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erxam 4 hours ago [-]
Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
ksec 30 minutes ago [-]
And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
cmdrmac 3 hours ago [-]
I share the same sentiment. I honestly thought that the price increases would occur as new products rolled out. Seems like with the "back-to-school" promotion right around the corner, Apple expects to sell more machines and find it harder to absorb the higher component price tags. I'm guessing that by changing the prices now, they'll still maintain their profit margins per unit at the expense of total unit sales.
akmarinov 3 hours ago [-]
They didn’t increase prices on iPhones, Apple Watch and Airpods
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
Those are next in line, it’s almost guaranteed.
akmarinov 3 hours ago [-]
For sure but an iPhone has more RAM than a Neo and those went up $100, so they’re at least eating the price difference for another ~3 months
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, iPhone is nearly half of Apple's revenue or more, it's in their interest to eat a little margin away to keep it moving, increase will come with the 18 this fall.
All their other products are lower volume.
benoau 1 hours ago [-]
Only the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air have 12GB of RAM, and they're ~10 weeks away from new models so probably well past their peak sales.
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah I don’t think they will touch current models.
3 hours ago [-]
conductr 3 hours ago [-]
September new versions will likely start at a price point than they would have
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and seems they are only releasing the Pros and the foldable this year, and will release the base and e models in Spring.
MBCook 3 hours ago [-]
I’d say they’re subsidizing them with the rest but the computers and iPads don’t sell much compared to phones so that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
etempleton 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.
MBCook 3 hours ago [-]
I thought they would but not this fast.
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
If anything they seem to be ones who managed to delay increasing prices more than the rest.
dajonker 3 hours ago [-]
It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
>I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
TalkingCodeMonk 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Matl 3 hours ago [-]
That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
> That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
burnte 2 hours ago [-]
> > That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
> Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> People have problems DISCUSSING the idea.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
Matl 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's better to not do anything right? After all 'the market' is working for some.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
> But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
alex43578 3 hours ago [-]
What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.
Matl 3 hours ago [-]
> What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a global phenomenon. The latency concerns for data centers are minimal, so they could be built anywhere.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
testing22321 3 hours ago [-]
The old race to the bottom.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
It’s the old supply and demand in a global market.
It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.
m4rtink 3 hours ago [-]
Not saying this is the solution, but strategic reserves of important commodities exist.
Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?
So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
alex43578 3 hours ago [-]
Good news, you get the DDR2 that has been languishing in a salt cave for the last 20 years.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
win311fwg 3 hours ago [-]
So, in practice, if, say, the agriculture industry buys up the supply of seeds (they already effectively do) and we see it start driving significant inflation for food (a common concern), the agriculture industry would be restricted from buying seeds?
Matl 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, because we can't apply specific regulation for specific industries where it makes sense, we have to write them as if we were LLMs so they can be proven to 'not work'.
win311fwg 3 hours ago [-]
We can, but that isn't how the proposed regulation is written.
mghackerlady 3 hours ago [-]
The only thing the US could feasibly implement is forcing micron to allocate a certain amount of its production for consumer use
alex43578 3 hours ago [-]
Why? Why is consumer use vs corporate use a higher and better priority meriting such an intrusive regulation?
angoragoats 3 hours ago [-]
Because extreme corporate use, that is, what is happening now where a majority of supply is locked up ahead of time via B2B back-room deals, is anti-consumer. Unregulated, it is easy to see how this could lead to a perpetual "rent everything" dystopian environment for consumers.
alex43578 2 hours ago [-]
Every use of DRAM is a corporate use, with the best consumer-friendly examples like Apple’s efforts to hold down prices (until today) being thanks to “back room deals”. Nobody’s buying some DRAM to build a memory stick in their garage.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
angoragoats 3 hours ago [-]
Barring any single company from negotiating to buy more than a certain percentage of a given existing market of goods would be a start. Companies would still be free to build their own factories/fabs if they didn't like it.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
groundzeros2015 3 hours ago [-]
The cure for high prices is high prices. This increase in demand is encouraging economization. Factories which make components are trying to operate for more hours. Producers who haven’t gotten into RAM may try it out. Large companies like Apple may test alternative suppliers. Consumers who don’t really need an upgrade will wait, allowing others who need it to buy one.
hackingonempty 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, RAM is more like a taxi than an umbrella.
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
No? It’s an interchangeable component which is manufactured at scale by many suppliers.
