Oh the bright side they do offer $AAPL with a 5% discount today.
Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#252So this is how Apple makes up for the margins on the Neos.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#253Personal computing is in shambles right now. It has been for a bit. It was hard to buy video cards for a while, now other components are affected too.
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible. It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips the…
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#254I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#255Mac Studio M3 Ultra: $5299 (+$1300) Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line? This is just the new normal.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#256WOW. I'm glad I bought the beast yesterday . The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
Mac Studio?
I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#257I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
You can also buy something now that not all shops have adjusted to the new pricing.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#258I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#259I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
I had an M1 Pro MacBook and I agree with you about not needing a new computer. However, it seems like things are at best going to be the same if not worse over the next 5 years with AI prices. I went ahead and updated because although I’m still happy with my M1 Pro today, I am unsure how it will fair over the next 5 years.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#260I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers. Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
Apple has been weathering this for a while. Maybe it was bad timing with a contract rollover but they seem to have lost their primacy with TMSC. I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous. But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
Even when the M5 Pro MacBook 16 released, they did raise the price $100 but upped the hard drive to 1TB. I really thought they would wait to raise prices until the next cycle but this is a bit alarming.