mean being less educated or less ambitious, nor living closer to "traditional lifestyle" whatever it is supposed to mean.
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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.
I mean that and the effects of multiple LLM vendors affecting supply and demand.
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"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.
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 only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
maybe in our lives people will start to realize there is really only one political party and its always going to be them vs us until we are all serfs earning below subsistence wages.
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Catering to the top of the k-shaped economy is indistinguishable from evil
Apple has always done this.
This is a weird way for Apple to admit the Mac is dead.
If this is your interpretation of “Mac is dead” you might as well say “personal computers are dead.”
If it wasn't for Linux and open source, I very much could!
Bought my CTO M5 Pro just a month ago, i was a little bit skittish, thinking i should wait for the OLED one, but i think i'll be happier with the 64GB of RAM rather than that overpriced monitor.
Definitely not justified. You think Apple doesn't have warehouses of hardware. It's climate inflation based on a narrative they can exploit because of data centers being in the headlines. Smart, obvious, move because no one will jump ship.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.
They absolutely don't have warehouses of hardware. Tim Cook is a supply-chain-efficiency hawk from before he was CEO -- he was famous for reducing Apple's inventory.
> We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
Apple has never been a charity.
Who said that? It was Apple, who sold their iPhones at astronomic margins, created walled gardens. There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
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This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
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
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
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.
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.
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> Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
Memory pricing right is due to phantom demand from AI model/data center builders handing out future memory IOU'S has OpenAI accepted delivery?
By the way OpenAI has postponed their IPO until next year 2027.
best way to handle this is to stop buying/upgrading
Agree, us consumers should respond with our pockets
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> This is just pure greed
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
This is unfortunately the market and “capitalism” working as it should. Price goes up, incentive to produce more goes up too.
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