Comment by primaprashant
4 months ago
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)
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.
> And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
I keep seeing FLOODS of comments from people saying "at least Sony didn't raise prices1" Well, they did a month or two ago, so I have no idea why they say that. Literally everything with RAM is more expensive now.
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Microsoft should tell OpenAI to stop it
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[flagged]
> To be fair, Microsoft
Not sure what Microsoft has to do with this and why it's fair.
I guess Microsoft makes consumer electronics and (as much as it makes me shudder to say it) is a peer of Apple. I agree it’s not fair to Apple to draw comparisons with Microsoft given the sheer amount of damage they’ve done to the world.
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.
Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.
Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently
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This isn’t the 1st increase they do on these consoles.
Xbox has had two or three other price increases before this most recent one.
1.67x on the ethernet version! $150 -> $250.
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A good opportunity to move away from this tier of locked-down garbage devices, which include, among other, consoles (Xbox, PlayStation), streaming boxes (Apple, Amazon, Google), phones with locked bootloaders (Apple, Samsung), Internet-of-Shit home appliances that depend on the "cloud" and non-free apps, and others.
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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…
it's destroying consumption before destroying jobs, which is somehow even worse than initially imagined
> AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
But did you want the 128GB for AI use?
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For the average person, I think they would choose lower prices over AI.
Ha, that’s about how much our first computer was, with 128k of RAM. Nice symmetry to it.
It's really not that useful for the vast majority of people if we are being honest
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and 2tb -> 8tb storage is +$3k!
And you can't even upgrade the Studio past 96GB now.
You can get one on eBay for $car!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/198437319168
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.
When Apple isn't big enough things are really screwed up.
I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
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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.
> Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated.
That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
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)
512GB of matched DDR5 DIMMs at retail will currently run you $14k-20k+ depending on speed. So I’d imagine a now-hypothetical upgrade to 512GB on the Mac Studio would be in that ballpark.
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?
are consumers really tolerating current prices?
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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.
Apple made $120 Billion in profit last year alone.
They could easily keep swallowing this if they wanted to.
But then they would only make $119 billion profit this year, and their reports would show negative growth. Cant have that now.
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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?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
Why would Apple do that?
They could gain a shedload of market share by remaining cheap while pricing in the whole rest of the industry rockets up? Especially after just releasing the Neo, their cheapest laptop ever. They could be taking chunks out of the PC market right now if they werent so greedy.
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Because it could be strategically good to increase their market share and loyalty when everyone else is increasing their prices, for instance? But no, the "fiduciary duty" thing trumps everything, I guess.
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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.
> Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware
If car infotainment is “awfully under-specced”, aviation seatback infotainment is the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled
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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.
I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
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Even the FireTV is shite compared to an apple TV.
The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.
I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.
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.
Any version of the Nvidia Shield TV can do this, even the original from 2015. I’d be more surprised to find a streaming stick today that can’t handle direct playing 4K HDR remuxes from Plex
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Google 4k streamer does fine with 30Mbps plex. I guess it would cap out around 80Mbps, but I haven't tested it.
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.
The MBA m2 is still highly capable though!
I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.
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I meant to say M5 air, typo!
You're going to dig it. I went 32 / 2TB, the machine is a beast.
I have had need for active cooling once so far to get full performance.
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
Same here, reserved a 48GB M5 Pro shortly after seeing the news, and now I see the same retailer raised the price by over $1000. If they honor the sale, then this will be the most short term value I've gotten out of an HN submission ever.
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Had a Pro 48GB in my Amazon cart at ~$4k CAD, now it's ~$1k higher
Bummer
Pushed me to buy a Macbook Air in Costco today. I was on the fence for replacing my really old MBP for a while.