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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?

#71

Post by greedo »

pdpi wrote: post #16
basisword wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).

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.

My experiences have been that Macs last far longer than consoles.

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

#72

Post by PaulHoule »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #68
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…

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…

It was a wristwatch back then, right?

Win 95 had real processes and threads, memory protection and all of that but it wasn't terribly effective. The whole machine would go down frequently (as did Win NT despite Microsoft’s insistence otherwise; Microsoft kept repeating "It's the hardware stupid", Win2K was a great improvement but WDDM in Vista meant you could crash your display system and not crash the rest of the machine and I think got us in "rock solid" territory except for the the power management crashes that still dog us today) and it was absolutely endemic that applications would crash, I think because of memory safety problems. The industry went through a transition of "those crashes are annoying" to "those crashes prove your system is vulnerable to hacking..

I have had to argue with people so many times over that "you can't have race conditions in systems that have cooperative multithreading" in teams that couldn't fix those race conditions because they didn't believe they can exist.

Like yeah, thread A can't stomp on data that thread B depends on but you can definitely have situations where different things happen because of different orders of events. Like I was working on a knowledge graph editor in GWT around 2005 or so that had problems because it would try to cache results of XHRs and very different things could happen if a function called a callback synchronously with data from the cache or if later that callback got called by a callback that was called by the XHR. If you are systematic about things you can do it right, everybody is aware of these problems in threaded systems and threaded systems give you tools for protecting your data but in cooperative systems people will tell you don't exist even when the systems are crashing and corrupting data right before their eyes.

(Look at how Python has synchronization primitives for async that are roughly parallel to the ones in threading. In old school cooperative multithreading you are taking code that could be threaded and cutting it up into pieces manually and that gets super-difficult as complexity. Even if you don’t want to face up with concurrency means concurrency doesn’t want to face up to you.)

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

#73

Post by TechRemarker »

Can't imagine increases to existing products. Would seem almost certain it would be for new product/refreshes and they may simply continue to remove the entry level configs in the meantime. That is all still significant for Apple for whom pricing is part of the brand. Been waiting for a maxed out new MBP coming later this year/early next, which already is about 7K, so with the prices increases, scared to think what the 8GB SSD and max ram will come in at.

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

#74

Post by bigyabai »

hajile wrote: post #70
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I suspect we'll see M5/M6 Ultra later this year with 512gb-1tb of ram

I suspect the opposite. 512gb of LPDDR5X is enough memory to make sixty four Macbook Neos. Apple's HPC/server audience is not very large or demanding, it seems likely that they will avoid memory upgrades during the shortage to focus on delivering value to low-end consumers and driving service sales.

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

#75

Post by ndiddy »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #69
ndiddy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure exactly how many programs used them, but support was fairly widespread in a lot of popular programs because it was the only way for Classic Mac OS to make use of the second processor in multiprocessor machines. Some examples of software that used preemptive threads are Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D (see https://www.macworld.com/article/159778/mp_mac.html ).

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

#76

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

For that matter when they added SMP support to Linux they put most of the kernel behind a giant lock so, effectively, applications could run multiple processors even though the OS could only handle one. I guess you could have done the same thing with a single-process OS.

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

#78

Post by pdpi »

greedo wrote: post #71
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.

My experiences have been that Macs last far longer than consoles.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm talking about the product lifecycle, not the device lifecycle.

The M1 Mac mini, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S were all released on November 2020.

Since then, Apple has released the M2 mini (Jan 2023) and the M4 mini (Nov 2024), and I'd be willing to bet we'll see an M6 mini later this year. The PS5 has had the habitual mid-generation "Slim" refresh and the Pro (a smallish specs bump), and Xbox Series X|S has seen barely any changes.

My M1 Max MBP is still a beast of a laptop, but it hasn't been the current model in aeons. My Xbox Series X is still current.

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

#79

Post by vb-8448 »

hajile wrote: post #70
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably the first >20k$ macbook ever ...
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