Comment by sajithdilshan
4 months ago
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.
Or the winners of the AI race will make enough money to buy up the majority of global production indefinitely...
But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
2 replies →
> 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.
Not necessarily. If the entire industry triples its prices and alienates 40% the market, it's still coming out ahead. It only incentivizes producing more if there are enough people unwilling to pay for the new prices, or if it were easy for a newcomer to come in (it's not)