These are the price changes mentioned in the article:
Macs
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
iPads
iPad: $449 (up from $349)
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599)
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749)
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999)
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)
More products:
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129)
HomePod: $349 (up from $299)
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99)
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)
> And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
I keep seeing FLOODS of comments from people saying "at least Sony didn't raise prices1" Well, they did a month or two ago, so I have no idea why they say that. Literally everything with RAM is more expensive now.
This would be incredibly foolish. The consumer value of windows has gone off a cliff, and while the Xbox hasn't been competing with the PS5, it's going to be a solid earner for decades. They just need to avoid another game pass catastrophe that destroyed trust with the consumer.
In the hopes of selling more consoles and that didn’t work.
Not sure if you have seen the recent news but things are not looking great there. Gamepass is not making them a lot of money at all. Even after acquiring Activision their operating margin is 3%
Big layoffs / studio closures coming in July, on top of the previous ones.
> Their game pass business model, which is terrible for consumers once the rug pull happens, is making them a lot of money and market share
It seems more like their game pass price hike destroyed market share. Whatever revenue it yielded them now is sure to cost them in the long term because people viewed them as price gouging and moved to playstation.
I don't understand the model, tbh. It strikes me as more useful as a loss-leader to build market share at cost to the company and make money in licensing fees long-term. But as it is, the console seems doomed.
Most gamers think xbox is dead and Microsoft doesn't seem too sure either, they recently had a change in leadership but the whole division is not doing great and struggling. Game pass is not as popular as it used to be
I guess Microsoft makes consumer electronics and (as much as it makes me shudder to say it) is a peer of Apple. I agree it’s not fair to Apple to draw comparisons with Microsoft given the sheer amount of damage they’ve done to the world.
Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.
Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently
The price increase may be factoring in the next Apple TV hardware revision, allowing that to be released without price being the dominant story around it.
Yeah, that seems to be the dominant theory, especially since the AppleTV hasn't been updated in a few years and is widely expected to be "due" for a new model within the next few months.
Is this true? I was under the impression that Apple signs long term deals with companies and the reason they didn't have a price hike for so long is because they were still getting parts are the former price
As wonderful as long term deals are, if Apple signed a long term deal with a supplier who didn't secure their supply chain properly, said supplier is going to either:
1/ Force apple to eat a price hike. Failing that, they can:
2/ Terminate their relationship with apple
3/ Go bankrupt trying to sell $2 for $1 (which leads us back to point 1)
That has happened before with GT Advanced Technologies over iPhone screens. Apple frontloaded GTAT's Arizona facility buildout, but the contract had no obligation to buy and GTAT's yields were horrible, so Apple didn't pay the last installment of the loan and GTAT by contract couldn't sell to anyone else.
iPhone 6 launched without the sapphire screen and GTAT went bust.
Apple has a bit of a storied history of being the reason suppliers go bankrupt. Their contracts are usually one sided (who is going to tell Apple no and turn down that business?), and Apple does not like to be pushed around. They use multiple sourcing and pit their suppliers against one another and aren't above bullying.
The trouble with long-term contracts is that they have an end date. Looking at my 5 year fixed mortgage which will end in just over a year, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
Apple doesn’t get a pass just because their contracts are many of orders of magnitude bigger.
its so much better though. android junk UI and TV OS are so bad I will happily pay the Apple TV price just to get the remote and not get a headache when I get home from work and want to watch TV. the product name is too poorly thought out though
Yeah, it's one of the products where you are clearly paying an Apple tax for the hardware, but OTOH it's also one of the products where it's clearest that the Apple tax is paying for software that's both good and consumer-friendly. It's not a hackable box, but if you want to just hand something to a non-technical person to use in their house, it's considerably better than the alternatives.
A good opportunity to move away from this tier of locked-down garbage devices, which include, among other, consoles (Xbox, PlayStation), streaming boxes (Apple, Amazon, Google), phones with locked bootloaders (Apple, Samsung), Internet-of-Shit home appliances that depend on the "cloud" and non-free apps, and others.
I am currently in projects using lots of open source hardware and SBCs and I would argue the price increases on those have been even worse (if they are available at all) because those companies are competing for the same components but without the buying power of Apple. It’s a bloodbath out there.
You can still get any of these devices for the price of 16 GB DDR5 or 32 GB DDR4 (which limits the choice and availability of CPUs). It's a terrible time to build freedom PCs.
Here is an alternative: put any Linux distro that packages Plasma Bigscreen on a old laptop or mini-PC. Add an HDMI-CEC for control with the TV's remote. It even comes with Ethernet!
It's a mess, how would you remotely start up your laptop ?
The plasma big screen is also not very well made, I don't know if you can even compare it to Android tv or apple tv.
And the last nail in the coffin is that you don't get apps on plasma big screen. I need my internet provider app to acees the tv channels, otherwise I'd have to pay even more, and it's not available on Linux of course.
It’s an alternative, but for the majority not a good alternative (unless you go the OSMC Vero route). I have tried doing this ever since it’s been possible to play video back on a PC (and before that I used SGI’s, and Macs with external video solutions) and continue to try it with many devices and hardware configurations. An Apple TV is easier to maintain and the quality of output is great.
The only thing not so great with Apple TV are the solutions for local media playback, OSMC and a Vero V is a better solution for that.
For reference I do this both for fun and work professionally in video workflow and pipeline solutions for 25+ years.
Is 4K even relevant at a typical couch distance from the TV/monitor? Besides, 4K content can also be found elsewhere, it does not have to be streamed, and the viewing experience is probably better when it is not.
Especially, that Netflix 4k seems to be on par with blue ray 1080p.
Why is the image quality on Netflix so bad? Do people really not care about not having 4k when paying for the most expensive tier of the most expensive streaming service?
Consumers consume. Most of those who pay for Netflix Premium don't even know what they are paying for. They believe Netflix that says it's better quality, of convince themselves that they're going to use off-line features on flights.
I looked recently and a new Macbook 128gb ram was £5500 which was expensive for me but I could consider it! Now it’s £7000 which is absolutely ridiculous. AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
Yes, based on my personal experience, it is much more harmful than helpful to the majority. Most seem to be determined to completely replace their need to think, as opposed to just supplementing or augmenting their thinking with AI.
I think Apple could easily swallow these price hikes in its profit margin if it wanted to, but then its shareholders wouldnt have as pretty numbers to look at in their quarterly reports.
This is the explanation for almost all things done by public companies. The shareholders own the company. The numbers in the quarterly reports are important to them.
If they ate an average $100 margin decrease on every one of those sales, that profit number wouldn’t go down from $120bn to $119bn, it would go down to $80bn.
Now you can absolutely argue that $80bn is still an excessively large number, but just so we’re being realistic about what the difference we’re looking at here is, it’s not a tiny percentage of their profits, it’s a third.
Publicly traded companies can as well. There is no legal ruling that states a company must maximize EPS or face lawsuits. Apple could justify eating the margin to retain customers, build brand loyalty, or whatever other reason they can come up and the courts give a ton of leeway to business judgements in Delaware if they were sued over it.
Their fiduciary duty just means they have to act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders and not act for personal gain. Apple just has to spin eating the margin as being in the best interest of those parties.
The real reason they don't isn't any duty to shareholders, its any sort of drop would wipe billions off their market cap and directly affect exec compensation.
They could gain a shedload of market share by remaining cheap while pricing in the whole rest of the industry rockets up?
Especially after just releasing the Neo, their cheapest laptop ever. They could be taking chunks out of the PC market right now if they werent so greedy.
Because it could be strategically good to increase their market share and loyalty when everyone else is increasing their prices, for instance? But no, the "fiduciary duty" thing trumps everything, I guess.
Apple is free to make either choice (or anywhere on the spectrum) without violating any duty they have to shareholders.
“We chose to invest in future market share, believing that was in the best interest of the company” is a perfectly valid choice for the company leaders and board to make.
We are only talking about opinion here. Obviously Apple shareholders have their own and thats what they use to direct the company, thats fine. My opinion would be more along the lines of 'Lets sacrifice 1% of profit this year to gain huge chunks of market share by undercutting literally everybody else in the industry for the first time in our history'.
I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Well it means nobody can avoid their extortionate upgrade pricing anymore so I think that decision paid off well for them.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
AIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price.
Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
Delivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why.
They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
Long term contracts probably don’t last forever and probably don’t represent 100 percent of their demand. My guess is that they’re already having to pay inflated prices for some non-trivial fraction of their inventory.
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599) +16.7%
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099) +18.2%
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699) +17.7%
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199) +13.6%
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599) +13.9%
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999) +25.0%
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999) +32.5%
Pads
iPad: $449 (up from $349) +28.7%
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599) +25.0%
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749) +26.7%
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999) +20.0%
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499) +20.0%
More products
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129) +54.3%
HomePod: $349 (up from $299) +16.7%
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99) +30.3%
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499) +5.7%
Price elasticity, and supply and demand, and all that Econ 101 stuff... these numbers confirm there is no demand for the Vision Pro. (=
Same here, reserved a 48GB M5 Pro shortly after seeing the news, and now I see the same retailer raised the price by over $1000. If they honor the sale, then this will be the most short term value I've gotten out of an HN submission ever.
> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
reply
I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.
All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.
You haven't flown with a modern system than. I was in Cathay's Aria suite on their refurbished 777s and it was the most fluid experience ever. Frankly smoother scrolling than on my iPad but on a 24" 4K screen. Magical!
Any version of the Nvidia Shield TV can do this, even the original from 2015. I’d be more surprised to find a streaming stick today that can’t handle direct playing 4K HDR remuxes from Plex
Not to mention the non-first-party Google TV sticks/dongles. The Onn ones from Walmart range from $15-50 depending on how many bells and whistles you want. I really don't know why one would pick anything else.
I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.
I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.
Elgato's Eve app exposes all sorts of fun stuff in HomeKit that you can't do with the native Home app.
I get the impression they want you to use other apps to access HomeKit (the Home app didn't even exist for the first one or two releases of iOS with HomeKit). Which feels very un-Apple, but whatever.
The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.
I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
I'm so glad it's not just me. M1 MacBook Pro, here, and I quickly gave up on Zed because it felt so laggy to me. Thought it was something wrong with my MacBook (or maybe me).
Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.
Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.
That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.
> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough
I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite.
Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care
When you go buy a CPU you have twenty different points on the price versus performance curve to choose from, if not more. And they all have roughly the same feature list.
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.
"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."
The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.
The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).
Zed is also at the bleeding edge of rust GUI development, which doesn't have the same mature libraries as other low-level languages. I'll give them the longer-term benefit of the doubt, but the attention to detail does matter.
To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...
I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps).
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
> I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.
Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.
To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
> To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone
Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.
But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
The Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way.
(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware.
Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.
I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it.
In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU.
It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.
So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.
(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.
Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.
There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes.
Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.
So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.
Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
It's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Oh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
C API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
I'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line in person was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
The problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.
On one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.
Even beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
Yes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.
Fully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.
not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
It's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts.
This is such a reddit take. Yeah electron takes a lot of resources, but there’s also a lot of software that never would’ve been made in the first place if we didn’t have it. It’s not as simple at pointing to (comparatively) inefficient software and saying that’s bad. Software is ubiquitous now and a big part of the reason for that is that frameworks and abstractions made software much easier to create.
I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.
It’s not really helpful in furthering good discussion, though, and it assumes too much.
To compare a reply to being akin to/belonging on Reddit is to say that it is low-effort or not intellectually rigorous, but this critique is self-defeating because it is itself low-effort and is usually not substantiated or justified, so it just rubs people on HN the wrong way.
This is especially true when it nearly bumps up against the part of the HN guidelines which admonish us to not compare HN itself to Reddit.
When saying an individual comment belongs on Reddit or is like those on Reddit, that is against the guidelines’ spirit in the small scale the same way as saying HN proper is becoming like Reddit is against the guidelines by the book in the large scale, so I don’t really think the comparison is helpful or defensible. It adds little to nothing to the discussion it accompanies, but rather undercuts it. When stated absent any other discussion, it’s nearly impossible to read it as anything but a bad faith swipe and/or flamebait.
I use it as shorthand for “this is received wisdom that you likely haven’t thought about critically and are just saying because it tends to please the reddit hive mind”.
Which is something I did indeed want to say in addition to my actual point.
But I also take your point that it is aggressive, is not related to the substance of the discussion, and is reasonable to not want to see on HN. Will avoid in the future :)
I'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.
I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.
Google Meet is trash. Camfrog from over a decade ago trashes it, Zoom, and any other multi-camera meeting room software. I was watching over 150 video streams at once on a Pentium 4 using Camfrog, and now you can't even have more than 5-10 before a computer starts choking.
Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
I own both - there is a lot of work Arc's drivers need done to them to actually be able to use their supposed theoretical power. My GTX 1080 delivers more consistent framerates with less stuttering versus the B580.
Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
I mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.
You don't have to go retro, just 5 to 10y old is fine.
I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.
Yeah that's pretty much what I play. Newer titles haven't interested me much lately except for a few. THis machine handles Diablo 4, Pragmata, all the elder scrolls titles, cities skylines, satisfactory, etc. just fine. Even managed to get AC:Shadows to run decently using the steam deck preset.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.
I'm a fairly proficient linux user and I just can not get streaming to work properly and I've dedicated multiple hours to trying to set it up. The built in Steam streaming gets the closest but often just lags out for no obvious reason. Sunshine/moonlight seem to be close to working but weird display issues are constant. I've got it to the point where the steam big picture video streams perfect but when you launch a game the screen size seems to change where I can only see part of the screen on my target device.
Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
Oh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman.
Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$?
Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
its worth noting that you were much less restricted with this 6k computer in 1996. today we are paying ever more for walled gardens that will eventually become nothing more than a portal to cloud services. we are not returning to a previous position, we are moving to a world where everything will be a thin client.
True but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.
Speak for yourself. I have a modern machine running Fedora. What walled gardens are you talking about? Buying a Mac is a choice that you may make, but I never will.
