As Anakin Skywalker once famously said, "We need to build more Data Centers, AI needs it."
Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#762Anyone 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!
I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future? I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future. It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism bu…
I’m optimistic, but I’ve been like 99th percentile lucky.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#763Apple did not have to be in this situation. Begging for capacity lost to startups. Everyone else can complain, but not Apple. They had a 250B warchest, exactly for such situations. Now somehow openAI has capacity and Apple does not. And think about it Apple is not in a better position than Valve for example. A teeny tiny company in comparison. It is an unprecedented managerial failure.
Are you suggesting Apple should have invested in internal DRAM production?
In the past they regularly have co-funded construction of fabs / nodes and getting exclusive access as a return.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some very steep price rises here! I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
AIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price. Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
> Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated.
That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean where to publish? On a website?
Website runs on a server, which requires components that AI labs are buying years in advance, driving component prices to astronomical levels. What happens when only AI labs can afford to have a server? I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
There are many, many free hosts, like GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, Railway etc.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some very steep price rises here! I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Apparently their long term contracts ran out in January and suppliers are asking for quarter to quarter prices now. No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
When Apple isn't big enough things are really screwed up.
I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation. Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
Microsoft should tell OpenAI to stop it
Microsoft doesn't care about xbox like they care about copilot.
Watch any video from Microsoft leaders of the last years. It's all copilot copilot copilot. Not Xbox Xbox Xbox.
I mean it makes sense because "investors" are all screaming AI, not gaming. But for us it all sucks of course.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#768The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing; there is a push from who-knows-who to shift the balance of power back to (essentially) mainframes and corporate computing. Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#769Earlier 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…
I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task. If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps. What would make change is i…
There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps).
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
Re: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
#770Anyone 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!
You will own nothing and be happy