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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.
With memory manufacturers running gross margins in excess of 80% how long until we see upstarts come online to eat away at that or is that unlikely to happen in the near future? I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn I was considering an m5 max with 128gb just a few days ago and it was 5099 and now it’s 6699 - 1.6k increase - definitely a massive increase and has dissuaded me - this is pretty insane.
There are some Apple resellers that haven't quite caught up to the price increase yet. I just got a 14" M5 Max 128G, 2TB for $5100 off Amazon through Adorama, https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr... seems to have them in stock as well.
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…
Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
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.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
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!