Performance was flying in the 90s. The last 1-2 decades if you bought a top end computer it'd easily last you the decade before it started to drag behind average. 3 decades ago if you bought a computer it'd reach the same point in 2-3 years.
I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
Ordinary people do not buy devices for their computing power, they buy them for their utility. People will look at this and see only a device that delivers the exact same utility as before, but now with higher cost.
I had a similar thought. I bought a computer for $3600 CAD 3 years ago and it shows no signs of limiting my work in any way. I have another from 2020 from my employer that is just fine, likely costing them about $2500 CAD when they bought it.
Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.
I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
I think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
We paid like $3500 in 1995 money for a PC which was completely outdated after 4 years. The early to mid 90s were exciting times, but damn some of the machines were expensive and didn't last long.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.
> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
I come from th blue collar world of the central valley California. Every mechanic, car salesman, construction manager if not worker, owns their own home and has two kids. It's interesting how 60 miles east is a whole new world where you need a crazy fancy job to buy a home.
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
Waste and sanitation jobs in Toronto start at $39k and get up to $120k+ if you’re driving the truck and leading a team
I would imagine we actually pay our municipal employees proportionally _more_ than we did back then.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
There's many types. I sold Audi/Porsche and every now and then I'd sell a fancy car to a FedEx driver type that does long haul runs to other states (with a team driver next to him), and he'd be making $150k a year+. Not bad for 4 days a week work, and ability to live in a slightly lower cost area.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
Well California automatically pays more than most of the country. And I believe FedEx has some Union drivers. And yes, just like the average software engineer salary isn't all that dang high, when we discuss the industry we tend to look at the most successful group we aspire to be in, not the burnouts that aren't that good at their job.
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.
What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
That is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
That's great, but then can you ask the manufacturers of the devices to support them for 20 years? Raw numbers mean jack shit if the device itself is completely abandoned and cannot run any applications. Banking, authentication and bunch of services require the device to be on the latest iOS/Android version, which is hard to do because the manufacturer dropped it like a hot brick after 5 years.
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.
The quote from Gruber in question (IMO, a little more reasonable than you give it credit for.)
> For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. ... But unlike with the MacBook Pros in March, I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on my hunch here. However out of character it would be for Apple to raise prices midway through product cycles, the global RAM shortage is unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple pushes price increases moments after I hit “Publish” on this post.
Apple was on the USB Implementers Forum that designed USB-C so.. I would say they could definitely be credited as a co-inventor of USB-C, they also introduced one of the first devices that used USB-C.
In addition to being the sole inventors of lightning (the connector), which directly informed the USB-C spec based on learnings from field use.
Apple doesn't get solo credit for USB-C, but they were certainly essential to it. Just compare the USB-C physical interface to the USB-3 micro or super speed type B ports and compare design sensibilities.
I think we needed Apple to do that to throw a lot of weight behind the standard so it didn't get stuck in an eternal migration that never ends. Though removing the SD card slot was dumb since USB-C was never an alternative to SD cards.
Even today the desktop PC market is still stuck on USB-A since they have no Apple equivalent to just get things done.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
Memory prices are certainly going up, but Apple already makes a 40% profit margin on their products. That $1 trillion+ bank account still gotta go up no matter what right?
> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
If anything, Apple was likely happy for this. It let them rip the band-aid off on the transition but shift blame to the EU for people annoyed by having to switch adapters and accessories.
There is zero chance that Apple wasn’t going to do this themselves anyway in the next year or two. They’d been aggressively converting everything else in their device portfolio to USB-C and were doing so way ahead of everyone else.
People who think this only happened because of the EU are high as a kite.
Except they were steadily converting their devices to USB-C for years preceding the iPhone, and they had good reasons to make the iPhone the last device to get it. There is no indication that they were forced to do anything, and the best argument you have is a poster child for post hoc ergo propter hoc. A feeling.
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.
Maybe they don’t want the price to absolutely dominate the headlines of their forthcoming product announcements. It won’t be forgotten, but the sting will be less “newsworthy”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
There's solutions to everything you mention and as I said, usually when sanctions are applied to countries, companies and individuals are meant to deal exactly with this.
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
> If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to,
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
> 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead
These 10 countries need the US/EU market for their exports.
But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!
> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM
That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI goons to completely buy the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.
If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not merely 'so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.
It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.
If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
> But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!
The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.
You can't sanction your way into squeezing blood from a stone.
> If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
If a country came along and declared that companies couldn't buy the resources they need from other companies, the second order effect would be every major company relocating their headquarters out of that country as soon as possible, along with a sharp decrease in startups being formed in that country.
The economic impacts of this level of command-and-control government would be devastating to the economy. Much more than having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a laptop every 5-10 years.
> The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.
You keep arguing as if there's only one side to this, the producers/DRAM companies who can't scale production fast enough.
But there's two sides to a market, the producers (DRAM makers) and the consumers, (AI industry). I am arguing for increasing the supply by taking some away from the AI industry. This is BECAUSE on the production side there's no way to address this fast enough.
The DRAM producers have also agreed to work together to raise the prices in the past and are probably rather enjoying it being their turn to get a ton of money again. d Free markets break down when cartels form, because then you wind up with an effective monopoly despite having multiple suppliers
It's not in anybody's best interest to take away supply for the AI industry. For better or worse (and whether you believe it or not), AI technologies are coming that will be transformational. If the United States decides to handicap their AI industry, China will simply say "thank you very much" and develop these technologies first. Because of the nature of recursive self-improvement, the country that develops powerful AI first will most likely have an economic lead for quite a while.
It sucks that DRAM is so expensive, but it is for a good (economically useful) cause.
> but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Then, let's see how quickly I can reinterpret whatever power you've grabbed in the name of "doing something" and pervert it for some other nefarious purpose, or just generally bypass the intent entirely as a motivated actor with limitless funds.
Many regulations, once passed, impact only those incapable of navigating around them - typically, the less-fortunate. Invariably, power taken in the name of some transient issue is never later relinquished.
> > 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.
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.
Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
> Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
They have those powers when they're allowed to become monopolies. Unregulated capitalism leads to monopolies and slavery as they're the best way to capture all capital. Company towns, company stores, company scrip, etc.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices.
How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, imagine doing that for oil. American and EU companies that “hoard” oil get punished. The net effect would be everyone else gets to buy more and prices remain exactly the same.
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.
A strategic reserve of a commodity that (historically) depreciates at ~50% per year is a terrible trade for occasionally avoiding demand-driven price spikes.
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?
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'.
The market will take care of itself. The Chinese are going use this to ramp up and build more memory, and some companies out there will take it in-house, In short, they won’t be caught with their pants down again.
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.
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.
You ignored the part where I mentioned "extreme" and "locked up." To be fair I wasn't necessarily clear what those meant. I'm specifically referring to the deal(s) that OpenAI signed which reserved an outsized chunk of the memory supply, for what is apparently speculative future hardware that hasn't been built yet, or at least to build hardware that no consumer or business will ever be able to physically purchase.
Hopefully you'll agree that there's a difference between even a large buyer like Apple reserving a large chunk of DRAM supply to put in their products that they sell to consumers, and the anti-competitive behavior by OpenAI that I describe above.
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.
One or two companies will come out of this, designing and engineering memory and partnering with someone else to do the fab of that memory no different than making processor chips in Arizona.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple can’t switch now, but they can take it in the house over the next 3 to 4 years to avoid this fiasco again. They have the right new CEO for the job. He’s a designer and engineer of chips, and since Apple didn’t waste money on the AI model/Data Center building exercise.
They certainly have the money to get it done in house, long-term, why? after this fiasco, the Chinese are going to have a much bigger piece of the memory market worldwide. So strategically, it pays to bring it memory in house in partnership with TSMC in Arizona or Oregon.
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.
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
> All existing factories have maximized their production.
Citation needed.
This is almost certainly not true because capacity is not binary but an efficiency curve. As the cost of RAM increases it becomes economical to operate the factory at higher capacities.
> It takes 2-3 years to switch
Citation needed. Who sets the max speed limit for changing?
> What alternative exists for NAND flash?
There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.
The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.
=-=-=-=
"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.
“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.
“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”
$10 billion dollars, 3 to 4 years, that’s less time to build a new modem chip that works. that’s less time to build a new M series processor that works. Google, Microsoft, and Meta We’ll spend close to $500 billion in 2026, just on their AI dreams, I would say having a supply of memory chips is vital towards your business if you’re someone like Apple or AMD or Nvidia, these days these days, if you want to design the devices you need to design, so who’s going to take it in house?
I did some more research and it turns out the problem is not maxing capacity to produce ram but that these manufacturers have switched to another class of ram leaving less of their production for consumer hardware
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.
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.
We were talking here about whether it is necessary for the government to intervene because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products.
In that context, it is not only technically true that you do not need to buy those products. This simply does not strike me as an issue where the government would need to step in and regulate the market.
> because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products
Here's your problem. This is not a consumer or Apple-specific issue whatsoever. Computing hardware is critical infrastructure in the digital age. The AI boom is inflating the cost of almost all compute for every business, including the cost of all cloud computing.
It's alot like housing, in that the average cost of housing directly inflates the average cost of living, impacting the poorer many orders of magnitude more than the richer. When all governments, companies, and individuals depend on computers to amplify productivity or deliver services, a significant increase in price will impact every government, company, and indiviudal.
An extremely small number of individuals or orgs being able to dramatically impact critical infra, and the cost of living – regardless of why – is a major national security and supply chain failure. This is the entire reason why monopolies and too-big-to-fail entities are bad for everyone, and anti-trust laws were created to being with; to prevent an extreme minority from influencing markets in such a way that it is detrimental to consumers and other market players or sectors.
The Chinese won’t be sitting around? They will consider it a vital area. And they will keep the engines going sitting back and daydreaming will only leave you further behind…
I don’t think government needs to get involved in the West, but some of those companies affected that have the resources are gonna have to reconfigure themselves and design around the three memory companies. The Chinese certainly will.
"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."
--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith)
_Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.
Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.
Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their costs do not scale linearly with revenue. Inference is expensive, but it's a variable cost. Anthropic's overall costs include massive fixed costs in training, which are the same regardless of usage.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
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.
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)
except if as cost here only the inference cost is considered, and not the capital investment, and maintenance costs (not to mention r&d, marketing, and others).
to put it another way, if they just had the corporate API subs today, would they be profitable?
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.
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.
The world would be a better place without AI, OpenAI, Anthropic and all others. It only immerses the world into chaos, dystopia and increased inequality. So far nothing for the public good has come out of it.
The cause is the whole thing, cost of shipping (container, gas, etc), cost of components (RAM, SSD, etc), cost of tariff, cost of lobbying and lawsuits, and overall inflation cost.
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!
Sure do! Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man, we live the longest, our material welfare is the highest it has ever been! I have electricity, I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly, I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day. I could go on and on forever.
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically over the past two centuries. The extreme poverty rate, currently defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2.15 per person per day (adjusted for purchasing power), has dropped from around 60% of the world's population in 1950 to under 10% today.
That people should be happy over this may seem obvious to commenters shuffling about charts and research papers. But ordinary people do not look at their living situation and feel overwhelmingly thankful on a daily basis that they're not living in a horrible shack eating nothing, like many people 100 years ago. They're looking at their immediate parents. Neither of them were likely to starve, or die prematurely, or be affected by many of the most horrible things that wiped out people for millions of years. And yet, people are still worried that what was seen decades, not centuries, ago is unattainable. Maybe most people aren't likely to be homeless, but that precarious threshold is getting closer than it used to be. There's less of a safety margin for most things.
Ah yes ! You should have said that to the 10 000 people who died while trying to migrate to another country, due to drone wars, financial crisis and climate change. [1]
And you should also have said that to the Congolese children who died while mining for the natural resources used to produce components for the AI datacenters.
And yes, the future we're living in is wonderful for the 50 millions slaves all around the world to build things we don't really need. [2]
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
There's never been a time in history when that was true and there never will be a time when that will be true.
The point is you live in the most comfortable/easy/least violent/most democratic/longest lifespan/best healthcare/best technology/best educated/etc. time to be alive in all of human history.
On top of that, if you're on this website, according to similarweb you're one of the highest income and most educated people on the planet (you're the 1%).
So you're likely in the 0.005% luckiest humans to ever live, and yet you're pessimistic because some media channel preyed upon your empathy or fears of change to capture your attention so they can monetize it selling ads for toilet bowl cleaner.
The truth is some people just have a negative emotional disposition. Others have genuine issues in their lives they need to change. In all cases there are actions, medications and therapies for you. Seek help.
Pretending you're so virtuous as to care about all the worlds problems and yet also powerless to do anything about them is simply a giant excuse to never actually do anything but complain and contribute nothing to humanity.
> Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
Really? Because what OP said, it sounded similar:
>> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
"Take him to a psychologist" was standard playbook in soviet block to silence dissent. Everyone knows of the gulag archipelago but just declaring someone insane was part of the toolkit.
This is the problem in the discussion. Many on HN don't remember what it was like to buy a house in 2010, so they assume it hasn't gotten (far) worse. It has.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
>Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
My generation can't afford to own homes nor have children and the already pithy value of our labour is being outsourced to cheap foreign labour while the cost of food and basic living shoots into the stratosphere
Reading the replies is amazing. OP: a specific manufacturer raised prices on some products. Thread: endless argument about everything that's good or bad about the current living situation, in historical perspective, across the entire world.
Looking forward to being sent to a foggy planet in foreign start system to collect alien eggs for a daily nutripaste and bunk bed with corporate issuesd blanket.
I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects.
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
That's funny. To me (mid-40s), the "glory days" of the internet were pre-iPhone, around 1997-2005 or so. Sure, speeds were lower, but that was ok for the time. And sure, everyone didn't have always-on internet access wherever they were, but I think that was mostly a good thing.
I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
Indeed. Early to mid 1990's, that's where it was at. FTP, telnet, gopher were awesome, and then, in short order: HTML, Mosaic, Netscape - the WWW. Really useful.
Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-)
I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting.
I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
> I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
Hopefully, but there is something we know we cannot change in the next decade, and that's climate change. Heard of the heatwaves happening right now? That's only the beginning.
The only way it could stay as bad as it is today would be to reduce the emissions to 0 right now. There is no coming back, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it stays there for much longer than your lifespan.
Of course we won't cut the emissions in the next few years (kind reminder that they keep increasing actually), so every year will be worse.
And I'm not talking about the energy crisis that's coming. Nor about the current mass extinction we are living: biodiversity is measurably dropping, and until now it was NOT due to climate change (only human activity and habitat loss). Now climate change adds up as a bonus.
It's probably time to enjoy seeing insects and the occasional wild life. We probably won't go to Mars, but we're making the Earth look like Mars, so we may all get to live in a "bunker" and have to were a suit outside before the end of our life.
To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
I genuinely wonder: in those monarchies in the past, were the kings as rich and powerful as Elon and Bezos? It feels like there have been revolutions for less than what we accept today.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this stuff.
I agree with you on medical advancements, but I am skeptical about curing cancer (which is really curing hundreds of different diseases) any time soon. Alzheimer's might be nearer and a cure could come from a big breakthrough, but that's still in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory.
Senescence... oof, I think we're a good century or so from figuring that out, at best. And even if you're right, I expect this to be a closely-guarded medical technology, with near-immortality only available to the super-wealthy.
Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
Space travel is... mixed. It's amazing that the costs to getting things into space have been going down, and amazing that we have things like the JWST and so many different organizations and countries sending stuff up, but it's depressing that one single company (run by a megalomaniac) is so far ahead and owns all the technology to bring those costs down. The commercialization of space is not something I'm looking forward to, and I expect governments to do their typically shitty stuff when it comes to space.
> Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
I think it's too late for that anyway. Peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss (we are measurably living in a mass extinction era), those problems are here and now. Fusion may help (?) slightly reduce climate change but the only thing that can stop it is the end of fossil fuels (every time we emit CO2 we make the climate worse for the next generations). But fusion couldn't change the fact that we are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs: this one is unrelated to CO2 or climate change, just humans destroying wildlife habitat. Fusion may actually allow us to make it worse.
> Space travel is... mixed
Space travel is a big joke. The only advantage of looking for solutions to survive at scale on Mars is that we are rapidly transforming Earth into something that is as bad as Mars, and we many need suits and bunkers to survive here before the end of our lives. That's a bit ironic.
Fusion: well even if we had a reactor that could produce 5Q, just look at the power demands of the tech sector... They have an infinite appetite. Unless we demand/enforce optimization on them, their businesses, their code, their hardware... Any additional green MW we build, will just be eaten by the inefficiencies of silicon valley.
Mars: more like we are rapidly transforming earth into Venus.
We have expensive drugs that make people less hungry, and essentially require they take them for the rest of their lives. We also don't really know the long-term effects of these drugs when used for this purpose. (Using them for diabetes is different.)
We do not have computers that think. And what we do have, if improved further, is likely to cause severe labor disruption, which could lead to mass riots and civil war if we're not careful. (And since when have we been careful?)
It's 40°C all over my home country right now. And as far as I am aware, each year is going to get worse, and the thinking computers are adding more fuel to the flame.
Think about that next year when climate gets even worse, and the year after.
And don't forget that it will get worse every year for the rest of your life. Unless we cut CO2 emissions to 0, in which case it won't recover: it will just stay as bad as it is when we stop the emissions. But no need to think about all the disagreements coming from cutting our energy use (because cutting emissions means cutting energy use), because we just won't do it. So we can happily focus on the wars that will come from the energy crisis and enjoy the climate worsening every year.
The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot is to reduce the amount of energy and obvious way to do that is to block out the sun, clearly. That's why we need so much space lift capacity. Not to get to Mars, but to blot out the sun which will cool the Earth!
"The obvious solution to this invasive species is to bring a predator from where they come from, so that it will regulate it. Problem solved".
5 years later, the problem is two invasive species. My point is that messing up with the climate is not necessarily a good way to fix the fact that we messed up the climate. Naive hope like this is simply dangerous.
And that's assuming that this ridiculous idea is actually possible in practice.
> The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot
What about the mass extinction we are measurably living in right now? It has nothing to do with the Earth getting too hot. We've lost 80% of insects, we are emptying the oceans... it's not a risk, it's happening. We measure it.
wait, so we have a pill that cures us from (some of) the effects of having turned all of out food into low-nutrition, high addiction items that negatively impact our health while they destroy our ecosystem? (ask where all the water that goes into making soda comes from, all the high frutcose corn syrup, all of the palm oil, ...)
And that's what gets you excited about the future?
Ok cool. Computers think. They're (trying to) use that to literally replace regular people. And not in a Star Trek way. "Permanent underclass" way. That's bad.
I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards.
When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat.
I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years.
Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
So far the main effect of "computers think" has been making my job both more precarious and more miserable— talking to agents all day instead of writing code sucks ass and I want to die by the end of it, it's like spending all day on Slack with particularly dimwitted coworkers. What about that should make me excited?
The pill has more power in the argument here. Thinking is still nebulous and the same could have been said in the 70-80s.
The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking.
However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement.
Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago.
No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things.
But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous.
Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today.
We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
I agree with your sentiment and would advise the same. However, I would caution anyone sympathetic to the idea: we are probably at the stage where the current generation(s) who can make a difference have to plant trees whose fruit they will not taste.
The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.
Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. I didn't have the choice (or agency) to make decisions and changes to fight back against the silo'ing of all digital spaces, ownership, and freedoms.
I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
> Whilst true, its your generation who got us here.
You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.
> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.
Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.
> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).
Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.
The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
Not sure why you're donwvoted. I too see the downsides as well as the upsides. The high prices vs the people that use their excess solar to power a GPU that powers an agent that messed about with an ESP32 and some sensors to build nice Home Automation integrations. Etc.
Of course it's hard to be positive when you lost your job, I get that.
The downsides you're listing are real things that are already affecting us. The upsides are imaginary and reliant on a very positive outlook for the future. My view is that we'll be renting someone else's server time because GPUs will all be tailored to datacenters and either too expensive or useless for home computing. Only to generate the ESP32 home automation project that was probably already generated or human-written a thousand times in the past and could be found by a quick Github search. Silver linings or not, this doesn't seem like a deal I would take.
Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
> Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
Citations needed. From what I see is
(1) the demand for electricity is growing at an explosive rate
(2) The AI data center build out is relying more on natural gas than you might expect. I believe it was the utah one that plans to build the world's largest gas power plant, which the next largest one is orders of magnitude smaller.
(3) The US is actively blocking hardware from China being sold in the US (low cost high grade solar panels, electric cars, etc.)
So, yes I deny that energy is getting cleaner and cheaper. In fact, I think it's going the exact opposite... It's getting more expensive and dirtier!!!
Ah yes, personal computing was also supposed to come to an end. Yet here I am, on the best Linux ever with the most beautiful desktop being productive with all my favorite tools, not worrying about drivers or compatibility or anything. All for free, freedom included.
The "worst" part of this comment, is that it's not even exaggeration.
In the last 6 months, my competition increased 5x. People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do. My margins will keep shrinking while hardware and servers gets more expensive.
It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.
Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...
A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.
A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.
In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.
Like the famous Market for Lemons, where a similar information asymmetry produces market failure that ends up making things worse for both buyers and sellers.
New signals of trustworthiness will emerge (are already emerging.)
More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.
The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.
How do you build reputation when you have 100 competitors who will do shady things to get customers before pulling the rug out from under them. Your pockets aren't deep enough to survive until there are pieces to pick up.
> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
While I understand both of your perspectives, please think about how frustrating it can be to have poured years into building a product genuinely solving a problem and building a relationship with clients only for a dozens AI copy cats to come in. Even if your product is clearly better, the SEO slop alone will raise your marketing cost, price cutting will affect you as not all clients are able to tell quality before purchase or will know of your project, etc.
And in the end, everyone is worse of. We get less for the products we build. Customers in many cases get a worse solution. And the AI copy cats multiply until none of them can make a living from it.
If your product is really good, then people will choose it over AI copy cats. If that’s not the case then it’s time to take a really hard look at your product and see if that’s really as good as you think
That's a naive view of things. People don't have perfect information about the world around them. They can only go on what limited information filters to them. AI copycats will by their very nature be better at marketing and pushing information into people's faces. It's bad information, but how are customers supposed to know that?
Exactly. People on a forum dedicated to a VC should know that disruption happens everywhere, AI just makes it easier but it's been happening for a long time, that is the nature of startups in general.
I don't know, it really depends on the product. If we were all still paying for proprietary UNIX in the current year, then it's likely that these startups would never exist in the first place. Sometimes a SAAS has to admit that it's not providing real value before actual innovation becomes the status quo. I don't weep many tears for dying businesses because nobody lives forever.
The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.
Honestly, 60-70% of this feeling is just inflation. If things were still affordable, the doom and gloom would be much less palpable. Inflation will get under control, but we still have other problems with the direction of social cohesion.
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
For most that hit the treadmill at 18 that may be true because the rat race starts then, live within your means save and invest start early or else or you will be left standing scratching your head later in life...
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
I would never want to compel someone else to buy services from me if they had a better option available. My goal is to make money by contributing to society, not force others to pay me for services they don't want from me. If AI makes it so programmers aren't needed anymore, well, I had a good run and made good money while it lasted. I'll find something else productive to do.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
In 2024 I bought a used (2021 era) Dell for $400 to use as my home server. Just the ram that it came with now routinely goes for $600 or more. I'd sell it, but then I wouldn't have a server...
I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.
You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...
Yep, I had the exact same (but in euros), also a discounted m5 in December. I feel pretty lucky with that timing, not that it benefits me in any way but that feels like getting one of the last ticket for a concert
Apple did not have to be in this situation. Begging for capacity lost to startups. Everyone else can complain, but not Apple. They had a 250B warchest, exactly for such situations.
Now somehow openAI has capacity and Apple does not. And think about it Apple is not in a better position than Valve for example. A teeny tiny company in comparison.
Begging? Component price goes up, they increase their prices. Where's the begging?
Just like US had oil but as the world prices went up, US oil prices went up. No one will sell it cheap inside the country for patriotism. Same thing here.
Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
About pricing, Netflix is constantly raising its prices and making more and more money (their stock is broken for last few months only) because they learned how to maximize profit by serving less customers but more profitable customers. Thats just one example.
All I am saying is that price stability is not guaranteed and is not a corporate goal so whether they failed here, whether they regret something, it is not possible to judge that just from price increase. Maybe they did, maybe they did much better than we know today and will find out next year (or quarter).
The difference is that Netflix isn’t facing a situation where they have run out of product to sell. If Apple wants to sell 10k laptops, they need to have 10k laptops. If 10k customers sign up for Netflix, Netflix gets that revenue and they can worry about optimizing their selection / service later.
Like SOC'S? Something is probably coming Motorola, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm (out in 2027-2028), and Broadcom said no then Apple did something and replaced them the Apple Silicon design group can certainly do memory wasn't a company called Anobit bought by Apple years ago and money isn't a problem Apple didn't flush billions down Sam Altman's toilet like Microsoft.
Timeline 2-3 years 10-20 billion dollars...
Note:(Microsoft thru the end of this year will spend 60-80 billion dollars on Capex and Google will spend 180 billion dollars).
Because Apple doesn't sell socketed memory, but instead integrated SOC products that usually stimulate growth in their much more profitable services segment?
This is not Apple's fault and it is just the beginning of AI. Unlike every other software/algorithm/program known to mankind, AI based on neural networks threatens to extract exponentially the entire humanity's supply of computational capacity. Moore's Law hit a fundamental snag in the last decade (e.g. Dennard scaling) and cannot and likely will not keep up. This then would be the worst case scenario with serious long term consequences far beyond the price of consumer goods.
Micron said that they tried to tell 2 of their largest customers (one almost certainly Apple) that the prices they were demanding would result in the cancellation of a lot new construction in 2023, which wasn't in the industries best interests.
It is sort of Apple's fault. They are probably the biggest single buyer of DRAM and NAND globally and they pride themselves on their supply chain management under Cook.
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.
I'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You think the state of personal computing is a-ok because most people have smart phones. Others pointing out the very real limitations of what you can do on those phones seems highly relevant.
How is it not related? You are saying that we have massive powerful devices (smartphones) that can take over personal computing. I'm telling you that for you to be able to do "personal computing" you need a device that you own and can modify/run whatever you want.
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.
Get an XPS13 for the same money, and put Linux on it. It's a much better hardware/software combo, and Apple can't unilaterally kill it by refusing to provide upgrades a few years from now.
n.b. the Geekbench multicore test is more like a 2-core test because it adds lock contention, which is arguably closer to the real use case for these machines but isn't what you normally think of a multicore test doing
Though it does seem safe to say your original claim of "way slower than the Neo" isn't correct. Considering it's losing in one benchmark and only ahead in Geekbench (that tends to show higher scores for Apple processors relative to other benchmarks anyway).
"Roughly equal" seems to be a more accurate description.
It's not normal for these two benchmarks to deviate that much, so I'm not gonna take an average between them, just trust one or the other. My default has always been Geekbench, I didn't even look at Passmark until it was mentioned, and in this case Geekbench thinks the Mac's single-core speed is 35% higher.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ordered a refurb M3 two weeks ago specifically because I had a bad feeling about Q3. Now refreshing the refurb store to see if the prices there tick up too. The thing about "absorbing tariff costs" is that it's a great sentence to say when you also want to reset price anchors upward permanently.
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.
My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.
Look, this is going to suck for several more years. The western memory cartel was never truly dismantled or punished after their price fixing in the early 2000s, and now this is the result. With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative but to suck it up and ride out whatever this market is, be it bubble or blessing.
