151–160 of 264 posts
I’ve been in tech for a long time and have seen RAM shortages and price spikes before. This one’s fairly bad but they resolve in 1-3 years.
Going beyond 512gb and into 768gb memory is something of a threshold that will allow Apple to claim local capability for significantly more models. Qwen3-235B, Minimax M2.5, and GLM 4.7 could kind of run with no quantization on 512gb, but they'll comfortably run at 768gb. DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM 5 may also work at some level of quantization.
Just 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.
128GB memory kits are not $3K. Closer to half of that. Amazon is not a good source of RAM pricing.
IMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory from the supply-constrained major memory supplies; and they need as much as they can get because they want to push an M5 Ultra config to 768gb to continue the "you can run local models" story that the M5 Max Macbook Pro started telling last week. Going beyond…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I haven't watched up the video but I went way too into the weeds of the ram crisis. I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday) My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc. Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests…
>[...]
>All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI
Nothing you described is actually "cartel/monopoly-ish" beyond "big players have more money to splash around". It's fine to go look at that and go "grr, I hate big tech companies", but the claim of "It's not a shortage, it's a cartel." isn't substantiated. The latter implies some sort of malice beyond what could be explained by standard scarcity thinking, eg. "there isn't enough RAM to go around. We need RAM, so let's stock up".
It'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
+ showing the people responsible have only been promoted in those companies
+ pointing out 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) companies at the heart of it now have 95% of market share
+ hypothesis they've doing it again (or rather, have continued doing it "business as usual")
Earlier 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.
Not if their margin on the completed product is higher than the potential profit on the memory. My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.
It can be about more than the single sale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I 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.
The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.
IMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory from the supply-constrained major memory supplies; and they need as much as they can get because they want to push an M5 Ultra config to 768gb to continue the "you can run local models" story that the M5 Max Macbook Pro started telling last week. Going beyond…