Comment by KMnO4
9 hours ago
Which means nothing. Apple is extremely good at calculating how much inventory they should produce. They’re not going to make more than they’ll sell and have them sit on shelves. They’re also not going to cut into their profit margin too much by paying their way out of the memory shortage.
If a new premiere high-margin product sells out "within a month" that means there's a disruption in sales and an opportunity for competitors to meet the demand they just generated while manufacturing/distribution tries to catch up.
It would absolutely represent either a mis-estimation of demand or compromise to some supply/manufacturing bottleneck that they couldn't overcome without sending their release calendar into chaos.
I think I agree with the economic sentiment in general but who is the competitor that can even make something comparable? And by that I mean: Matches the memory amount, the memory bandwidth, the form factor, the power draw, the compute and the OS
In it's role as a local AI engine (for inference, training, or fine-tuning) you don't need to compete on all those factors to be a viable competitor if this were sold out.
Those are hard-to-beat features for typical Apple users, for sure, but this is aiming for a different niche and the potential buyers in that niche may not be as concerned with form factor or power draw (for instance), and some may even see the OS as a negative factor. Those are just factors that happen to come along for the ride since it happens to be an Apple product.
Sounds like a great way to generate interest and FOMO.
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But only for a limited time so you better act fast!
> Apple is extremely good at calculating how much inventory they should produce.
That doesn't really matter though for a physical product, unless you are implying they are 1) selling it at a loss or 2) not attempting to maximize profits from the product. If they sell out, it means they hit the target profit from the sale of the product.
It could also mean they're supply-constrained, and cannot set or reach future targets without accounting for surge pricing.