That said, China isn’t stupid and is gladly steering their domestic firms to produce more kit not just for data centers and AI customers, but to shore up domestic electronics manufacturing in general. If China can make a device that appeals to Americans en masse, western companies are arguably at their most vulnerable in the face of sky-high part costs and supply chain issues. Combined with rising public sentiment against data centers and a general “fed-up” attitude towards tech in general, and this could be quite the explosively expensive powder keg depending on how things end up shaking out.
That’s a fair critique of my limited, Ameri-centric perspective in my comment, but also a stinging rebuke of the decline of American hegemony abroad. As recently as last year having those Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list meant that those memory modules were unsellable outside of China and a handful of other countries that rebuked American power; the fact even American companies are now openly courting them for parts shows how weak the Empire’s power really is just two years later.
If you're in the US, Costco has certain models at the old price through Saturday (or while supplies last). Just pulled the trigger on a 24GB/1TB 13" MbA for $250 off the new price.
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.
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.
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.
"By the end of 2026, we expect CXMT to reach roughly 350 kwspm, which is only modestly below Micron’s estimated ~385 kwspm. This would position CXMT close to becoming the industry’s third-largest memory supplier"
Initially no but the Chinese will play long and take over much of the existing market worldwide and some companies that are capable will move design and engineering of memory in house and fab with a third party. With in house SOC's now out there memory will be next out of necessity/survival.
The problem with these drives is that you can't ensure the grade of the NAND chips. They could be A+ grade with great endurance but they could also be bottom of the barrel.
I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.
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.
They won't have choice the bad blood they are creating now won't buy them customers in the future there will be western companies and one country that will design around this AI fiasco.
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.
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.
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.
So, it finally happened. The Project is so thirsty for RAM that not even the world's most well-capitalized computer company could have the final word any longer. There's only so many more powerful organizations in the world than Apple. Well... we'll find out soon enough if such a thing could be built, or should I say, summoned.
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
Personal computing was essentially dead when companies figured that renting hardware and software and charging monthly subscriptions was a lot more profitable.
It's not dead. I refuse to rent hardware and software. I host all of my stuff at home on my own hardware, and encourage those around me to do the same. I have converted countless e-waste laptops to Linux and will continue to do so. Personal computing is only dead if you accept that outcome.
I started doing this in the mid-2010s, too. Used to grab throwaway hardware from a former employer and piece whatever still worked together. I've since moved on to a different employer. How do you procure throwaway hardware?
Yep, replaced my old Mac Pro with an M1 Mac mini that's actually faster. MacBook Neo is probably faster and nicer for most people's uses than what they already have, except of course video games.
It will get Golden Gate. Not sure what will happen after 2027. However, Apple will still provide security updates for older OS even after a new one has come out.
So you can expect ~2-4 more years of updates for an M1. Even after no updates, you can probably still use it longer.
This is entirely inaccurate. M1 is Apple Silicon and will be fully supported in Golden Gate (macOS 27). Support in macOS 28 is also practically a given.
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.
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.
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.
Two weeks ago I purchased an M5 Max MacBook Pro 16 inch with 128GB RAM and a 4TB SSD from Microcenter for $5100. (They had a $900 discount on the machine.) Not sure if that deal is still around, or if Microcenter still has any stock, but if you're in the market, I'd make a run for it! $5100 is now $8000 on Apple (and if ordered via Apple, it won't ship until August.)
I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
Even when the M5 Pro MacBook 16 released, they did raise the price $100 but upped the hard drive to 1TB. I really thought they would wait to raise prices until the next cycle but this is a bit alarming.
The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)
That's a double edged sword. Assuming it's an 18 month contract, even when ram prices do go back to "normal" it's a year and a half until Apple has savings to pass onto to customers.
Right — if we can know how long ago the contracts were agreed we can predict how much more the price will have to rise, because 20% sounds like the beginning of the problem.
Apple is notorious for their prices being extremely stable for a given SKU. If anything, this is Apple getting out ahead of where they expect memory prices to be long-term, so they can rip off the band-aid once and don’t have to do it again.
I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.
This kind of broad mid-cycle price update is essentially unprecedented for Apple. Their price points are extremely reliable, and even only occasionally do they tweak an individual product price up or down during a refresh.
I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.
If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.
I wonder if this is the real reason Tim Cook is resigning as CEO. He's a supply chain guy and semiconductor supply chains seem utterly borked right now.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
Compute? Inference doesn't only need memory bandwidth. You need to actually do work with the memory you're loading which needs compute power. Which needs more electricity, which needs more cooling, which isn't practical for something as thin as a MBP.
MacBook Pro has plenty of compute for local LLMs to be usable. I'm getting up to ~150 tokens/s with Deepseek-v4-Flash on a MacBook M5 Max. It's quite capable for coding assistant usage.
In general LLMs are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than raw compute power.
Yes, it's quantized (4 bit). Sure, it's... not quite as good as what's on offer via API. And sure, "up to" does a lot of work (I don't have an average/median for you but it feels fast to me).
But it's usable, fully local, fully private, and has no subscriptions and no operating costs other than electricity.
I mean it’d take minutes of research to realize people are successfully and efficiently running 4-bit quantized GLM 5.2 on MacStudio 512GB M3 Ultras at over 60 tok/s. K2 2.7 is quite literally designed for 4 bit quantization and runs even better.
The integrated GPU. Not enough compute onboard to handle prefill for 100gb+ models, and the decode is constrained by memory bandwidth that's lower than most dGPUs that price.
Apple would be in a much stronger spot right now if they didn't pretend like eGPUs were inconceivable black magic that Macs are incompatible with.
I'm not sure I follow - 614 GB/sec is pretty squarely in dGPU territory (~5070 level). External GPUs can definitely exceed that on the very high end, but it seems pretty competitive, no?
Competitive for 16-24GB dGPUs, but for 100gb+ inference workloads it's going to be a decode bottleneck. For smaller models it'd be fine, but the same goes for the smaller GPUs.
In particular though, the fatal bottleneck is the weakness of the iGPU. Filling a KV cache on a 100gb+ model could take a few minutes, or even hours if you're trying to restore a 256k-to-1m token session.
Apple Share price fell 6.12% yesterday. Perhaps indicating that expectations are of a reduced demand in response to the price rather than buyers accepting it.
I feel sick to my stomach. Been saving up all year for a new 16" M5 Max to replace my M1 Max in July (I do indie game dev, so I routinely use everything it can give). It was already a was already a big stretch at $6k, now it's completely out of reach at $8k. There's no world where I can justify that price even if I could afford it.
You know what's extremely good value right now? The old "space bin" Mac Pros. You could get a maxed out one for less than 1k - 128GB RAM and with the dual D700 GPU's those produce around 12GB VRAM too. I've been eyeing these for local LLM purposes. To be fair the jump between the M1 Max and M5 is not that big in real usage, unless you're absolutely memory bound on the M1 - the M1 is likely to be supported for a few years more...
I have to have a laptop with how I work, unfortunately. And yeah, I really need more RAM and particularly GPU power, so the M5 Max would have been a very big improvement for my workflow.
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.
People for some reason forget that for most election apps you can run it in a browser tab and avoid almost all of the overhead.
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
I shift a 1 GB electron app to a 900 MB browser tab (i don't know what it actually is, but the number of Tabs I have taking up 1 GB memory is shocking these days).
Trying to vibe as many of my own CLI toolings as possible....
Doing that helps some, but it doesn’t help the fact that web engines and the balls of mud they’re so often tasked with running are quite heavy even with just one browser instance.
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.
I replaced my M1 Air with M1 Max 64GB few weeks ago, not the biggest upgrade, but memory was that made me decide. It's hard to find even 64GB models nowadays.
I was just about to buy a new macbook myself but I guess I'm out now. Not sure what else to do except install linux on my current macbook to keep things supported.
My niece graduated and is headed off to college in the fall and I picked her up a macbook as a graduation present, knew that apple's prices were still artificially low and a price hike was coming and ordered it the day before they announced that prices were going to go up.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
That's kind of my point, the existing manufacturers are falling short, in apple's eyes. Every single device they sell requires storage and ram, every single item's price is going up. That's going to hit them very hard.
Just got a MacBook Neo (512GB model) for CZK 19 990 (roughly US$950) from a local reseller, which was the original list price back when the model entered the market.
Models with US keyboards currently still sell for CZK 19 990, Czech keyboard models sell for CZK 21 990 ($1050), probably someone forgot to update the price on the US models.
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”.
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.
I think nowadays the Apple TV is more about smart home than TV. But as long as they keep calling it a "TV", most of the people will compare it with the built-in apps in their smart TVs and think it's unnecessary. Even if you tell them that it can do much more than watching TV, they will think the money they spend on the TV related functionalities is a waste. The old price was already hard for them to justify, the new price is almost impossible.
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
What smart home features does Apple TV have? All I've ever used it for is to watch TV. To be fair, I pretty much dismissed Apple for anything smart home after they launched that ridiculously priced Pod thing.
It's a thread border router and matter controller, providing Remote access to local-only devices, scheduling, automation... with better track records on security and privacy than competitors.
The personal computer is getting more and more expensive. Here we are, where it's getting harder and harder to get a computer to create your art but you can get a subscription to any AI company for a fraction of the computer's cost and get your "prompt" art.
And that's ridiculous.
It's funny seeing this kind of comment get made over and over. I don't think those regurgitating this line realize that getting "left behind" (whatever that even actually means) is appealing when the direction the future is heading is very unappealing.
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.
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.
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]
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
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%.
Wow, I guess no one is immune from supply chain issues. To Apple's credit, I remember the time (a while back) when people overpaid for the Apple brand while not getting as much performance for their money as they would have with other laptop / smartphone manufacturers. Things have really changed over the recent years. Thanks to all the vertical integration, Apple is about as cost-effective as you can get for top-of-the-line hardware. So the fact that they are raising prices is an alarming sign.
What surprised me was that they increased across the current lineup. When Cook announced that they'd have to raise prices, I had assumed he was referring to new launches, as is Apple tradition I did not expect such a large and widespread bump across the whole line up.
I was considering getting M5 Max mbp with 128GB, but at that price it is just ridiculous, 64 version costs now roughly what 128 was before and that was a stretch for me. At this point might as well stick to my ol reliable M1 Pro mbp.
Edit: I'll say that now it seems also very hard to justify buying top of the line apple hardware for the enterprise. Getting top laptops for just a team of 10 people now means extra $20k just for RAM on top of already a higher base price.
These "hidden" costs of AI/LLM driving up IT (and energy) related price inflation are starting to feel more and more as a kind of an inescapable, AI-imposed tax. We should start calculating these increased hardware costs (that at this point basically affects any product with storage and RAM inside) into the real price we for our AI/LLM usage, and not only think of the price in terms of a monthly subscription or $/tokens. How much have you, both personally and at your workplace, in reality spent extra on equipment and on price increases of services per year since the LLM-boom started?
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.
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?
It's the flamebait detector. Any post which gets a lot of comments in a short time gets pushed down quickly. Though the mods usually push it back up if it doesn't involve touchy topics like politics.
Oh interesting! Thanks for the context I had no idea that was a mechanic - also it seems like the mods merged it with another thread and now it’s back on the front page.
I had plans to buy two Airs, was not sure if I needed 13 or 15, 24 or 32, which was better for my wife and what's the best strategy to buy one for her first and then understand my needs test-driving it. Maybe I actually needed Pro. Lot's of procrastination as none of us had a real need for an upgrade. It's all in the past tense now. I've just bought a 16GB model with 1TB on Amazon at 480 EUR cheaper that the new price, and it seems cheaper than the official old price. I will forget about MacBooks until a real need comes, or maybe good ARM laptops happen sooner. It's funny that if they did not have the dichotomy between 13 and 15, I would have thought less and bought M4 as soon as it was out with the support for 2 external displays + built-in.
I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
I had an M1 Pro MacBook and I agree with you about not needing a new computer. However, it seems like things are at best going to be the same if not worse over the next 5 years with AI prices. I went ahead and updated because although I’m still happy with my M1 Pro today, I am unsure how it will fair over the next 5 years.
My M1 Max is still great. I was considering upgrading before prices went up but decided to just wait. I will admit though, a tiny voice in my head is telling me prices will never come back down, even if the ram shortage goes away. :-(
I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.
It's a pretty huge cost to support an entirely different set of hardware with different kernel extensions and an entirely different build (x86 instead of arm64e). Could apple choose to do that? Absolutely. But the cost of supporting an M1 is very different than the cost of supporting Intel.
Yeah. I also meant that this is an inflexion point with Apple Intelligence at the OS level.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
I wasn't implying that new releases of the OS and new software that depends on new hardware would be made to work on the old hardware. I interpreted "extend support for anything they make themselves" to mean keeping it updated with bug/security fixes and generally usable as it was when it was purchased. I don't find the fact that they made it themselves vs purchased it from Intel to be a big factor in that decision.
Right but I said nothing about bug fixes, which we'll continue to receive for some time.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
M5 Air is still incredibly cheap on Amazon and Best Buy ($950). This is perhaps the best deal you are ever going to get for a MacBook, because they are all going to raise prices.
Fighting words, it’s Apple’s fault (doesn’t he know that Apple can actually (in House for good) replace them? Maybe not today, but certainly in three years)
Fabs are notoriously costly and time consuming to setup by which time you become obsolete, assuming you even have access to equipment which will take years to reach you. I wouldn't be surprised though if Apple was considering becoming a fab at this point regardless. Apple has a history of not letting its suppliers toy them around. Given the political and AI pressures going on, I think apple could just decide to make its own SOCs and memory at some point in America. Unfortunately the person who could can pull this off is retiring.
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets.
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
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.
Until they raise the price on that too. Dell has explicitly stated it's a "limited time" price, so don't be shocked if it becomes the $699 XPS13 almost immediately.
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.
My prediction is that the semiconductor price increases is going to cause a lot of demand destruction. The semiconductor companies revenues is not based on new products but rather on the fact that there is scarcity. Once that scarcity is removed then I suspect that we're going to have some reckoning happening across the industry.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
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.