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
hackingonempty 3 hours ago [-]
Building a RAM factory is a major investment and takes a lot of time. There is a big risk that by the time you enter production the rain will have stopped in the form of reduced demand and/or algorithmic improvements that reduce the memory required to produce good results. All of the attention is on the well funded frontier labs who may be buying up RAM as much to starve out competitors as anything else while in the background there is an army of researchers all over the world who only have a handful of consumer GPU to work with.
groundzeros2015 2 hours ago [-]
I already mentioned 3 ways we get more RAM and none of them require building new factories. Although, I would not doubt that effort is also ongoing.
hackingonempty 2 hours ago [-]
The only one you mentioned was existing factories extending production hours. AFAIK they already operate 24/7! Apple can't switch suppliers because everyone is selling out. Semiconductor factories are specialized and can't be easily switched to other types. It takes time and money and it stops making money for the duration, leading to a similar risk analysis as building a new one.
groundzeros2015 2 hours ago [-]
1. existing factories increasing production
2. factories but are not making ram switch
3. Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something.
This means:
1. You wait for build out and prices go down.
2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.
And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.
throw2ih020 41 minutes ago [-]
> existing factories increasing production
All existing factories have maximized their production.
> factories but are not making ram switch
It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.
> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
What alternative exists for NAND flash?
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Libcat99 2 hours ago [-]
This is true in the same sense you don't need to own a pair of shoes.
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
angoragoats 2 hours ago [-]
I want to believe this is true, but I am increasingly encountering situations IRL where saying "I don't have a smartphone" would be a serious hindrance to doing whatever it is I'm doing.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
What helped me come to my conclusion is trying to come up with concrete examples, so like "I need a smartphone cause I need maps going to a place I've never been before" instead of "I need a smartphone for whatever it is I'm doing."
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
as1mov 2 hours ago [-]
It's 2026, the _WANTS_ are reserved for the ultra wealthy. The rest of us plebs should be happy we're getting 1500 calories everyday with a room to go back to in the evening, after increasing shareholder value everyday. Oh and don't forget to reduce your plastic usage to save the planet.
qaq 3 hours ago [-]
If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
People will consume a lot of things offered below actual cost thanks to VC and cheap loans.
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
qaq 2 hours ago [-]
Most of Anthropic revenue looks to be companies paying for Claude Code at API prices ...
Insanity 3 hours ago [-]
They are reserving future HW productions to meet their hypothetical usage as well. Which is why others (like Apple) can’t reserve it for their future products.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
qaq 3 hours ago [-]
Yes 65B ARR that Anthropic has is clear indication there is no path to revenue.
Insanity 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I should have said "profit path", good catch!
They have revenue, but their cost scales with revenue and they're losing more than they are making.
How much money does that revenue cost though? If I had to steel-man GPs argument I'd ask for profits rather than revenues.
qaq 3 hours ago [-]
We will see once they go public Dario did claim profit margin on inference is 40% if memory serves me right
mrbungie 3 hours ago [-]
That's convenient accounting. The reality is that they can't stop training since they risk losing customers if they do so. So they shouldn't factor it out of profitability analysis.
qaq 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of factors there we will see how it plays out.
overgard 3 hours ago [-]
Yes Dario is well known for his honesty
qaq 2 hours ago [-]
hence the bit about us learning the actual state of things once they are a public company.
danabrams 3 hours ago [-]
This is not sustainable forever unless their hypothetical usage is realized, and eventually the bill will come due.
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like the fact Apple raised their prices means they foresee this lasting a lot longer than 3-6 months.
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
This is going to be the 1st increase of a series of increases. I don’t think this will ease in the next 2-3 years.
rpgbr 3 hours ago [-]
Ask every Windows 11 or Google consumer that doesn't give a damn for AI and, yet, has been almost forced to use Copilot and Gemini…
crypttales 3 hours ago [-]
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cassianoleal 3 hours ago [-]
Didn't they literally say they would, just a few days ago? Why would you all say they wouldn't? What would they gain by lying about price hikes?
angoragoats 3 hours ago [-]
The only news about this I saw was that Cook confirmed that price increases were inevitable, but he wouldn't say when or how they would come. I think most people erroneously took this to mean that they'd roll them out gradually as products were refreshed.
2 hours ago [-]
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
What's OpenAI going to do? Not secure supply for their product? If you don't like the hardware price increases, don't use LLMs.
Insanity 3 hours ago [-]
You are assuming the HW shortage is the result of meeting a real demand and not just build-outs for a hypothetical demand that might never materialize.
robin_reala 3 hours ago [-]
I broadly don’t use LLMs (once or twice a month), yet I’m still being hit by hardware price increases.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
>What's OpenAI going to do?
