Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#641

Post by xlayn »

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.

Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman. Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$? Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#643

Post by microtonal »

zamadatix wrote: post #551
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the non-first-party Google TV sticks/dongles. The Onn ones from Walmart range from $15-50 depending on how many bells and whistles you want. I really don't know why one would pick anything else.

I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices. It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up mo…

I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.

I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#644

Post by medvezhenok »

jorvi wrote: post #112
tristor wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...

The EU price includes the warranty, which is at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.

You can get AppleCare+ in the U.S. for $149/year which is just as good (or better) than any warranty.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#645

Post by rescbr »

stego-tech wrote: post #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, wester…

> With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative

American companies, you mean.

Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#646

Post by ghshephard »

epolanski wrote: post #339
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.

The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs. You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10? Furthermore, you're lucky i…

M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#647

Post by Danox »

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.

No not going back to a mainframe computing…

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#648

Post by compiler-guy »

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.

"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."

--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_

Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

#649

Post by pyronite »

bluerooibos wrote: post #613
sajithdilshan wrote: post #604

This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity. Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra

> This is just pure greed Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.

This is unfortunately the market and “capitalism” working as it should. Price goes up, incentive to produce more goes up too.
Post reply on HN