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.
I got Mint back in 2022 for my desktop built in 2014. Everything worked fine and I was even able to customize my install (though I regret some choices). It used considerably fewer resources than Win10 (never mind Win11, which I don't think would even install on this machine) out of box. I'm talking 40% less RAM use at the desktop before opening programs; and that's for Cinnamon (Xfce would be leaner still). And grindy I/O that touches a lot of small files is about three times the speed. No fancy configuration necessary. I did a simple install for a relative on even older hardware, again no problems.
If I needed to change a kernel version, it's literally as easy as selecting it from a menu in a pre-installed GUI "update manager", letting it do its thing and rebooting. I can get up to the bleeding edge (although I have no good reason to).
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.
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 it's already enough to make an impact.
> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.
Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.
I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.
The M5 Max 128GB RAM MBP I was eyeing went up by $1600. Thankfully Amazon and some other retailers haven’t updated their prices yet, so I immediately picked one up this morning.
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.
"luxury brand" that offers best base models for bucks than any other windows machine is my favorite luxury. if you compare same $$ priced macbook air to windows laptops, speed and long term reliability difference is few times big.
I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
They very well could have. Apple was the only company poised to take on CUDA with OpenCL, and they got pantsed so hard by the HPC industry that the Mac Pro got discontinued entirely.
Apple could have added a couple trillions to their valuation if they weren't addicted to service revenue. But today's Apple is too fat to see their shoes, let alone where the puck is headed.
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
I asked this ~6 months ago and I'm going to ask again - if AI is supposed to make creating digital things easier, where are we going to publish these digital things? On rocks? Is AI industry essentially eating its own tail?
Website runs on a server, which requires components that AI labs are buying years in advance, driving component prices to astronomical levels. What happens when only AI labs can afford to have a server?
I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
I was considering an upgrade this fall. I think I can do another year or two without. who knows, I might the same spec for even more $$. Just as the trend goes....
The biggest reason is I move around a lot and the 16" MBP has weighed on me. It's a really chunky and heavy laptop. Sometimes I don't even want to carry it anywhere.
The M5 is also significantly faster than an M1 Pro. I definitely feel the snappiness on day to day use. I'm also upgrading from 16GB/512GB to 24GB/1TB.
The screen is quite a downgrade and the battery life, surprisingly, is only marginally better than my 5 year old M1 Pro with only 79% capacity left.
Other than that, I don't miss anything else about the M1 Pro. I hear rumors that they're making a smaller MBP in the M6 Pro/Max generation which is why I wanted to wait originally.
For sure, on paper - I'm curious, do you actually notice that difference in your day-to-day? I struggle to think of times in my usage of my computer where I think "this feels slow", but maybe I'm blind to it.
The Studio I looked at yesterday jumped from $2600 to $3400 (30%). I was saving for it and was about 1/2 way there. I was expecting these increases in 2027, so planned to buy late in the year. Apple moved faster than I expected after the price increase announcements.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
Dodged that bullet. Heard Tim Cook's comments and decided to pull the trigger on the machine I was debating as I didn't think Gruber was right on them waiting until new models to change prices.
Yes Gruber's comment about not making Ternus debut with a shit sandwich was right on the money, so I wondered why that alone didn't sway him to think that Apple would do the price increase sooner.
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
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.
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.
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.
> The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.
It's more likely that China will simply impose export controls. It's unlikely Chinese fabs will be able to fulfill local demand, leave alone global, for the foreseeable future. And they do need these components for their own manufacturing.
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.
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.
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
FYI - other retailers still have the old prices. Some even have discounts. The cheapest MacBook Air is now $1300 on Apple and $950 on Amazon and Best Buy. I imagine this will change soon, so grab them while you can.
Xbox just increased prices this morning. I think Apple was the canary, expect large increases in tech soon. If you need something remotely in the future buy it now.
Just don't buy an Xbox. It's hot garbage and requires a pricey yearly subscription to play online. A PC pays for itself quickly once you factor the subscription in and cheaper games.
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing; there is a push from who-knows-who to shift the balance of power back to (essentially) mainframes and corporate computing.
Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
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.
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.)
I don't know what makes sense for Apple's supply chain and BoM, I'm just saying that the price for my home's worth of Apple TVs with the minimum functionality I use has gone up by over 50% since the previous-gen model and now sits at over $1,000 in local pricing.
That's the kind of pricing that makes me start to consider the Google 4K Streamer even if it's a UX downgrade - for $300 I get ethernet and Thread on every TV.
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.
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.
Yeah, for a few short months Apple had a really nicely priced entry-level machine. Now so much with a 20% price hike on an 8GB machine with soldered RAM
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.
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.
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.
Matter of time before they where hit by the market prices. If you take the day of today, and calculate back. You can see how long apple locks in the prices for their hardware supplies. Interesting note to make. Wonder if they will increase the duration in the future or become more risk averse.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Old enough to remember several memory price boom cycles. In the late 80s at the place I worked we bought a bunch of DRAM for a production run that became delayed because the CPU needed wasn't ready. The DRAM was in a large cardboard box under my desk for a while, acting as a foot rest. I remember the price of DRAM spiked and we calculated that box/foot-rest was now worth more than...one million dollars.
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.
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.
Wild that they increased the ipad prices as well; the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool to avoid cutting into macbook marketshare.
How does that contradict the price increase? iPads still have RAM, yeah? If anything, not increasing the prices on iPads would undermine Macbook marketshare, would it not?
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
While these new Mac prices are probably here to stay, the upside is that once the AI market saturates and RAM prices fall, future Macs will likely get a significant memory boost at all price tiers.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
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.
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.
I suspect this is because the next models are more imminent. Not imminent per se, but Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag on most of a factory run of 512GB Studios.
Fully loaded costs for an engineer where I live are anout 15-25 a month, plus a maybe 2-3k in token consumption. Whether the laptop costs 9k or 6k makes no difference and apple knows this.
What a beautiful way for Tim Cook to end his career at Apple. supply chain genius can’t overcome market forces so they can keep a healthy profit margin.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
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.
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
Building a new memory fab takes 3-4 years, extremely capital intensive. Micron is spending $25B+ on Capex and more than half of that is for new memory capacity, a 3x increase over 2 years.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
It *is* hard to make memory, especially HBM (...which is what the AI market wants, and is what the manufacturers are focusing on) and bringing on new capacity takes years. There's the additional wrinkle that the manufacturers we have left are the ones who survived periods where the market was glutted with oversupply in the wake of previous shortages.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
I mean lets not pretend that Apple hasn't done this for years. I had a cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, but I had a choice with memory - I could upgrade from the base 32GB to 192GB one of two ways - pay Apple $3,000 for 160GB, or get the base 32GB model, and buy 192GB of the exact same sticks of memory (same manufacturer, timings, etc.) from OWC for $1,050. And I could sell the 32GB if I wanted.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
>If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."
Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.
As I understand it, the dynamics are similar to generic drugs where there is a large capital hurdle to new production facilities and a likelihood that prices will soon drop to a point that a new facility will lose money.
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.
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.
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
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
We have to get real, here - most people are not replacing GPT or Claude with local inference, even on M5. If you can afford to do that (RAM shortage or not), then you are in the minority of customers.
Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
You’re just out of the loop, and that’s fine but it’s worth learning about.
There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.
I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.
I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
My hardware isn't powerful enough to try, so I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not to push back: what do you use DS4 for? Did it replace e.g Claude Code with Opus for you, or was it replacing something else?
I use it as my main coding agent - so its running DS4 server on my 128gb mbp and I run the pi coding agent on my other machine which calls out to it. Mostly Go and Typescript work.
I also use it in local agent mode if im coding directly on the machine which is nice cause you can save sessions and resume them, and so for personal projects and training related stuff it's been great.
Even got an autoresearch loop going where the agent looks at the previous run, adjusts parameters and code if needed, and then hands off training to another script (so full system resources are available for training), ad infinitum - it works really well - what antirez has done with that project is pretty incredible.
Which provides a 2-bit quant and a mixed 2-bit/4-bit quant - which range from 80gb to 97gb
Deepseek is particularly well suited for quantization and the quality of the 2bit quants antirez has provided have been validated by folks like ggernov of llama.cpp project
GLM 4.7 Flash is a 30b model that was far behind SOTA at launch, and I know that because I pay for z.ai inference and have run the model locally. Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash have the same issue, and beg the question; are you really going to process a 64k agentic context at 450tok/s? That's 2+ minutes that you spend waiting for the first token to generate! Of course nobody can sell that as competitive inference, and it only gets worse with larger models. We're talking about non-interactive speeds, here.
If you're satisfied with small local models, more power to you. It puts you in the same barrel as Strix Halo enthusiasts or the guys that bought 2x3090s on Reddit. You are completely ignoring the market if you think that any of those SOCs are unprecedented or unparalleled for inference workloads, though. The free DS4 API is faster at prefill and decode, you could not give away Mac inference at zero cost and compete with what China provides for free. That's how far behind Macs are for local inference, to put things into perspective.
I think you’re confused - nobody running local models is concerned about SOTA - that’s just marketing hype from large providers - we are interested in data governance, security, control and freedom. You can’t compare hosted services to local inference, these are two very different things, out of principle we aren’t interested in handing our code bases over to untrustworthy third parties.
On your first point, nobody is pasting 64k tokens at once as context, if you are you’ll experience very similar wait times even with hosted providers - context is built up piecemeal and by virtue of being context does not need to be replaced constantly - this is how all agents work.
100% local models are not SOTA, but they are good enough to be incredibly useful if you are a skilled engineer, and I understand the industry is pushing engineers to offload more and more of their work to incentivize higher token spending, but talented engineers can absolutely be just as productive using local models today - it’s just a different style of working that folks who have become accustomed to large providers can’t really comprehend at this point. They’ve vendor-locked themselves into a delusion that they absolutely need SOTA for everything and as a result see everything as black and white.
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.
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.
Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
The EU price includes the warranty, which is at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
> you'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!
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.
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).
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
$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.
To be honest, Apple's pricing has been up to a point pretty user friendly the last few years. Two years ago I bought an iPad for around 400 because everyone thought they'll announce a new one. That didn't happen until last year where they announced the new one but for 350 or so. Macbooks are also "cheap" considering what you get for them with the M chips.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
No, no they don't. CPUs and GPUs do, broadly, but SSDs and RAM use specific processes catered only to their respective usages. You can't use a NAND flash process for anything else. Likewise for a RAM process.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Apple has increased the price of MacBooks and iPads by about 20 per cent worldwide, one of the broadest price rises in its history, as the iPhone maker blamed memory chip shortages caused by the AI infrastructure boom."
Expect this trend to continue -- firms have delayed price adjustments to avoid retaliation from Trump as doing so would draw attention to Trump's many inflationary policies.
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
You're right it's not only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
maybe in our lives people will start to realize there is really only one political party and its always going to be them vs us until we are all serfs earning below subsistence wages.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.
This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.
Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.
I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
Or the winners of the AI race will make enough money to buy up the majority of global production indefinitely...
But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
Pretty sure greed existed long before capitalism was a twinkle in any economist's eye. The East India Company was rapacious and evil and full of greed. But it was mercantilist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Not necessarily. If the entire industry triples its prices and alienates 40% the market, it's still coming out ahead. It only incentivizes producing more if there are enough people unwilling to pay for the new prices, or if it were easy for a newcomer to come in (it's not)
Bought my CTO M5 Pro just a month ago, i was a little bit skittish, thinking i should wait for the OLED one, but i think i'll be happier with the 64GB of RAM rather than that overpriced monitor.
Definitely not justified. You think Apple doesn't have warehouses of hardware. It's climate inflation based on a narrative they can exploit because of data centers being in the headlines. Smart, obvious, move because no one will jump ship.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.
They absolutely don't have warehouses of hardware. Tim Cook is a supply-chain-efficiency hawk from before he was CEO -- he was famous for reducing Apple's inventory.
These are the price changes mentioned in the article:
Macs
iPads More products:To be fair, Microsoft announced their third XBox price hike today.
> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...
This is in addition to the other two recent price hikes.
And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
> And it isn’t the 1st time they increased it, also PlayStation.
I keep seeing FLOODS of comments from people saying "at least Sony didn't raise prices1" Well, they did a month or two ago, so I have no idea why they say that. Literally everything with RAM is more expensive now.
Yes, even the Switch 2. Nobody escapes this.
Microsoft should tell OpenAI to stop it
I’d argue that Nadella has considered spinning off or even selling Xbox considering how it’s been going for them.
This would be incredibly foolish. The consumer value of windows has gone off a cliff, and while the Xbox hasn't been competing with the PS5, it's going to be a solid earner for decades. They just need to avoid another game pass catastrophe that destroyed trust with the consumer.
what was the game pass catastrophe?
I suppose it doesn’t really fit into a business that is so focused on enterprise so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Especially seeing as Windows is becoming less relevant to the typical consumer as well.
That doesn’t make sense, they spent billions on a shopping spree of game devs.
Their game pass business model, which is terrible for consumers once the rug pull happens, is making them a lot of money and market share
In the hopes of selling more consoles and that didn’t work.
Not sure if you have seen the recent news but things are not looking great there. Gamepass is not making them a lot of money at all. Even after acquiring Activision their operating margin is 3%
Big layoffs / studio closures coming in July, on top of the previous ones.
Internal memo: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/06/10/next-100-days-xbox-re...
Spinning off Xbox: https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-has-considered-sp...
> Their game pass business model, which is terrible for consumers once the rug pull happens, is making them a lot of money and market share
It seems more like their game pass price hike destroyed market share. Whatever revenue it yielded them now is sure to cost them in the long term because people viewed them as price gouging and moved to playstation.
I don't understand the model, tbh. It strikes me as more useful as a loss-leader to build market share at cost to the company and make money in licensing fees long-term. But as it is, the console seems doomed.
