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These are the price changes mentioned in the article: Macs MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599) 13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099) 15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299) M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699) M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199) M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599) iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299) M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999) M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from…
Expect this trend to continue -- firms have delayed price adjustments to avoid retaliation from Trump as doing so would draw attention to Trump's many inflationary policies. Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.) I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we ju…
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.
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.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
I have a suspicion these new prices will stick around, even after the RAM shortage ends. Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
>what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle f…
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
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> So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable. Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
512GB unified memory is targeting local inference of large models, or local training of non-frontier models.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free... All Electron dev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.