Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#101

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

darioush wrote: post #16

Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%

The base model 13" MacBook Air released in 2020 was $1,299. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to... $1,299.

The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.

And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.

Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...

That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#102

Post by crypttales » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #59

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #35

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.

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

[dead]

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#103

Post by crypttales » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #97

stavros wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What's OpenAI going to do? Close down would be a good idea.

[dead]

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#104

Post by discopicante » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

Quite convenient outcome for the AI labs + hyperscalers that the barrier of entry to running (usable + performant) open source models on your own hardware is getting higher, not lower.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#105

Post by fckgw » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

If you were planning on buying a Mac, do it right now through a third party vendor like Best Buy or Costco. They have not yet adjusted their pricing and in fact, have sales currently running. Both have the Macbook Air on sale for $949, for example.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#106

Post by cpursley » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #63

Can we now all admit that AI is bad? The technology itself may be neat, but the side effects are killing us. How can AI make computing easier when ironically it's now significantly harder to get computers? AI is driving price increases, unemployment, economic inequality, illiteracy, misinformation, slop on the internet, possibly global warming and water shortages, etc. Is this really the future we wanted?

Farming implements and looms are bad, I miss having to scratch my own food from the earth and knit my own clothing from whatever fibers and animals I could find...

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#107

Post by etempleton » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

erxam wrote: 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.

Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#108

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #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 o…

Cryptocurrencies never did this because they were never popular. They were a big deal in tech spaces but the average person never really worked out what a bitcoin was or how they'd get one. AI, on the other hand, is seeing widespread use among ordinary people.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#109

Post by mrbungie » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #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 o…

Ah, come on. I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space. AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#110

Post by TheJoeMan » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

khurs wrote: post #29

After these increases, will Apple be maintaining the previous profit margin? Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?

The ridiculous thing about profit margin, is that if RAM increases Apple's cost by $100, they have to increase the selling price by a multiple of that to maintain the same %. Same exact factory line, labor cost, shipping cost, but have to 1.5x everything at the shrine of the bean counters.