So, the question I wonder: is that it for this tier? Will we even see a 512GB variant of the next model?
Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
51–60 of 264 posts
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#52Just got a strix halo ROG Z13 this month with soldered UMA memory, 128GB LPDDR5X-8000. It cost ~$3k. Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k. I think there might be a market failure guys.
It’s only a failure if manufacturers don’t respond by increasing capacity.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#53I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market
other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly
but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
That doesn't take into account the profit generated by selling the mac in itself
Or the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.* *Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint
Apple isn’t really a consumer company. It does both consumer and enterprise stuff. Just look at all the fleet management stuff it does for ios and mac os. And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.
It’s definitely a consumer company when you compare it to Microsoft.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#56It's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)
Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros
It's also very hard to encounter x86 machines that can be powered from PoE.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#58Just got a strix halo ROG Z13 this month with soldered UMA memory, 128GB LPDDR5X-8000. It cost ~$3k. Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k. I think there might be a market failure guys.
It’s only a failure if manufacturers don’t respond by increasing capacity.
This is like believing there's unlimited, instant-on capacity. The same type of "we can just tariff whatever we want, and magically, the market will figure it out".
That makes sense for a few products, but not something that takes billions of dollars, multiple factories, etc to produce.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#59It's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
Re: Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
#60I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?
>Apple buys and uses so much RAM across all its product lines that it’s in a better negotiating position than the likes of Framework or Raspberry Pi, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the company’s last earnings call that memory pricing could begin to eat into Apple’s profit margins later this year.