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Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

reuters.com

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Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#671

Post by techteach00 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #499
j1elo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.

Yup. We're going back to time sharing for the majority of people. The terminal will be their dumb phone.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#672

Post by matthoiland »

jacobgold wrote: post #274

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 gladly paid $1,499 for an iBook G4 in 2005. (~$2,572 inflation adjusted)

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#673

Post by devsda »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #629
maipen wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "worst" part of this comment, is that it's not even exaggeration. In the last 6 months, my competition increased 5x. People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do. My margins will keep shrinking while hardware and servers gets more expensive. It's a fucking miserable future for us software people. Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...

It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.

A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.

A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.

In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#674

Post by cubefox »

jliptzin wrote: post #535
j1elo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.

Yes. Several new memory fabs are expected to come online in 2028, one in late 2027:

https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...

So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.

(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#675

Post by 650REDHAIR »

butlike wrote: post #127
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.

Yeah but if you think about it... you don't really _NEED_ any of this stuff. It's all "want" and not "need" deep down. We don't really need smartphones, we're just led to believe we can't live without them.

I mean…

My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.

Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.

Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.

It’s gross.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#676

Post by Grombobulous »

dijit wrote: post #667
Grombobulous wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again. There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.

Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes. Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle. So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”. Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.

This subject gives me sudden nostalgia for the times when Steve Jobs was talking about the front side bus during Apple keynotes.

I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#679

Post by windowsrookie »

barake wrote: post #662
zamadatix wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.16x simple mean on XBOX 1.22x simple mean on Apple Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.

Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly. Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also fa…

Tim Cook stated Apple is eating some of the price increases. I'm guessing they chose not to with the Apple TV.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#680

Post by frollogaston »

dijit wrote: post #667
Grombobulous wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again. There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.

Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes. Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle. So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”. Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.

It's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
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