Close down would be a good idea.
crypttales 3 hours ago [-]
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tavavex 2 hours ago [-]
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!
piinbinary 4 hours ago [-]
I have a suspicion these new prices will stick around, even after the RAM shortage ends.
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
revolvingthrow 3 hours ago [-]
>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 for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
haunter 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a permanent price hike
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
ErneX 3 hours ago [-]
The new Xbox CEO said recently they are expecting storage prices to be 5x what they were late 2025 by late 2027. And that RAM should be similar.
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
brandrick 4 hours ago [-]
Considering what's causing it, I can't imagine it's a particularly short timeline.
jorvi 3 hours ago [-]
With new fabs built and AI demand shrinking, they will have to. If they don't, considering the last lost price fixing case, they will be absolutely crushed by the EU and probably other governments as well.
mDyJzDPmBdG 4 hours ago [-]
On supply side 3 years is about right, new plants won't come online faster. Demand might collapse faster if some AI companies go bankrupt or at very least fail next funding round.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Depends on who goes bankrupt and what happens to their IP when it happens. If OpenAI or Anthropic liquidate, and the IP gets scooped up by MS, Amazon or Google, demand will remain, the public clouds will still want to run them. Maybe some pressure will come off if they lose the appetite to train new models for a while, inference is cheaper, but they'll still finish some of the buildout.
dwa3592 3 hours ago [-]
Until China floods the market with their memory which is starting
jauntywundrkind 1 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing it with NAND.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
dwa3592 36 minutes ago [-]
right, but that seems to be the only viable path for any reduction in prices unless the bubble suddenly pops which these ultra qualified people (sam, dario, elon, oracle and so many more) won't let happen.
justincormack 4 hours ago [-]
At least 3 years maybe more.
cryo32 3 hours ago [-]
I suspect that these prices are going to seriously dent sales. RAM is getting crushed. I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation onto all the hardware that the cloud companies bought up for AI and found wasn't possible to get any ROI out. Bezos was all over that already.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
paulmist 3 hours ago [-]
Personal anecdote on ROI - I was at an early stage startup earlier this year where we had some burstable long-running GPU tasks (<100 VMs). Accross GCP and OCI we couldn't get our hands on L40S on-demand, and had to resort to T4s (released 2018). Sometimes even these were unavailable, and we would have a P4 (2016!) fallback. AWS sells A100s (2020) at $4/hr except they don't even have capacity for x1 versions, you have to rent x8.
cryo32 3 hours ago [-]
AWS runs a hell of a lot of old junk. I was surprised at how we managed to save a lot of money not using it as well.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
> I bet the next step is going to be dumb terminals and centralisation
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
The MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. That's still significantly more powerful than anything you could buy at that price point last year.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
otter-in-a-suit 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they've done the math. Mac has ~8% revenue share for Apple and I (naively) assume they'll just account for a 20% drop in sales with 20% higher prices. Personally, if my Mac were to die right now, I'd scream and shout (well, I'd use Apple Care...), but I won't go back to a Linux laptop, since I'm too deep into the ecosystem. And I suspect I'm not alone.
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Same boat here. If I had to, I could grab an Air instead and do more work over ssh. I prefer to keep things local, but it's not a huge deal breaker for my work. I'm too deep in the ecosystem to get anything else, and I need Xcode anyway.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
infecto 3 hours ago [-]
Supply chain crunches are not unique or new. It happens. Earth is flooded with powerful smartphones, Mac’s are already on M5 generation. Most people already get most of their computing from their phone. We will be fine.
gonzalohm 2 hours ago [-]
You mean the same phones that we own less and less with each passing day? I cannot even turn off OS updates anymore. Is it even my phone if I can't do whatever I want with it?
infecto 2 hours ago [-]
What does this have to do with this thread? Go buy any other device then. My point is the doom and gloom is overblown, we have massively powerful devices already, no dark age is coming.
This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.
jauntywundrkind 1 hours ago [-]
Pixels (and Motorolas now?) are nearly the only devices left with unlocked bootloaders.
And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.
"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)
infecto 34 minutes ago [-]
Again, what does this have to do with the discussion at hand. Replace phone with a laptop, desktop. A locked down phone has nothing to do with doom and gloom for the dark ages of computing. This is so far off topic I should not even be replying.
overgard 3 hours ago [-]
GPU farms aren't that useful for general purpose work
cryo32 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah but there's a huge amount of generic estate to support those GPUs.
varispeed 3 hours ago [-]
I know some organisations were already moving to thin clients last year. Citing cutting costs and improving security (the data doesn't stay in employee's laptop and all access to virtual desktop is thoroughly centrally logged).
