Comment by Reason077
4 months ago
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.
Let's see if Apple can spin up a company to make memory.
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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?
Do they have a choice?
Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.
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.