361–370 of 1001 posts
Personal 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.
I was literally ordering an M5 MacBook Pro tomorrow. The total is $900 more now. Might have to hold off and just live with my M4 Mini.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
I was literally ordering an M5 MacBook Pro tomorrow. The total is $900 more now. Might have to hold off and just live with my M4 Mini.
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
I'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..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line? This is just the new normal.
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB. While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600. However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
I'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
I 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.
Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past…
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.