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
We aren't quite there yet where I work but those conversations are starting. We've already pushed refresh cycles out for the non-tech folks from 3 years out to 5 years with justification (basically has to be broken or battery shot, otherwise its run it til it dies or no longer gets updates, no more automatic refresh).
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
Aurornis 4 hours ago [-]
I was considering a 128GB MacBook Pro earlier this week.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
kamranjon 4 hours ago [-]
Damn I was considering an m5 max with 128gb just a few days ago and it was 5099 and now it’s 6699 - 1.6k increase - definitely a massive increase and has dissuaded me - this is pretty insane.
mirashii 3 hours ago [-]
There are some Apple resellers that haven't quite caught up to the price increase yet. I just got a 14" M5 Max 128G, 2TB for $5100 off Amazon through Adorama, https://expercom.com/products/16-inch-macbook-pro-with-m5-pr... seems to have them in stock as well.
sixothree 3 hours ago [-]
Already gone at least from what I'm seeing.
mirashii 3 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm glad I snap bought, looks like I may have gotten the last one on Amazon for the 14" at least. I see a couple 16" options around at slightly higher than they were at retail but steal cheaper than Apple's new prices.
3 hours ago [-]
kamranjon 1 hours ago [-]
How does something with 232 comments and 207 points over just 2 hours get pushed to the 3rd page in hacker news? I’m just really curious how it works, like why would something with so much engagement be push down so quickly?
discopicante 3 hours ago [-]
Quite convenient outcome for the AI labs + hyperscalers that the barrier of entry to running (usable + performant) open source models on your own hardware is getting higher, not lower.
Resell them, or make a tiny hosted cloud farm to help devs that don't own a mac build an app for ios
BigTTYGothGF 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like an awful lot of work.
3 hours ago [-]
worldsavior 3 hours ago [-]
Sell them.
brandon272 3 hours ago [-]
Was looking at upgrading my M1 Air (16/1TB) to an M5 Air (24/2TB). This price increase changes the time horizon of that upgrade from “now” to “let’s try and get 18-24 more months out of this thing”.
electriclove 3 hours ago [-]
Prices have not updated at some retailers yet (Amazon, Best Buy, Costco). Get a move on! Prices are not going to come down anytime soon
brandon272 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately the configuration I need is not available through any of those retailers.
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
rpgbr 3 hours ago [-]
Devs reading this, please start making your apps less memory hungry.
All the people running any computer appreciate.
bigyabai 52 minutes ago [-]
Message recieved, porting my webapp to Electron ASAP.
as1mov 2 hours ago [-]
Realistically this will just be used to force people into even more subscriptions.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
darioush 4 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%
hibikir 3 hours ago [-]
Inflation is an average of many things. Computer components have a huge spike in demand with insufficient increase in supply, which is going to lag for years, so we might as well be buying at auction. It's not a price that flows through the entire economy, like the price of oil.
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
timacles 27 minutes ago [-]
You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
sph 3 hours ago [-]
> Inflation is an average of many things
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
rsanek 50 minutes ago [-]
Turns out, BLS actually lists this stuff when they release CPI figures.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
Eggs. That was the last omg inflation is crazy story and now they're about as cheap as they've ever been.
3 hours ago [-]
RaSoJo 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
3 hours ago [-]
yardie 3 hours ago [-]
The base model 13" MBA was $799. I remember because I needed a laptop for our son to continue attending school during COVID shutdown.
draw_down 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fckgw 3 hours ago [-]
If you were planning on buying a Mac, do it right now through a third party vendor like Best Buy or Costco. They have not yet adjusted their pricing and in fact, have sales currently running. Both have the Macbook Air on sale for $949, for example.
cma256 4 hours ago [-]
I love the "year of the linux desktop" meme but even so I feel compelled to say it. Year of the Linux desktop?? You don't need a new machine if your new OS uses 1/4 of the resources.
akazantsev 3 hours ago [-]
Unlikely Linux will become mainstream until people stop saying "install Linux" and not a particular distro. I recently installed Ubuntu on a new laptop: something doesn't work because I need a more recent kernel, so... I installed the second "user-friendly" distro - Fedora. Scrolling is 10x faster in Chromium-based browsers, making it unusable. The fix - install KDE... Then I had to make hardware video acceleration work so that playback wouldn't drain the battery. That was a pain in the ass.
