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Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

bbc.com

11–20 of 178 posts

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#11

Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."

Could you please expand on this? Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand? And they’d collapse in turn if demand disappeared. My understanding of economics is entry level so please forgive my ignorance. I’m just curious what you mean.

The usual argument is that as prices rise, demand will shrink and supply will rise to take advantage of the increased price.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#12
Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast if it allows me to run coding models locally.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#13
post #4

I'm not sure how much of it is just an unintentional side-effect of greed from promises of international capital based in NY, and Dubai, and how much was intentional malicious behavior to destroy home compute to force people to pay for openai subscriptions, but the role of a functioning government typically is to keep corporations from doing exactly this. Regardless of which one it is, I absolutely despise the cartel…

Well no one gets a free pass for too long. If prices rise consumers hold politicians responsible. Its just that the feedback loop plays out at different rates for the corps, cronies, politicians.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#14

Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."

As if simply entering the market is trivial.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#15

Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast i…

That's an expensive looking 'if'.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#16
post #5

Props to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices. It had even led to some anomalies where Apple machines were a better price than similar Windows machines.

> Props to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices.

Yeah, it's a laudable miracle that this $4T+ company could survive this long without raising prices on such razor-thin margins.

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#17

Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast i…

there's no local AI model that comes even close to the ones you get access to by paying 1000 USD per month

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#18

Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast i…

> you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick

Why?

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please expand on this? Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand? And they’d collapse in turn if demand disappeared. My understanding of economics is entry level so please forgive my ignorance. I’m just curious what you mean.

The usual argument is that as prices rise, demand will shrink and supply will rise to take advantage of the increased price.

It all depends on the particular situation as to whether there is elasticity of supply or demand.

In this particular situation there is a bit of inelasticity of supply because it takes a long time to spin up a DRAM factory and if people believe it is temporary they won’t make the investment

Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please expand on this? Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand? And they’d collapse in turn if demand disappeared. My understanding of economics is entry level so please forgive my ignorance. I’m just curious what you mean.

The usual argument is that as prices rise, demand will shrink and supply will rise to take advantage of the increased price.

Yes, it will. It's just delayed because fab buildout takes several years.
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