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Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

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Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#51
post #10

Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh. And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course. Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.

The fact that a dozen companies are allowed to buy up the entire global supply of core components, and increase the cost of living for every human on Earth, is full blown dystopian.

That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.

Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#52

Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices. I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell o…

They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.

Treat yoself Tim Apple!

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#53
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.

Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.

It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#56
post #31

The 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. During the same time from launch to now, I have seen local LLMs get significantly better, to the point that I wish more people had hardware like this to be able to localize their workloads. I can't help but think society is moving in the wrong direction with this…

I really think this is a coordinated effort to restrict computing capacity for individuals and force adoption of centralized AI - I think there already is evidence of this from the moves OpenAI had made to lock up memory and gpu markets.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#57
post #39

What? M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599) M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999 How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices? Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.

It's not just a RAM problem. All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#58

Holy shit, if Apple is being pushed to do this, something they never would have done before before a refresh, then it must mean there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps at this rate.

The only other event I could remember in the history of Apple that is remotely comparable is the release of the original Power Mac G4 towers in 1999. They were originally going to have 400MHz, 450MHz, and 500MHz models, but due to issues regarding processor availability, Apple lowered the specifications by 50MHz for each model, but without lowering the prices.

https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/

I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.

I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#59
post #10

Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh. And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course. Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.

The fact that a dozen companies are allowed to buy up the entire global supply of core components, and increase the cost of living for every human on Earth, is full blown dystopian.

If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#60
post #42
post #10

Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh. And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course. Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.

What's OpenAI going to do? Not secure supply for their product? If you don't like the hardware price increases, don't use LLMs.

You are assuming the HW shortage is the result of meeting a real demand and not just build-outs for a hypothetical demand that might never materialize.
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