So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.
I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.
Yeah, everyone always misses the little things when it comes to the masses moving to Linux.
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
bigyabai 31 seconds ago [-]
The flip side is that the pot is now boiling. Windows and macOS are both replete with advertisements and service upsell, which is something that nontechnical and technical users both pick up on. It's been expanding the discussion of alternatives, and gave Linux a piece of the spotlight in the PC gaming world. Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already. Many of them bought a Steam Deck and switch to the desktop, getting their first "preinstalled" Linux desktop experience.
The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.
If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but definitely enough to make an impact.
seemaze 4 hours ago [-]
Base iPad went up almost 30%, including refurbs. Was recommending one to my parents for $299 - now it’s $379.
intrasight 3 hours ago [-]
Is Apple also offering more money for trade-ins?
baggachipz 3 hours ago [-]
Ha, as if.
leeman2016 4 hours ago [-]
I bought one last month for $299. Now the Apple Store is showing $449
SirMaster 2 hours ago [-]
Just bought a new iPad A16 128GB from Staples website a few minutes ago for $279
I was planning to upgrade my 16" M1 Pro to the M6 Pro 16" MBP later this year.
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
senordevnyc 2 hours ago [-]
I supposedly just snagged the exact same model on Amazon for $1549, as opposed to $1999 on Apple’s site today!
aurareturn 24 minutes ago [-]
I doubt these discounts will last much longer.
brandrick 4 hours ago [-]
The shine of the Neo just rubbed off somewhat.
Quothling 4 hours ago [-]
No kidding, I was considering one to replace my 8g air m1. Which was questionable to begin with performance wise, but it's so worn after all these years. Certainly won't do it now.
lapcat 3 hours ago [-]
Yes and no. Relatively speaking, MacBook Neo is still quite cheap, especially since iPad and MacBook Air received even greater price increases. And Apple's competitors are surely experiencing the same component shortages.
darreld 1 hours ago [-]
I put a iPad Air in my bag on Apple's store yesterday. It went up $135 overnight. Cancelled. I'm not sure I do specifically iPad things on it (YouTube, web). Will look at some Android tablets I think. I don't think an iPad Air is worth 835.
juancn 2 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn't like to be held hostage, it has the cash coffers, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're somehow buying dedicated production capacity for the future.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway
> Cook said Apple is willing to deploy its balance sheet to help secure supply and called for all options to be examined, including a review of national security restrictions on Chinese memory suppliers. He ruled out building Apple's own memory factories.
Above all else, any focus to corner supply for them will be focused on the iPhone. It's their cash cow, nearly half of their revenue. They'll sacrifice other products to save the iPhone.
hodder 3 hours ago [-]
Forgive me because I do not understand the supply chain for memory. With Micron et al effectively scalping their customers with an oligopoly on probably the lowest intellectual IP in the chain, does this not guarantee 10 years from now a) We are either overbuilt as hyperscalers cut capex, or b) hyperscalers vertically integrate. Or is it truly that hard to make memory?
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
matwood 3 hours ago [-]
It's not that it's hard, it's that it requires a large up-front investment. The last time prices were higher, some made that investment, prices cratered and many companies never recovered the investment/went out of business.
rchaud 3 hours ago [-]
Apple soaked up all the good press about the PC-killer Macbook Neo's price point, waited until those articles seeded search results, influencer videos and AI queries, then jacked up the price by 17%.
groundzeros2015 3 hours ago [-]
I went looking for a comparable PC product a few months ago and nothing is even close in price for the same feature set.
rchaud 23 minutes ago [-]
You're proving my point. It's no longer at the same price.
2 hours ago [-]
thomascountz 3 hours ago [-]
RAM impacts engineers' machines. We learn to build smaller again. More breakthroughs happen around less-memory intensive local inference. Model provides' bottom lines are impacted. They bail on RAM contracts. The market floods. Private inference becomes flush with resources. The third-wave of local models begins, but RAM trauma keeps things lean. Nature heals?
steve-atx-7600 3 hours ago [-]
If you don’t need the lastest models, I recommend https://eshop.macsales.com/ for refurbished that I can trust. Their prices seem reasonable to me. I have been buying from them since I was a kid in the 90s and it was a (the) mail order catalog for the Mac ecosystem. I bought a beefy 3 year old mini for a home server earlier this year from them.
john-titor 3 hours ago [-]
I was eyeing a 24GB macbook air configuration that used to go for ~1250 USD in my region, which was a fairly good deal. This went up by 500. I guess I'll be going with a frame.work instead. Was willing to pay the premium for repairability anyways and now this has made the price difference a no-brainer.