> Their game pass business model, which is terrible for consumers once the rug pull happens, is making them a lot of money and market share
How much money is it making, and how much market share?
Most gamers think xbox is dead and Microsoft doesn't seem too sure either, they recently had a change in leadership but the whole division is not doing great and struggling. Game pass is not as popular as it used to be
Gamepass was never popular enough to justify the expenses and investments on the level they did.
They just thought growth will forever be exponential until they have a billion subscribers.
They should’ve done it a while ago before Microsoft acquired more studios.
Microsoft doesn't care about xbox like they care about copilot.
Watch any video from Microsoft leaders of the last years. It's all copilot copilot copilot. Not Xbox Xbox Xbox.
I mean it makes sense because "investors" are all screaming AI, not gaming. But for us it all sucks of course.
> To be fair, Microsoft
Not sure what Microsoft has to do with this and why it's fair.
I guess Microsoft makes consumer electronics and (as much as it makes me shudder to say it) is a peer of Apple. I agree it’s not fair to Apple to draw comparisons with Microsoft given the sheer amount of damage they’ve done to the world.
GTA 6 is coming out.
Now IS the time they will hike prices up, as sales of hardware are going to go through roof.
How is that a comparison? Consoles are well known tobe sold as loss leaders.
Apple doesn't sell anything remotely close to a loss leader.
1.16x simple mean on XBOX 1.22x simple mean on Apple
Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.
Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently
Tim Cook stated Apple is eating some of the price increases. I'm guessing they chose not to with the Apple TV.
The price increase may be factoring in the next Apple TV hardware revision, allowing that to be released without price being the dominant story around it.
Yeah, that seems to be the dominant theory, especially since the AppleTV hasn't been updated in a few years and is widely expected to be "due" for a new model within the next few months.
That makes a lot of sense
Is this true? I was under the impression that Apple signs long term deals with companies and the reason they didn't have a price hike for so long is because they were still getting parts are the former price
As wonderful as long term deals are, if Apple signed a long term deal with a supplier who didn't secure their supply chain properly, said supplier is going to either:
1/ Force apple to eat a price hike. Failing that, they can:
2/ Terminate their relationship with apple
3/ Go bankrupt trying to sell $2 for $1 (which leads us back to point 1)
That has happened before with GT Advanced Technologies over iPhone screens. Apple frontloaded GTAT's Arizona facility buildout, but the contract had no obligation to buy and GTAT's yields were horrible, so Apple didn't pay the last installment of the loan and GTAT by contract couldn't sell to anyone else.
iPhone 6 launched without the sapphire screen and GTAT went bust.
Apple has a bit of a storied history of being the reason suppliers go bankrupt. Their contracts are usually one sided (who is going to tell Apple no and turn down that business?), and Apple does not like to be pushed around. They use multiple sourcing and pit their suppliers against one another and aren't above bullying.
The trouble with long-term contracts is that they have an end date. Looking at my 5 year fixed mortgage which will end in just over a year, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
Apple doesn’t get a pass just because their contracts are many of orders of magnitude bigger.
The Apple TV barely has any storage or memory, it’s already massively overpriced compared to any other set-top box.
its so much better though. android junk UI and TV OS are so bad I will happily pay the Apple TV price just to get the remote and not get a headache when I get home from work and want to watch TV. the product name is too poorly thought out though
Yeah, it's one of the products where you are clearly paying an Apple tax for the hardware, but OTOH it's also one of the products where it's clearest that the Apple tax is paying for software that's both good and consumer-friendly. It's not a hackable box, but if you want to just hand something to a non-technical person to use in their house, it's considerably better than the alternatives.
This isn’t the 1st increase they do on these consoles.
A good opportunity to move away from this tier of locked-down garbage devices, which include, among other, consoles (Xbox, PlayStation), streaming boxes (Apple, Amazon, Google), phones with locked bootloaders (Apple, Samsung), Internet-of-Shit home appliances that depend on the "cloud" and non-free apps, and others.
I am currently in projects using lots of open source hardware and SBCs and I would argue the price increases on those have been even worse (if they are available at all) because those companies are competing for the same components but without the buying power of Apple. It’s a bloodbath out there.
Move to what?
Do I not have to buy RAM and an SSD if I opt for a Framework?
Your point is orthogonal to the fact that the price increases are at a level that affects ANY computing device.
Make your own RAM, n00b!
You can still get any of these devices for the price of 16 GB DDR5 or 32 GB DDR4 (which limits the choice and availability of CPUs). It's a terrible time to build freedom PCs.
1.67x on the ethernet version! $150 -> $250.
Here is an alternative: put any Linux distro that packages Plasma Bigscreen on a old laptop or mini-PC. Add an HDMI-CEC for control with the TV's remote. It even comes with Ethernet!
It's a mess, how would you remotely start up your laptop ?
The plasma big screen is also not very well made, I don't know if you can even compare it to Android tv or apple tv.
And the last nail in the coffin is that you don't get apps on plasma big screen. I need my internet provider app to acees the tv channels, otherwise I'd have to pay even more, and it's not available on Linux of course.
No, really, it's not an alternative.
It’s an alternative, but for the majority not a good alternative (unless you go the OSMC Vero route). I have tried doing this ever since it’s been possible to play video back on a PC (and before that I used SGI’s, and Macs with external video solutions) and continue to try it with many devices and hardware configurations. An Apple TV is easier to maintain and the quality of output is great.
The only thing not so great with Apple TV are the solutions for local media playback, OSMC and a Vero V is a better solution for that.
For reference I do this both for fun and work professionally in video workflow and pipeline solutions for 25+ years.
If you were going to use a streaming service, say Netflix or Prime Video, do you still get 4K and HDR10 this way?
No, you don't. And you probably also use a ton more power than a streaming box too.
Is 4K even relevant at a typical couch distance from the TV/monitor? Besides, 4K content can also be found elsewhere, it does not have to be streamed, and the viewing experience is probably better when it is not.
Yes the difference is noticeable.
Especially, that Netflix 4k seems to be on par with blue ray 1080p.
Why is the image quality on Netflix so bad? Do people really not care about not having 4k when paying for the most expensive tier of the most expensive streaming service?
Consumers consume. Most of those who pay for Netflix Premium don't even know what they are paying for. They believe Netflix that says it's better quality, of convince themselves that they're going to use off-line features on flights.
This isn't immediate though, it's from August
Go look at the upgrade prices - the 128 GB RAM jump on the MBP is now $2k!
I looked recently and a new Macbook 128gb ram was £5500 which was expensive for me but I could consider it! Now it’s £7000 which is absolutely ridiculous. AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
it's destroying consumption before destroying jobs, which is somehow even worse than initially imagined
For the average person, I think they would choose lower prices over AI.
Ha, that’s about how much our first computer was, with 128k of RAM. Nice symmetry to it.
> AI is useful but it’s sucking everything out of the economy and destroying it at the same time…
But did you want the 128GB for AI use?
I’m part of the problem!
It's really not that useful for the vast majority of people if we are being honest
Yes, based on my personal experience, it is much more harmful than helpful to the majority. Most seem to be determined to completely replace their need to think, as opposed to just supplementing or augmenting their thinking with AI.
and 2tb -> 8tb storage is +$3k!
And you can't even upgrade the Studio past 96GB now.
I think Apple could easily swallow these price hikes in its profit margin if it wanted to, but then its shareholders wouldnt have as pretty numbers to look at in their quarterly reports.
This is the explanation for almost all things done by public companies. The shareholders own the company. The numbers in the quarterly reports are important to them.
It seems like they have been doing that for a while now. Most other companies raised prices a while ago. At some point that becomes unsustainable.
All these AI companies need to stop hoarding RAM.
Apple made $120 Billion in profit last year alone.
They could easily keep swallowing this if they wanted to.
But then they would only make $119 billion profit this year, and their reports would show negative growth. Cant have that now.
Apple sells about 400 million units a year.
If they ate an average $100 margin decrease on every one of those sales, that profit number wouldn’t go down from $120bn to $119bn, it would go down to $80bn.
Now you can absolutely argue that $80bn is still an excessively large number, but just so we’re being realistic about what the difference we’re looking at here is, it’s not a tiny percentage of their profits, it’s a third.
Only a private company can realistically do that.
Publicly traded companies can as well. There is no legal ruling that states a company must maximize EPS or face lawsuits. Apple could justify eating the margin to retain customers, build brand loyalty, or whatever other reason they can come up and the courts give a ton of leeway to business judgements in Delaware if they were sued over it.
Their fiduciary duty just means they have to act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders and not act for personal gain. Apple just has to spin eating the margin as being in the best interest of those parties.
The real reason they don't isn't any duty to shareholders, its any sort of drop would wipe billions off their market cap and directly affect exec compensation.
Amazon is right there, reinvesting profits.
How do you know they're not also swallowing a portion of the supplier costs?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
Why would Apple do that?
They could gain a shedload of market share by remaining cheap while pricing in the whole rest of the industry rockets up? Especially after just releasing the Neo, their cheapest laptop ever. They could be taking chunks out of the PC market right now if they werent so greedy.
> They could gain a shedload of market share by...
... having end user replaceable DDR5 RAM and end user replaceable storage. Even if it is a low end underpowered laptop.
Not everyone needs to render 8K videos in 5 minutes.
Because it could be strategically good to increase their market share and loyalty when everyone else is increasing their prices, for instance? But no, the "fiduciary duty" thing trumps everything, I guess.
Apple is free to make either choice (or anywhere on the spectrum) without violating any duty they have to shareholders.
“We chose to invest in future market share, believing that was in the best interest of the company” is a perfectly valid choice for the company leaders and board to make.
We are only talking about opinion here. Obviously Apple shareholders have their own and thats what they use to direct the company, thats fine. My opinion would be more along the lines of 'Lets sacrifice 1% of profit this year to gain huge chunks of market share by undercutting literally everybody else in the industry for the first time in our history'.
But Apple has always made their image quality not cost effectiveness. Pivoting here too drastically could sacrifice their image and backfire
Some very steep price rises here!
I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Apparently their long term contracts ran out in January and suppliers are asking for quarter to quarter prices now.
No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
When Apple isn't big enough things are really screwed up.
I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
Let's see if Apple can spin up a company to make memory.
They havent 'spun up a company' to make anything else, so I doubt it. Apple are not a maunfacturer.
Apple messed up since the memory is integrated?
Well it means nobody can avoid their extortionate upgrade pricing anymore so I think that decision paid off well for them.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
AIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price.
Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
> Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated.
That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
Delivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why.
They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
The prices are set largely by what consumers will tolerate. If everyone else is raising prices so consumers expect that, why wouldn't you do it, too?
are consumers really tolerating current prices?
Long term contracts probably don’t last forever and probably don’t represent 100 percent of their demand. My guess is that they’re already having to pay inflated prices for some non-trivial fraction of their inventory.
2 year supply contracts are expiring and they need to lock in the next one.
Or simply they have an opportunity to raise prices? They probably will announce record revenues in a year or so.
Happens with all kind of companies: oil goes up, prices go up, record revenues for the companies. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with Apple.
HomePod mini? Up 30%?
How is this excused by increased memory prices?
Sounds more like broad across the board inflation to me.
The HomePod mini has 32GB of flash storage in it, from what I can find.
Yeah. Even the AirPods are expected to be pricier. This all seems a bit crazy to me.
Did the price of upgrades also increase across the board or just the base spec? I’d assume so.
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999) is quite a jump.
Macs
Pads More products Price elasticity, and supply and demand, and all that Econ 101 stuff... these numbers confirm there is no demand for the Vision Pro. (=Darn, Vision Pro for $3,699 is just a little too much for me!
Why Air series prices have not increased? Planning to buy an M2 Air, 32+1TB
M2 is 3 years old and not sold by Apple anymore.
The MBA m2 is still highly capable though!
I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.
...And that wasn't the point OP was arguing
I meant to say M5 air, typo!
You're going to dig it. I went 32 / 2TB, the machine is a beast.
I have had need for active cooling once so far to get full performance.
$200 up for an in years barely changed iPad Pro. Who would buy these things and for what?
In fact I wonder that about the majority of the product palette nowadays
Looking at a few retailers, it seems like prices haven't increased yet. Maybe in a few days?
Impulse bought a Pro with 48Gb ram on a retailer with old prices
Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out
Same here, reserved a 48GB M5 Pro shortly after seeing the news, and now I see the same retailer raised the price by over $1000. If they honor the sale, then this will be the most short term value I've gotten out of an HN submission ever.
Same here. Buy now ask questions later. Pretty sure the shop where I bought it will happily cancel the order if I give the cancel order.
Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.
Had a Pro 48GB in my Amazon cart at ~$4k CAD, now it's ~$1k higher
Bummer
Pushed me to buy a Macbook Air in Costco today. I was on the fence for replacing my really old MBP for a while.
wow the almost 4 year old Apple TV 4k gets a 55% bump. The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost. reply
I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.
All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.
> Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware
If car infotainment is “awfully under-specced”, aviation seatback infotainment is the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled
You haven't flown with a modern system than. I was in Cathay's Aria suite on their refurbished 777s and it was the most fluid experience ever. Frankly smoother scrolling than on my iPad but on a 24" 4K screen. Magical!
https://apex.aero/articles/cathay-pacifics-state-of-the-art-...
Wake me when any TV streamer besides the Apple TV 4K can stream a high bitrate 4k HDR video from a Plex server because I sure haven’t found anything.
Any version of the Nvidia Shield TV can do this, even the original from 2015. I’d be more surprised to find a streaming stick today that can’t handle direct playing 4K HDR remuxes from Plex
Wonder if he feels woke yet.
My OG shield is still going strong. It's all I need for streaming.
Google 4k streamer does fine with 30Mbps plex. I guess it would cap out around 80Mbps, but I haven't tested it.
Not to mention the non-first-party Google TV sticks/dongles. The Onn ones from Walmart range from $15-50 depending on how many bells and whistles you want. I really don't know why one would pick anything else.
I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.
I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.
