Comment by KMnO4
11 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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> 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.
What's the argument here? Are you saying that Apple is manufacturing scarcity? All you're saying is that Apple is anticipating demand, which everybody tries to do, but it kinda sounds nefarious or at least artificial.
When the M3 Ultra 256GB+ models got discontinued the secondary market prices went through the roof. That's not manufactured demand.
All the M5 Ultra Mac Studios have had 3-4+ month delivery estimates within a short time of launch until now. I occasionally check and noticed that the 96GB model has moved up from February to December where I live (pickup or shipping). There's clearly a demand for these things and it's widely believed it's largely AI.