revolvingthrow 4 hours ago [-]
Oof, that’s a ~20% increase across the entire lineup. Ram and storage are particularly expensive, as can be expected: mbp m5 pro $1700 -> $2000, m3 ultra $4000 -> $5300. To be expected, there’s only so much margin apple is willing to lose and everybody else already increased prices.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
TalkingCodeMonk 3 hours ago [-]
They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
fckgw 3 hours ago [-]
The majority of the component cost in the AppleTV is likely the storage so that's a big hit.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
Having the ethernet port and Thread radio gated behind the 128gb model is obnoxious.
I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
That’s infuriating. I was hovering over the buy button last week, and now that’s a deal breaker. I was already going for the premium price point for hard-to-justify reasons.
0cf8612b2e1e 36 minutes ago [-]
Update: while I am terribly unhappy to give them money, there are still retailers who are listing the previous price and I was able to scoop one up before the hike went into effect.
elicash 4 hours ago [-]
I think the Neo was eating into their Air sales, and not merely bringing the Mac to a new market.
sylens 3 hours ago [-]
The Macbook Pro jump is probably the most meaningful, as it now puts the 16GB/1TB configuration of the 14" at $1999. That is now more than a Framework 13 Pro with Intel Core Ultra 3, 16 GB/1TB, whereas the Framework looked more expensive when it was originally announced.
subarctic 2 hours ago [-]
Damn it, I was just about to buy a mac mini with 24gb ram yesterday, but waited until today to figure out some shipping logistics. Definitely didn't expect the price would go up so much in one day.
jkman 2 hours ago [-]
Check costco/another third party, they still have yesterday's pricing right now
3 hours ago [-]
CobaltFire 3 hours ago [-]
Well I guess that changes the keep vs sell calculation on my 128GB Studio. Have already been thinking about downsizing; seeing what the prices are now I may go ahead with that.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
jlengrand 4 hours ago [-]
And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.
AustinDev 4 hours ago [-]
With memory manufacturers running gross margins in excess of 80% how long until we see upstarts come online to eat away at that or is that unlikely to happen in the near future?
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
m348e912 4 hours ago [-]
The memory manufacturing industry is historically notorious for its "feast or famine" cycles, bouncing violently between periods of extreme supply gluts and crushing shortages. We're in a shortage with massive demand right now, but manufacturers are hesitant to significantly invest in new manufacturing capacity due to the risk of being left holding the bag if demand drops.
benoau 3 hours ago [-]
The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.
Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.
tavavex 3 hours ago [-]
Probably American markets, not Western. The EU, Canada, Australia and others would have no reason to reject cheaper supply, and they don't have the same anti-democratic tech forces ready to do anything to ban their competition like the US does.
erxam 4 hours ago [-]
Even the upstarts are cashing in. I believe CXMT is making some serious cash now.
m4rtink 3 hours ago [-]
Yep - the incumbent memory cartel bathes in money for a bit longer - then Chinese manufacturers eat their market share while they sleep on their laurels.
r0fl 3 hours ago [-]
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
dagmx 3 hours ago [-]
Where would they make that which isn’t constrained already?
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
As has been said here every time this question comes up, years away if ever. It takes years to bring a new fab online as well as a huge amount of capital investment. Once the AI bubble pops, you now have a glut of RAM chips with prices crashing. If that new fab has been paid off while the getting was good, it's now an albatross on the books. Not something investors are eager to get into
reenorap 3 hours ago [-]
Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!
diebillionaires 3 hours ago [-]
Apple was already on the edge of "too expensive". Now it's obscene. I think this really opens the door for the new intel framework 13 pro.
petesergeant 3 hours ago [-]
> the new intel framework 13 pro
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
throawayonthe 40 minutes ago [-]
no but you could even bring your own
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
4 hours ago [-]
khurs 4 hours ago [-]
After these increases, will Apple be maintaining the previous profit margin?