Elgato's Eve app exposes all sorts of fun stuff in HomeKit that you can't do with the native Home app.
I get the impression they want you to use other apps to access HomeKit (the Home app didn't even exist for the first one or two releases of iOS with HomeKit). Which feels very un-Apple, but whatever.
Even the FireTV is shite compared to an apple TV.
The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.
I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.
Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
>> it will be consumers demanding
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
I'm so glad it's not just me. M1 MacBook Pro, here, and I quickly gave up on Zed because it felt so laggy to me. Thought it was something wrong with my MacBook (or maybe me).
Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.
Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.
I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.
You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.
What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.
Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.
Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.
Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.
> Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that.
Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.
Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.
That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
This implies that a better version is on offer. It is not. You get the telemetry stuffed, stuttery garbage, and your company pays for it.
That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.
I understand what you meant.
I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite.Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
this part is still true.But this only explains why software used for work is like that. What about software people use privately and where they could chose a different one?
When you go buy a CPU you have twenty different points on the price versus performance curve to choose from, if not more. And they all have roughly the same feature list.
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.
"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."
The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.
The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.
I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).
Zed is also at the bleeding edge of rust GUI development, which doesn't have the same mature libraries as other low-level languages. I'll give them the longer-term benefit of the doubt, but the attention to detail does matter.
To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...
> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz
This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!
I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.
I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps).
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
> I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.
Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.
> If things don't work, they will blame the computer
Or the single app that slows it down.
To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
> To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone
Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.
But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
The Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way.
(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware.
Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.
I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it.
Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.
Don’t worry - the cycle will reverse again at some point and we’ll go back to more powerful local machines.
Why do you expect it would be cyclical when the power capture would be extremely valuable to the main players?
And those main players will just be outcompeted. I'm sure DEC wasn't anticipating the PC revolution to take hold so quickly.
I'm not sure they were quite as entrenched or quite as big as Apple or Google are today.
Yup. We're going back to time sharing for the majority of people. The terminal will be their dumb phone.
No not going back to a mainframe computing…
> All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits!
They can't. They have no clue how. Electron is all they know and I doubt they can learn anything else.
Also AI clearly hasn't replaced developers since the AI companies are also using electron and generating very buggy software.
In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU.
It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
RAM prices won’t stay like this forever. If demand keeps up, suppliers will just start producing more.
They're already producing as much as possible.
Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.
Yes. Several new memory fabs are expected to come online in 2028, one in late 2027:
https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...
So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.
(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
> but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks
"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.
Shouldn't that all fit into less than 64k?
Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.
There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes.
Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.
So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.
Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
> 12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity
Or 3 modern Electron apps.
This subject gives me sudden nostalgia for the times when Steve Jobs was talking about the front side bus during Apple keynotes.
I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.
It's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
Do you really think we'll have optimization in an era of metrics encouraging developers to approach shipping a million lines of code a month?
The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Oh, you mean those shitty Web UI frameworks with worse performance on modern hardware than native GUI programs from 1995?
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
Oh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
C API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
I'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
> instead of unobservably better performance
That's... quite the choice of words there
> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
The problem Is when the performance problems becomes observable. Only after a specific scenario like low power mode for example
> instead of unobservably better performance.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
> work on things users care about
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Also it's no longer a toy for hobbyist but a necessary tool to participate in society
Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line in person was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
The problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.
On one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.
Sometimes abstractions make performance better too. We can’t all be experts of everything so using a well-optimized library is a boon.
Even beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
Yes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.
I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
"Hey Opus, migrate this site from jekyll to astro" doesn't work?
Fully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.
Because so much modern software is a web browser. The application bundles in its own version of Chromium.
Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.
I mean, why even use spotify?
I like music, and i have a diverse taste.
a single leetcode tab is taking up up to 700mb of memory...
"What Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh Away"
It’s not Bill any more, it’s developers choosing to use Electron as an app development platform. It all seemed fine when 64 GB of RAM was cheap.
not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
Something being easier is not a waste, it’s literally the purpose of every technology.
It's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts.
https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
This is such a reddit take. Yeah electron takes a lot of resources, but there’s also a lot of software that never would’ve been made in the first place if we didn’t have it. It’s not as simple at pointing to (comparatively) inefficient software and saying that’s bad. Software is ubiquitous now and a big part of the reason for that is that frameworks and abstractions made software much easier to create.
I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday optimizing out a function call to save 36 nanoseconds: stop whining about electron.
> This is such a reddit take
You might consider that your comment would have been just as strong without the opening put-down.
I found it interesting commentary… must’ve been because I wasn’t its target!
Maybe “common myth I’ve noticed spread on reddit” would work.
It’s not really helpful in furthering good discussion, though, and it assumes too much.
To compare a reply to being akin to/belonging on Reddit is to say that it is low-effort or not intellectually rigorous, but this critique is self-defeating because it is itself low-effort and is usually not substantiated or justified, so it just rubs people on HN the wrong way.
This is especially true when it nearly bumps up against the part of the HN guidelines which admonish us to not compare HN itself to Reddit.
When saying an individual comment belongs on Reddit or is like those on Reddit, that is against the guidelines’ spirit in the small scale the same way as saying HN proper is becoming like Reddit is against the guidelines by the book in the large scale, so I don’t really think the comparison is helpful or defensible. It adds little to nothing to the discussion it accompanies, but rather undercuts it. When stated absent any other discussion, it’s nearly impossible to read it as anything but a bad faith swipe and/or flamebait.
I use it as shorthand for “this is received wisdom that you likely haven’t thought about critically and are just saying because it tends to please the reddit hive mind”.
Which is something I did indeed want to say in addition to my actual point.
But I also take your point that it is aggressive, is not related to the substance of the discussion, and is reasonable to not want to see on HN. Will avoid in the future :)
I was thinking last night how I'm biased towards gleaning information from sites I avoid without having to visit them :)
Great points, thank you!
I'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.
Anytime inflation comes up and the relative power of computing devices is mentioned, I remember the classic[1] line that you can’t eat an iPad.
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
I'm still using ~10 year old PCs at both work and home. Running linux, still doing fine.
I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.
Try Google Meet. I have a similar spec Air, and that's where it falls down :'-(
Google Meet is trash. Camfrog from over a decade ago trashes it, Zoom, and any other multi-camera meeting room software. I was watching over 150 video streams at once on a Pentium 4 using Camfrog, and now you can't even have more than 5-10 before a computer starts choking.
What garbage.
Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
> I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
The B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using.
the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.
> The B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using.
That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster.
https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...
I own both - there is a lot of work Arc's drivers need done to them to actually be able to use their supposed theoretical power. My GTX 1080 delivers more consistent framerates with less stuttering versus the B580.
Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
I mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.
You don't have to go retro, just 5 to 10y old is fine.
I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.
You don't miss what you haven't tried.
Yeah that's pretty much what I play. Newer titles haven't interested me much lately except for a few. THis machine handles Diablo 4, Pragmata, all the elder scrolls titles, cities skylines, satisfactory, etc. just fine. Even managed to get AC:Shadows to run decently using the steam deck preset.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.
I'm a fairly proficient linux user and I just can not get streaming to work properly and I've dedicated multiple hours to trying to set it up. The built in Steam streaming gets the closest but often just lags out for no obvious reason. Sunshine/moonlight seem to be close to working but weird display issues are constant. I've got it to the point where the steam big picture video streams perfect but when you launch a game the screen size seems to change where I can only see part of the screen on my target device.
Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
My 2012 thinkpad still works well.
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?
The website version works fine.
Oh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman. Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$? Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
its worth noting that you were much less restricted with this 6k computer in 1996. today we are paying ever more for walled gardens that will eventually become nothing more than a portal to cloud services. we are not returning to a previous position, we are moving to a world where everything will be a thin client.
True but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.
Yeah but these computers don't have sota performance by maybe more than a factor of 10. So an unfair comparison.
depends on what the computer is, I'm running a desktop with linux, is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996?
> is there really anything I can't do on my computer that was possible in 1996?
Use dial-up internet and SCSI drives?
functionally, this is the same as connecting via ethernet cable on my fibre modem and connecting SATA drives.
Were you? That $6k Apple in 1996 was just as 'walled garden' as it is now.
If we are talking specifically about Macs, I remember my Mac in 1996 didn't even have a command line interface.
Speak for yourself. I have a modern machine running Fedora. What walled gardens are you talking about? Buying a Mac is a choice that you may make, but I never will.
What would be the relative power scaled equivalent today and what would that cost?
It's easy enough to build a $10k rig. Apple sells a studio that's closer to $7k.
Performance was flying in the 90s. The last 1-2 decades if you bought a top end computer it'd easily last you the decade before it started to drag behind average. 3 decades ago if you bought a computer it'd reach the same point in 2-3 years.
I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
Ordinary people do not buy devices for their computing power, they buy them for their utility. People will look at this and see only a device that delivers the exact same utility as before, but now with higher cost.
You may have equivalent power on that $6 computer but can you run the same applications?
In my case, yes, because I used to be a Linux user. I still am, but I used to be too.
Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
I'm sure you can find an equivalent to ClarisWorks or Photoshop 3.0 that works on a Raspberry Pi.
But you cannot, I promise you, buy a raspberry pi for $6. Not even remotely close.
Obviously. I assumed that was hyperbole given that you can’t buy any SBC for $6
Even $60 would be hyperbole for a SBC intended for productivity software.
I had a similar thought. I bought a computer for $3600 CAD 3 years ago and it shows no signs of limiting my work in any way. I have another from 2020 from my employer that is just fine, likely costing them about $2500 CAD when they bought it.
Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.
I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
1996 was 30 years ago. What about comparing prices from 3 years ago? 2023 vs 2026.
Software was leaner!
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
But back then the contemporaneous llm was the single digit mb file word_list.txt.
I think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
I paid about $6k two days ago for a machine that's now above $8k.
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
Well Conversely, in 1996 you, your spouse, your kids, didnt need a pc to live your lives - having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
> having a pc or mac was something of a luxury
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
The MacBook Neo (at least pre announcement) was a better value than anything else, including a chromebook.
And if you spent all that money on a single computer there was the expectation of sharing it with the whole family.
And you can buy the compute power equivalent to the entire NASA Apollo program for $15, now what?
start launching moon missions, what else?
We paid like $3500 in 1995 money for a PC which was completely outdated after 4 years. The early to mid 90s were exciting times, but damn some of the machines were expensive and didn't last long.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
* https://archive.is/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shac...That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Wow, I didn't know that Camcorders were that expensive at the time. That's $2k today according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm .
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
And yet in some ways, modern computers feel slower than those from decades ago. Software today is so, so much less efficient than it was back then.
In some meaningful ways they are measurably slower.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
Great article. This is the kind of web design that I like.
Reminds me of this story about every app being sluggish on a relatively new machine, compared to equivalent apps running on a 20+ year old machine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)
Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
Yes and no. Faster hardware doesn’t solve pathologically broken algorithms :)
Worth's law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
Yep, and its nothing new :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
*Wirth
Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.
I gladly paid $1,499 for an iBook G4 in 2005. (~$2,572 inflation adjusted)
> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
why not compare the prices a couple years ago instead?
That was a niche product, these are mass market consumables.
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
I come from th blue collar world of the central valley California. Every mechanic, car salesman, construction manager if not worker, owns their own home and has two kids. It's interesting how 60 miles east is a whole new world where you need a crazy fancy job to buy a home.
It's all about housing and the rampant NIMBYism that drove prices up in the 'desirable' places.
>we...consider buying food a luxury
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
Waste and sanitation jobs in Toronto start at $39k and get up to $120k+ if you’re driving the truck and leading a team I would imagine we actually pay our municipal employees proportionally _more_ than we did back then.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
I mean truck drivers make much more money than you'd think.
How much do they make?
There's many types. I sold Audi/Porsche and every now and then I'd sell a fancy car to a FedEx driver type that does long haul runs to other states (with a team driver next to him), and he'd be making $150k a year+. Not bad for 4 days a week work, and ability to live in a slightly lower cost area.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
If that tucker lived within his/her means saved and invested in some blue-chip stocks they could be doing well long since 2005...
I ran it by Gemini, and it says that the top 10% earn more than $78,800 annually.
I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.
Well California automatically pays more than most of the country. And I believe FedEx has some Union drivers. And yes, just like the average software engineer salary isn't all that dang high, when we discuss the industry we tend to look at the most successful group we aspire to be in, not the burnouts that aren't that good at their job.
Three things live within your means save and invest.
Often a mid level engineer salary at least.
unc?
“unc” is the new “boomer”
Nah unc is kinda charming, boomer often had a derisive connotation.
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.
it'd be more instructive to compare what you get from apple silicon compared to x86 and ARM.
What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
And software is now so cheap, or free, that it's incredibly difficult to even start and maintain a single-member LLC software business.
That is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
Computers got cheap due to necessity. The necessity is still there and raising prices is a rug pull.
That's great, but then can you ask the manufacturers of the devices to support them for 20 years? Raw numbers mean jack shit if the device itself is completely abandoned and cannot run any applications. Banking, authentication and bunch of services require the device to be on the latest iOS/Android version, which is hard to do because the manufacturer dropped it like a hot brick after 5 years.
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.
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.
The quote from Gruber in question (IMO, a little more reasonable than you give it credit for.)
> For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. ... But unlike with the MacBook Pros in March, I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on my hunch here. However out of character it would be for Apple to raise prices midway through product cycles, the global RAM shortage is unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple pushes price increases moments after I hit “Publish” on this post.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/22/apple-device-pr...
Apple was on the USB Implementers Forum that designed USB-C so.. I would say they could definitely be credited as a co-inventor of USB-C, they also introduced one of the first devices that used USB-C.
In addition to being the sole inventors of lightning (the connector), which directly informed the USB-C spec based on learnings from field use.
Apple doesn't get solo credit for USB-C, but they were certainly essential to it. Just compare the USB-C physical interface to the USB-3 micro or super speed type B ports and compare design sensibilities.
