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Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#12>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far! Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#13I understood this as a “the next generation will cost more”. By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales for each season and so they likely have a decent backlog for the current generation, procured at reasonable cost from hardware manufacturers. It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked. Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this tho…
> By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales The Neo being an exception I beleive.
That’s a new product line. Should have clarified but I meant mostly their existing product lines and specifically iPhone
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#14This was inevitable. The better question is if AI related hardware costs drop after the AI bubble implodes, will Apple drop the prices? My answer is negative.
I think we might end up in a weirder situation: Apple _does_ drop their prices back down to current levels for the same quantity of ram, but ASP goes much higher, at least for the Pro tier buyers. My reasoning is that depending on how the benchmarks look, many of us may try to go big on ram on our next hardware purchases to run models locally as a way of hedging either model costs, or to ensure access.
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#15I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.
The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.
A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.
I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#16>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far! Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).
It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#17This is understandable given the market but part of me really wishes this would wait a year even though it won't. Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max wit…
> You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
That config can be had for $5100 already: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales The Neo being an exception I beleive.
That’s a new product line. Should have clarified but I meant mostly their existing product lines and specifically iPhone
On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper). It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
They’re not dropping in price though. PS5 is 25% more expensive than at launch six years ago.
Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
#20>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far! Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
> Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now
Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.
> It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.