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
TheJoeMan 3 hours ago [-]
The ridiculous thing about profit margin, is that if RAM increases Apple's cost by $100, they have to increase the selling price by a multiple of that to maintain the same %. Same exact factory line, labor cost, shipping cost, but have to 1.5x everything at the shrine of the bean counters.
monegator 4 hours ago [-]
Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen
flyingshelf 3 hours ago [-]
That just proves that Mediamarkt are scammers. It's not special price if it's the current MRSP. "Future price hikes" are not something you can legally base your "sales" on.
ungovernableCat 2 hours ago [-]
2026 computing, brokies need not apply.
kalleboo 46 minutes ago [-]
Computers are the new cars - only rich people (or people assuming debt) buy new ones, everyone else gets to buy used.
tristor 4 hours ago [-]
The 128GB M5 Max MBP I ordered at launch was $7049 and is now $9849 for the same configuration, that's nearly a 30% price increase and more than $2000 bump. During the same time from launch to now, I have seen local LLMs get significantly better, to the point that I wish more people had hardware like this to be able to localize their workloads. I can't help but think society is moving in the wrong direction with this technology by further centralizing in hyperscalars and damaging the hardware market to make strong general purpose computing even more difficult for individuals to obtain, when the right direction would be democratization of both the hardware and the software to allow most workloads to be run locally.
kamranjon 3 hours ago [-]
I really think this is a coordinated effort to restrict computing capacity for individuals and force adoption of centralized AI - I think there already is evidence of this from the moves OpenAI had made to lock up memory and gpu markets.
aroman 3 hours ago [-]
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
kamranjon 1 hours ago [-]
I think one of the more ominous things to see in recent years was all of the tech execs at the presidential inauguration, after having collectively donated several million dollars to the inauguration fund. So if we go with that list, which happens to overlap with many of the circular deals we’ve seen in the AI space recently, you’d have people like: Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
jnwatson 2 hours ago [-]
I would get nervous carrying around a $10k laptop.
tristor 2 hours ago [-]
I get more nervous not carrying it around when I travel. It's a lot easier to steal things that aren't on your person. That said, I get what you mean. I cover my photography gear with insurance and the computer since it is used for my photography (in addition to local LLMs) is covered under that insurance also.
sixothree 3 hours ago [-]
I had one in my cart last night. It seems far less appealing today.
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
tristor 3 hours ago [-]
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...
jorvi 3 hours ago [-]
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.
freediddy 2 hours ago [-]
Do you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.
stockresearcher 3 hours ago [-]
> you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
orlp 3 hours ago [-]
You save a lot less after paying import duties.
tristor 3 hours ago [-]
Do you pay import duties in the UK on items purchased for personal use? The situation is changing constantly in the US, but generally speaking you do pay duties only over a certain dollar amount in value if you intend to keep the item in country after importation (and a MBP would be over that amount), but it's a fairly small percentage (around $400 in duties on $3149 saved here). I'm not sure how it'd work in the UK.
cmdrmac 4 hours ago [-]
The price increases are unsurprising considering Tim Cook said it was "unsustainable" for Apple to keep absorbing the increases. Glad I ordered a new machine a couple days ago.
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
m4rtink 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, unsustainable to maintain their insane profit margins made possible by their locked down walled garden.
electriclove 3 hours ago [-]
They need to do layoffs and get rid of dead weight
fcoury 3 hours ago [-]
I am usually terrible at timing my purchases, but a couple of weeks back I bought a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max with 8TB SSD 128GB RAM.
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
joshstrange 3 hours ago [-]
> M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
functionmouse 4 hours ago [-]
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
rvz 3 hours ago [-]
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
tencentshill 2 hours ago [-]
This is where regulators would normally step in and limit the clearly excessive buildout. It's well past harming consumer spending.
mrbungie 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, come on. I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space. AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
> I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space.
This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.
> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.
Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Cryptocurrencies never did this because they were never popular. They were a big deal in tech spaces but the average person never really worked out what a bitcoin was or how they'd get one. AI, on the other hand, is seeing widespread use among ordinary people.
bix6 4 hours ago [-]
How is the mini not increased?
ndiddy 4 hours ago [-]
It is. They previously got rid of the 256 GB, $599 configuration, and the cheapest option was the 512 GB, $799 config. Now they brought back the 256 GB base model but at $799, and the 512 GB model is $999.
linguae 3 hours ago [-]
That’s terrible. I purchased my M4 Mac Mini (base 16/256 model) two months ago because I wanted an ARM Mac for a software project. I feared that the M5 Mac Mini would have a price bump, but I would’ve never guessed that Apple would dramatically hike prices for existing models.
I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
cmdrmac 4 hours ago [-]
I think they removed the "cheaper" configurations. In essence, the barrier to entry to mac mini was increased without actually changing the original price tag. I suspect the new mac mini (if one is coming) will sport a higher price tag.
