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Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

reuters.com

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#581
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.

My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.

Look, this is going to suck for several more years. The western memory cartel was never truly dismantled or punished after their price fixing in the early 2000s, and now this is the result. With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative but to suck it up and ride out whatever this market is, be it bubble or blessing.

That said, China isn’t stupid and is gladly steering their domestic firms to produce more kit not just for data centers and AI customers, but to shore up domestic electronics manufacturing in general. If China can make a device that appeals to Americans en masse, western companies are arguably at their most vulnerable in the face of sky-high part costs and supply chain issues. Combined with rising public sentiment against data centers and a general “fed-up” attitude towards tech in general, and this could be quite the explosively expensive powder keg depending on how things end up shaking out.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#582
post #401

The personal computer is getting more and more expensive. Here we are, where it's getting harder and harder to get a computer to create your art but you can get a subscription to any AI company for a fraction of the computer's cost and get your "prompt" art. And that's ridiculous. Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone

[flagged]

It's funny seeing this kind of comment get made over and over. I don't think those regurgitating this line realize that getting "left behind" (whatever that even actually means) is appealing when the direction the future is heading is very unappealing.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#583
post #524

I guess the days of engineers getting to be so casual about memory footprint and CPU cycles is over.

Nope. 1: most of them dont use their own products 2: someone else pays for their laptops

1: true. 2: that someone else has to get approval for the cost

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#584

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.

it'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.

What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#585

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…

wow the almost 4 year old Apple TV 4k gets a 55% bump. The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.

> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost. reply

I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.

All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#587

Anyone else here enjoy living in the future? Look at us, we get AI megacorporations ruling the world and bestowing us with the power to use their servers for just $20-200/month. It's practically charity, and all we had to give up for it is all consumer hardware, the quality of the internet and our own jobs. I love it here!

Welcome to the cyberpunk future.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#588
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Taiwan invasion Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?

If TSMC is blown up, how much RAM is used in new datacenters?

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to upgrade my M3 Max to an M5 Max with more RAM. The machine I priced out was $5400 yesterday and costs $7500 today.

I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door. The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare. A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.

I bought exactly that, in 14", last April. Before tax, it was $5,853 and is now $7,849

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#590
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.

I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
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