Apple is going to raise device prices, but when? • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#41

Post by rock_artist » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #25

Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference? For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!

> Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?

Yes but to a point. Like Microsoft raised their Surface series prices. There's internal threshold of what they can tolerate before raising prices.

You can see the price and trend here: https://www.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Yet, remember that costs are more complex with currencies and shipping prices.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#42

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

deltarholamda wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.

The network stack was fine (they licensed the same STREAMS implementation also used in AIX, UnixWare, VxWorks, etc) - it was everything else around it (cooperative multitasking, no virtual memory, no memory protection) that was a house of sand.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#43

Post by freediddy » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

They might add it as a surcharge the way Ubiquiti is doing it. I recently bought a bunch of stuff and it all comes with a memory or tariff surcharge that is annoying but it's hard to argue it.

Also we know that it's coming soon, that's why Cook is running cover for the new CEO. They don't want the new CEO to be the one taking the fall on higher prices, so before September 1 will be my guess.

Thank God I made the right decision and I bought a max'ed out Macbook Pro 5 Max with 128 GB of memory a couple of months ago. I think prices will continue to keep going up.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#44

Post by adolph » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

AnonC wrote: post #15

I 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…

> 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.

It seems unlikely that Apple created a rainy day fund from offering an legacy product at niche prices almost a decade ago. Equally unlikely that Apple will continue to sell at a loss today out of a traditional disregard for decreasing component costs.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#45

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #25

Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference? For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!

Hah, yes, with my cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (to go from 32 to 192GB).

I bought it with 32 and OWC sold me the exact same sticks of memory (manufacturer, timings) for $1,050.

Same. $3,000 for 8TB of SSD. $1,200 for 4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pros and a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe enclosure. Which actually ran about 500MB/s faster than the Apple SSD.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#46

Post by Insanity » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #18

Insanity wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but it's effectively a 'new' market segment when it was introduced and thus demand was less predictable.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#47

Post by qurren » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

freediddy wrote: post #43

They might add it as a surcharge the way Ubiquiti is doing it. I recently bought a bunch of stuff and it all comes with a memory or tariff surcharge that is annoying but it's hard to argue it. Also we know that it's coming soon, that's why Cook is running cover for the new CEO. They don't want the new CEO to be the one taking the fall on higher prices, so before September 1 will be my guess. Thank God I made the righ…

You can avoid the Ubitiquiti tariff surcharge and shipping fees if you buy via B&H. They don't stock all Ubiquiti products but they have most of the common stuff.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#48

Post by trollbridge » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #10

jmyeet wrote: post #6

This 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…

> It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least. The Neo seems likely to.

I think we’re likely to see some kind of tiered storage (maybe still 8GB of GDDR5, but some additional memory running at slower speeds that’s volatile and then segmenting the SSD into a bigger, slower part and a smaller really fast part.

The technology all exists to do this and it’s ideal for the kind of local inference Apple wants to push.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#49

Post by trollbridge » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #40

I don't have apple-issued devices, so no money flows from me into apple, but it should be pointed out that with an increase in RAM prices, many of us already paid more in general, and apple may benefit here indirectly when they can add their own extra-cost onto devices on TOP of that increased RAM prices. So this should be considered rather than merely focus on (only) "Apple is increasing device prices". They are all…

The EU should have figured out how to open a RAM factory and make sure it stays cutting edge and relevant.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#50

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

StilesCrisis wrote: post #30

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.

Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but al…

When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side.

Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time.

My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad.

People think "you have race conditions or you don't" and that is true on some level but if your utilization factors are low they might cause problems once a month but increase the load and those problems are happening once an hour. I saw all the symptoms that I expected such as a brand new and faster mac crashing less often than the old mac because it had more capacity to process events and less overlap between them.

Yeah '95 was bad, NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise (had terrible fights w/ a prof who was a roommate of Bill Gates who got a grant from Wintel to get new x86 machines.) Once we got those machines there were two of us you'd always find in front of the NT machines: the student who liked NT and myself who would use VNC to log into one of the few Linux machines. One day that prof came around and said "you win Paul!" and announced that most of those NT machines would be switched to Linux.