AndroTux 3 hours ago [-]
Models with more ram have also increased in price around 20%. The M4 Pro base configuration went up $200. It’s just that nobody cares about Mac minis.
elicash 4 hours ago [-]
I think when they eventually announce the M5 Mac Mini (September?) it'll just be at a higher price.
jl6 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
wrxd 3 hours ago [-]
I wish but I am not hopeful that's actually going to happen
jl6 2 hours ago [-]
It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.
varispeed 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed, maxed out model I've been saving to buy is now £2000 more expensive than just few weeks ago. Madness.
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
submeta 4 hours ago [-]
What?
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
flyingshelf 3 hours ago [-]
It's not just a RAM problem. All
silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
deadbabe 4 hours ago [-]
Holy shit, if Apple is being pushed to do this, something they never would have done before before a refresh, then it must mean there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps at this rate.
linguae 3 hours ago [-]
The only other event I could remember in the history of Apple that is remotely comparable is the release of the original Power Mac G4 towers in 1999. They were originally going to have 400MHz, 450MHz, and 500MHz models, but due to issues regarding processor availability, Apple lowered the specifications by 50MHz for each model, but without lowering the prices.
I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.
I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
asats 2 hours ago [-]
>there is some truth about these memory stocks eventually reaching trillion dollar market caps
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T
SK Hynix $1.345 T
Micron $1.343 T
c0rruptbytes 4 hours ago [-]
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Kenji 4 hours ago [-]
Inflation babyyyyyyyyyy. See if your salary also raises by 10-20% this year. You're getting priced the fuck out of everything, have fun.
lapcat 3 hours ago [-]
Can we now all admit that AI is bad? The technology itself may be neat, but the side effects are killing us. How can AI make computing easier when ironically it's now significantly harder to get computers? AI is driving price increases, unemployment, economic inequality, illiteracy, misinformation, slop on the internet, possibly global warming and water shortages, etc.
Is this really the future we wanted?
cpursley 3 hours ago [-]
Farming implements and looms are bad, I miss having to scratch my own food from the earth and knit my own clothing from whatever fibers and animals I could find...
lapcat 3 hours ago [-]
This is not a serious response to my comment.
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
aroman 3 hours ago [-]
The point you’re making is that AI is an intrinsically bad technology, but that does not follow from this news story, which merely evidences that AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
lapcat 3 hours ago [-]
> The point you’re making is that AI is an intrinsically bad technology
Not really. I said, "The technology itself may be neat."
There's a larger societal question: how many resources should we devote to this technology? The current answer appears to be "unlimited resources".
> AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
The point is that we're currently suffering the many negative side effects of AI production, some of which I listed. Will there be a utopian future when the negative side effects are all eliminated? Maybe... or maybe not. In any case, it sucks right now, and relief does not appear imminent. Indeed, the Apple price increases are a sign that the component shortages are not just temporary, and even the wealthiest corporation in the world can't ride out the storm.
bbg2401 3 hours ago [-]
You're going to have to work remarkably hard to link your comment to the parent without looking like a disingenuous ass.
nalekberov 4 hours ago [-]
> We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
ElProlactin 4 hours ago [-]
Apple has never been a charity.
nalekberov 3 hours ago [-]
Who said that? It was Apple, who sold their iPhones at astronomic margins, created walled gardens. There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
foldr 3 hours ago [-]
>There could be other solutions to this problem - one being, signing exclusive deals with vendors.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Why would they set prices at anything other than the level which maximizes profit?
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
All their other products are lower volume.
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.
Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?
So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
http://shirky.com/2001/01/
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something. This means: 1. You wait for build out and prices go down. 2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.
And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.
All existing factories have maximized their production.
> factories but are not making ram switch
It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.
> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
What alternative exists for NAND flash?
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
Close down would be a good idea.
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
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 for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.
And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.
"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
All the people running any computer appreciate.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.
And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.
Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.
I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.
If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but definitely enough to make an impact.
https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
I also wouldn’t be surprised if memory providers weren’t intimately involved, as they’ve been caught price fixing in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.
> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.
Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.
I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/
I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.
I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T SK Hynix $1.345 T Micron $1.343 T
Is this really the future we wanted?
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
Not really. I said, "The technology itself may be neat."
There's a larger societal question: how many resources should we devote to this technology? The current answer appears to be "unlimited resources".
> AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
The point is that we're currently suffering the many negative side effects of AI production, some of which I listed. Will there be a utopian future when the negative side effects are all eliminated? Maybe... or maybe not. In any case, it sucks right now, and relief does not appear imminent. Indeed, the Apple price increases are a sign that the component shortages are not just temporary, and even the wealthiest corporation in the world can't ride out the storm.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.