Enough of this.
It is time to activate the Chinese.
Seriously let ASML sell to CXMT etc.
Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
51–60 of 178 posts
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#52Apple 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?
IIRC modern Apple devices integrate the memory into the whole SoC instead of making it separate on the board and replaceable. It's definitely not swappable like a DIMM or CAMM module would be. Can't find a photo of a decapped M4 chip to prove it, though...
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#53There was a very interesting podcast that went into all the details of the AI supply chain shortage [1] The key takeaway for smartphones isn't so much that iphones will cost $150-200 more, which apple customers have shown they can stomach. But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE
> But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. Hmm. Even if iPhone users can theoretically stomach the increase, they have many other options available, whereas if the cheap $200 phones are the bottom of the market, there's no other real options. I'm in the ~$450 USD Pixel range atm, and never buy the current flagship or anything. If…
>Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media
Id love to know how many of em
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#54Props 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.
The iPhone is also a vehicle to hook people into the Apple ecosystem, where Services like the App Store bring in 40% of all gross profit with margins of 75%.
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#55Of course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock. What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be. In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
> In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
I don’t understand why this comes up on all of these topics.
Dire need will compel a naked woman to learn to weave her own clothes, but there is no weaving machine for just making more efficient software. (American) Software developers are expensive, now I guess compute will either be expensive, more centralized, or have much more demand from competing interests (vibe coders who are implementing their own bespoke software or abandonware-for-one), and compute-for-code (GenAI) is a whole emergent engineering problem.
Then we hunker down and listen to or read a piece by Muratori, I guess, just practice some of those principles? But what seems to keep happening is that we get stuck by constraints that go beyond just writing more efficient code as a solo contributor on a solo project. That you can predict the efficiency of the code by the application domain suggests that there is a whole big system (of people and processes) above our heads that is not simple for any person or group of people to untangle.
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#56There was a very interesting podcast that went into all the details of the AI supply chain shortage [1] The key takeaway for smartphones isn't so much that iphones will cost $150-200 more, which apple customers have shown they can stomach. But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE
Or they'll start making cheap phones with <=2GB of RAM again and people will have to write software that uses memory efficiently (the horror).
As the HN saying goes, people who can't afford an iPhone or a MacBook will not be your paying customers anyway, so don't worry about them.
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#57Thanks, AI!
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. Hmm. Even if iPhone users can theoretically stomach the increase, they have many other options available, whereas if the cheap $200 phones are the bottom of the market, there's no other real options. I'm in the ~$450 USD Pixel range atm, and never buy the current flagship or anything. If…
>Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media Id love to know how many of em
Not enough to have stopped the iPhone 17 Pro line from being a runaway success that even Apple—famously excellent at projecting demand and already invested in selling as many as possible given its the flagship model line of their flagship product line—completely underestimated the demand at launch.
I’d love to know how much “plenty” in the parent’s perspective stacks up against just this one individual model line and whether it is at all distinguishable from noise.
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#59Of course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock. What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be. In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
There is another reason - if the cheap phones necessarily go up in price, but Apple eats the cost increase since they can afford it, then the cheap phones suddenly will cost about as much as an iPhone. That is a big ick.
A big selling point for iPhones is that they are much more expensive than the Other phones, so it is absolutely necessary for Apple to make sure it's phones keep a 50% price luxury bonus, or many will stop buying them.
TL;DR - ultra-expensive iPhones are a feature, not a bug, like ultra-expensive watches
Re: Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
#60Tbf, 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."
Nobody's stopping you from taking advantage of that shortage :) Just don't forget to turn your garage EUV machine on and off if it starts glitching.
US is stopping China to increase their DRAM and flash production as they would, by forbidding everybody to sell modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment and consumables to China.
China is increasing their production of DDR5 and SSDs, but much more slowly than it would have been possible in a free market.
The current prices for DRAM and SSDs would have never happened if USA had not started to sabotage the Chinese memory industry a few years ago, presumably because Micron wanted to eliminate their competition.
The US sanctions against memory producers have started exactly when Apple was considering the use of Chinese memories in their smartphones, so Apple had to cancel their plans.
The claims that the sanctions against the Chinese memory producers have anything to do with US "national security" or with military applications are just a big shameless lie.
Military applications are content with older memories, which China can produce in sufficient amounts. The SOTA DRAM modules and SSDs are more important for consumer products and the US "sanctions" have the only purpose of maintaining artificially high prices for the consumer products, which steals money from millions of people all over the world.