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Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

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Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#61

Post by kube-system »

wat10000 wrote: post #54
PaulHoule wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.

The iBook also started at over $3,000 adjusted for inflation ($1,599 in 1999).

That was a pretty average price for "value" laptops at the time, much like the pricing of the Neo today.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#62

Post by PaulHoule »

basisword wrote: post #19
pdpi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper). It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.

They’re not dropping in price though. PS5 is 25% more expensive than at launch six years ago.

I haven't seen other people call it but I think the ultimate force behind Moore's law is not transistors getting smaller but transistors getting cheaper. Like you can make them smaller all you want but if you can't make them cheaper you can't afford them.

In the 2020s we've blamed extrinsic causes such as the pandemic and the AI bubble but I am suspecting the intrinsic cause that new processes are more expensive to develop and more expensive to operate.

The tragedy of the PS5 is that even though it has sold a lot of units it doesn't represent the kind of generational change like the PS3 was. There are roughly 15 exclusive games and closest I come to one that I want is a remake of one of my favorite games from almost 20 years ago.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#63

Post by PaulHoule »

kube-system wrote: post #61
wat10000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iBook also started at over $3,000 adjusted for inflation ($1,599 in 1999).

That was a pretty average price for "value" laptops at the time, much like the pricing of the Neo today.

At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007.

You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#64

Post by MBCook »

cj wrote: post #31
MBCook wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you’re right, but if they don’t do it until the new stuff is announced I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that. If they announce it on, to pick a date, July 1 then by the time the iPhone is announced it will be somewhat old news. It will still get mentioned but it won’t be the main feature of every story at announcement time. Like so…

> I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that. I think they could get away with it if they do something like drop the price of the lowest device tier (or minimally hold price steady) and only increase prices on their more premium line up, where the premium buyers are less price sensitive.

The problem is the things going up are core. It’s not like the cameras are getting more expensive, it’s the RAM and processors and storage. Which all the phones have to have.

If anything the percentage increase is probably higher on the low end phones relative to total bill cost.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#65

Post by Grombobulous »

ClikeX wrote: post #51
cockpump wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said “$600” in a comment about the Neo. You said “$600” twice here about other things. One thing is for sure, people consider that Apple hardware starts at $600. They are not raising prices. They are keeping them low (in marketing) to outcompete others like Microsoft (aka Valve). Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft for 15 years - people need to start considering Valve an extension of Microsoft. Their unofficial App Sto…

> Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft for 15 years - people need to start considering Valve an extension of Microsoft. Their unofficial App Store for games. This is a really weird take, considering Valve's push into Linux.

It’s really a factually incorrect take. The only reason Microsoft puts its games on Steam is because they have to for their game studios to be commercially viable. They have already tried getting a foothold with the Microsoft/Xbox store and the truth of the matter is that Steam holds all the cards in their overwhelming user base.

Valve is not an extension of Microsoft, they are a company that out-competed them.

I actually find it somewhat surprising that Microsoft is as warm as they are toward Valve. If there is a personal relationship factor, maybe that’s part of it.

But I think another part of it is that Microsoft ultimately makes more money via Steam than if Steam wasn’t a part of their ecosystem.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#66

Post by ndiddy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #50
StilesCrisis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but al…

When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from th…

> My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad.

They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Toolbox still had to run in the main thread and be cooperatively multitasked so it wasn't much of an improvement (hence the lockups).

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#67

Post by ndiddy »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #30
PaulHoule wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was on the ropes in 1999! Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.

Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but al…

If you had good enough hardware to run OS X, running OS 9 stuff in Classic meant that at least you didn't have to restart your whole computer when something froze, just all your OS 9 software. OS X was definitely slow and a bit buggy early on, but IIRC it got good enough for daily use around when Jaguar came out (late 2002?).

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#68

Post by StilesCrisis »

PaulHoule wrote: post #50
StilesCrisis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much. I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but al…

When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from th…

The rainbow beachball cursor was added in OS X. I think your memory of the Mac OS 9 machines might be mixed up.

Classic Mac OS used a cooperative threading model which meant that one program locking up would lock up the whole computer, but Windows 95 was only slightly better in this regard. It didn't have any classical race conditions with the network as you can't "race" in a world with no preemptive threads--control is only ever handed off when a program explicitly yielded.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#69

Post by StilesCrisis »

ndiddy wrote: post #66
PaulHoule wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from th…

> My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad. They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Tool…

The list of classic Mac OS programs which actually spawned preemptive threads was probably in the single digits. Very few of the machines were multi-core, so it didn't matter much.

Re: Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?

#70

Post by hajile »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #53
AnonC wrote: post #15

I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price…

Maybe that's why the 512GB RAM models are gone: they opt to pull a model without further announcement rather than increase its prices.

Demand for 512+gb hasn't gone away though. I suspect we'll see M5/M6 Ultra later this year with 512gb-1tb of ram going for the biggest premium we've ever seen from the company.
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