That's not what Grubber claimed tho. They claimed solo inventor, which Apple is not.
And then they went too far and introduced laptops that only used USB-C before finally setting at a (so far) happy medium.
I think we needed Apple to do that to throw a lot of weight behind the standard so it didn't get stuck in an eternal migration that never ends. Though removing the SD card slot was dumb since USB-C was never an alternative to SD cards.
Even today the desktop PC market is still stuck on USB-A since they have no Apple equivalent to just get things done.
I really don’t understand what SD card reader on MacBook Pro is for.
All small cameras and devices use micro SD. Professional cameras don’t use SD since forever now. Basically I always need an adapter now.
I don't think that's right, professional cameras still use full sized SD cards.
You can use an adapter for a micro SD but you can’t shrink the size of a normal SD card, is my only guess.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
Memory prices are certainly going up, but Apple already makes a 40% profit margin on their products. That $1 trillion+ bank account still gotta go up no matter what right?
What does this have to do with my comment, or the one above it?
> That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
The are at least 5 people on the initial USB-C design team on HN. They certainly tell a different story.
> a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple
That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.
But they were forced, at least for iPhones in Europe.
It's a fact. Not a feeling.
If anything, Apple was likely happy for this. It let them rip the band-aid off on the transition but shift blame to the EU for people annoyed by having to switch adapters and accessories.
There is zero chance that Apple wasn’t going to do this themselves anyway in the next year or two. They’d been aggressively converting everything else in their device portfolio to USB-C and were doing so way ahead of everyone else.
People who think this only happened because of the EU are high as a kite.
Except they were steadily converting their devices to USB-C for years preceding the iPhone, and they had good reasons to make the iPhone the last device to get it. There is no indication that they were forced to do anything, and the best argument you have is a poster child for post hoc ergo propter hoc. A feeling.
> There is no indication that they were forced to do anything
The EU law forced them. The law is the indication.
Sure it was Europe. Meanwhile Apple got raked over the coals for being too early with USB-C on their MacBooks.
Apple would have moved away from Lightning eventually. Did Europe force that move a year sooner than otherwise? Maybe. Maybe not.
> And I said MacBook Neo was wrongly priced since the beginning. I don't even remember how many sticks I got from it.
I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
They mean stick as in criticism.
And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.
https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...
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.
Maybe they don’t want the price to absolutely dominate the headlines of their forthcoming product announcements. It won’t be forgotten, but the sting will be less “newsworthy”.
Yeah, I was one of those people. Did not see this coming. The situation is truly dire out there.
I thought they would but not this fast.
If anything they seem to be ones who managed to delay increasing prices more than the rest.
>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?
come on now, we all know who the biggest culprit is
They didn’t increase prices on iPhones, Apple Watch and Airpods
Those are next in line, it’s almost guaranteed.
September new versions will likely start at a price point than they would have
Yes, and seems they are only releasing the Pros and the foldable this year, and will release the base and e models in Spring.
I've heard that the iPhone price is going up, and they've already started paying you more to trade-in the last generation.
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
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.
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.
Yeah I don’t think they will touch current models.
Why would AirPod prices increase?
Everything competing for fab capacity is more expensive. The Apple H2 is 7nm and TSMC has raised prices for that capacity.
The H2 is also tiny and the price is not per-chip but per wafer - so the price increase should be marginal per chip.
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.
There are many rumors that the new iPhone 18 Pro will start at ~$1300.
So maybe their mobile hardware will be next.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
There's solutions to everything you mention and as I said, usually when sanctions are applied to countries, companies and individuals are meant to deal exactly with this.
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
> If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to,
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
> 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead
These 10 countries need the US/EU market for their exports.
But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!
> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM
That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI goons to completely buy the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.
If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not merely 'so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.
It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.
If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
I'd argue that's incentive enough.
> But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!
The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.
You can't sanction your way into squeezing blood from a stone.
> If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
If a country came along and declared that companies couldn't buy the resources they need from other companies, the second order effect would be every major company relocating their headquarters out of that country as soon as possible, along with a sharp decrease in startups being formed in that country.
The economic impacts of this level of command-and-control government would be devastating to the economy. Much more than having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a laptop every 5-10 years.
> The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.
You keep arguing as if there's only one side to this, the producers/DRAM companies who can't scale production fast enough.
But there's two sides to a market, the producers (DRAM makers) and the consumers, (AI industry). I am arguing for increasing the supply by taking some away from the AI industry. This is BECAUSE on the production side there's no way to address this fast enough.
The DRAM producers have also agreed to work together to raise the prices in the past and are probably rather enjoying it being their turn to get a ton of money again. d Free markets break down when cartels form, because then you wind up with an effective monopoly despite having multiple suppliers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
It's not in anybody's best interest to take away supply for the AI industry. For better or worse (and whether you believe it or not), AI technologies are coming that will be transformational. If the United States decides to handicap their AI industry, China will simply say "thank you very much" and develop these technologies first. Because of the nature of recursive self-improvement, the country that develops powerful AI first will most likely have an economic lead for quite a while.
It sucks that DRAM is so expensive, but it is for a good (economically useful) cause.
> but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
> The demand for AI data centers is global
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
>another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Fascist trillionaire
Yes it is far better to do nothing than to something that makes the situation worse
> Yes, it's better to not do anything right?
Ah yes, "We have to do something! Something must be better than nothing!"
Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.
I applaud you for standing for Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI's freedom to price everyone else out of the market, because noone else will.
Here's an exercise: try drafting the statute.
Then, let's see how quickly I can reinterpret whatever power you've grabbed in the name of "doing something" and pervert it for some other nefarious purpose, or just generally bypass the intent entirely as a motivated actor with limitless funds.
Many regulations, once passed, impact only those incapable of navigating around them - typically, the less-fortunate. Invariably, power taken in the name of some transient issue is never later relinquished.
> > 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.
> 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.
> businesses can be colossally stupid too
Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
> Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
They have those powers when they're allowed to become monopolies. Unregulated capitalism leads to monopolies and slavery as they're the best way to capture all capital. Company towns, company stores, company scrip, etc.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices. How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, imagine doing that for oil. American and EU companies that “hoard” oil get punished. The net effect would be everyone else gets to buy more and prices remain exactly the same.
The old race to the bottom.
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.
On third of the Memory Stooges is in the United States...
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.
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.
A strategic reserve of a commodity that (historically) depreciates at ~50% per year is a terrible trade for occasionally avoiding demand-driven price spikes.
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?
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'.
We can, but that isn't how the proposed regulation is written.
The market will take care of itself. The Chinese are going use this to ramp up and build more memory, and some companies out there will take it in-house, In short, they won’t be caught with their pants down again.
yes, this will give the Chinese a good opportunity to catch up.
The only thing the US could feasibly implement is forcing micron to allocate a certain amount of its production for consumer use
Why? Why is consumer use vs corporate use a higher and better priority meriting such an intrusive regulation?
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.
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.
You ignored the part where I mentioned "extreme" and "locked up." To be fair I wasn't necessarily clear what those meant. I'm specifically referring to the deal(s) that OpenAI signed which reserved an outsized chunk of the memory supply, for what is apparently speculative future hardware that hasn't been built yet, or at least to build hardware that no consumer or business will ever be able to physically purchase.
Hopefully you'll agree that there's a difference between even a large buyer like Apple reserving a large chunk of DRAM supply to put in their products that they sell to consumers, and the anti-competitive behavior by OpenAI that I describe above.
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.
One or two companies will come out of this, designing and engineering memory and partnering with someone else to do the fab of that memory no different than making processor chips in Arizona.
The AI "market" is not a free market. It needs regulation.
What evidenced-backed regulation would solve this problem?
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.
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.
http://shirky.com/2001/01/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple can’t switch now, but they can take it in the house over the next 3 to 4 years to avoid this fiasco again. They have the right new CEO for the job. He’s a designer and engineer of chips, and since Apple didn’t waste money on the AI model/Data Center building exercise.
They certainly have the money to get it done in house, long-term, why? after this fiasco, the Chinese are going to have a much bigger piece of the memory market worldwide. So strategically, it pays to bring it memory in house in partnership with TSMC in Arizona or Oregon.
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.
> 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?
> All existing factories have maximized their production.
Citation needed.
This is almost certainly not true because capacity is not binary but an efficiency curve. As the cost of RAM increases it becomes economical to operate the factory at higher capacities.
> It takes 2-3 years to switch
Citation needed. Who sets the max speed limit for changing?
> What alternative exists for NAND flash?
There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
It takes about 3-4 years to build a fab and ten-billion dollars.
https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/manufacturing/fab-f...
And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.
The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.
=-=-=-=
"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.
“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.
“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/memory-stocks-cyclical-boom-...
$10 billion dollars, 3 to 4 years, that’s less time to build a new modem chip that works. that’s less time to build a new M series processor that works. Google, Microsoft, and Meta We’ll spend close to $500 billion in 2026, just on their AI dreams, I would say having a supply of memory chips is vital towards your business if you’re someone like Apple or AMD or Nvidia, these days these days, if you want to design the devices you need to design, so who’s going to take it in house?
> There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
There are only 6. Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron, WD, and YMTC.
5 operate as a price-fixing cartel, and the sixth is Chinese domestic.
I did some more research and it turns out the problem is not maxing capacity to produce ram but that these manufacturers have switched to another class of ram leaving less of their production for consumer hardware
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.
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.
We were talking here about whether it is necessary for the government to intervene because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products.
In that context, it is not only technically true that you do not need to buy those products. This simply does not strike me as an issue where the government would need to step in and regulate the market.
> because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products
Here's your problem. This is not a consumer or Apple-specific issue whatsoever. Computing hardware is critical infrastructure in the digital age. The AI boom is inflating the cost of almost all compute for every business, including the cost of all cloud computing.
It's alot like housing, in that the average cost of housing directly inflates the average cost of living, impacting the poorer many orders of magnitude more than the richer. When all governments, companies, and individuals depend on computers to amplify productivity or deliver services, a significant increase in price will impact every government, company, and indiviudal.
An extremely small number of individuals or orgs being able to dramatically impact critical infra, and the cost of living – regardless of why – is a major national security and supply chain failure. This is the entire reason why monopolies and too-big-to-fail entities are bad for everyone, and anti-trust laws were created to being with; to prevent an extreme minority from influencing markets in such a way that it is detrimental to consumers and other market players or sectors.
The Chinese won’t be sitting around? They will consider it a vital area. And they will keep the engines going sitting back and daydreaming will only leave you further behind…
I don’t think government needs to get involved in the West, but some of those companies affected that have the resources are gonna have to reconfigure themselves and design around the three memory companies. The Chinese certainly will.
"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."
--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
Technology and semiconductors are part of the supply chain for all modern necessities.
I mean…
My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.
Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.
Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.
It’s gross.
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.
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.
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.
If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
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.
Yes 65B ARR that Anthropic has is clear indication there is no path to revenue.
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.
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
Their costs do not scale linearly with revenue. Inference is expensive, but it's a variable cost. Anthropic's overall costs include massive fixed costs in training, which are the same regardless of usage.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
If people are sure they can always short NVIDIA
How much money does that revenue cost though? If I had to steel-man GPs argument I'd ask for profits rather than revenues.
We will see once they go public Dario did claim profit margin on inference is 40% if memory serves me right
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.
A lot of factors there we will see how it plays out.
Yes Dario is well known for his honesty
hence the bit about us learning the actual state of things once they are a public company.
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)
I feel like the fact Apple raised their prices means they foresee this lasting a lot longer than 3-6 months.
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.
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.
Most of Anthropic revenue looks to be companies paying for Claude Code at API prices ...
Companies will consume a lot of things offered below actual cost thanks to VC and cheap loans.
API pricing is def not below cost
"def" doing a lot of work here.
It is more expensive? yeah
Is it "definitely not below cost"? hardly
except if as cost here only the inference cost is considered, and not the capital investment, and maintenance costs (not to mention r&d, marketing, and others).
to put it another way, if they just had the corporate API subs today, would they be profitable?
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…
Tim Cook said prices were going to increase a few days ago
It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
I read the same comment and thought it made sense too.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>What's OpenAI going to do?
Close down would be a good idea.
The world would be a better place without AI, OpenAI, Anthropic and all others. It only immerses the world into chaos, dystopia and increased inequality. So far nothing for the public good has come out of it.
I broadly don’t use LLMs (once or twice a month), yet I’m still being hit by hardware price increases.
Not OpenAI’s fault that the cost of a shipping container doubled.
I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.
I mean, sure shipping is more expensive but that’s definitely not the cause of Apple’s price increases.
The cause is the whole thing, cost of shipping (container, gas, etc), cost of components (RAM, SSD, etc), cost of tariff, cost of lobbying and lawsuits, and overall inflation cost.
No. It's literally RAM.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-r...
And AI is the reason why developers are being laid off.
Don't trust a fox to count your chickens.
They would never say it is about the other reasons because of politics.
Also RAM is impacting other components such as SSD
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!
Sure do! Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man, we live the longest, our material welfare is the highest it has ever been! I have electricity, I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly, I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day. I could go on and on forever.
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
Oh, oh, one of the best things I've ever read on this topic is: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/reading-the-news-is-t...
I should submit this to HN, in fact. It doesn't seem to have ever been submitted.
Looks like you did! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48686167 (in case anyone is interested)
Ha, yes, I really ought to have linked to that here. Thanks for doing that!
> Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
We are. It is much easier to be negative than positive.
And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
I read “Enlightenment Now” and it is full of beautiful graphs of quality of life over time improving. More GDP, less hunger, longer life spans.
There was one odd graph. It showed that rising GDP lead to more happiness in every country except one: the USA.
Those living the longest are those born 75-85 years ago. Later generations will have to wait to assess how it ended for them.
You are right. But there is also the stress for the low and middle class and there horrible conditions of the poorest countries.
Not so sunshiny when you think about the millions of people struggling to have a meal each day.
Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically over the past two centuries. The extreme poverty rate, currently defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2.15 per person per day (adjusted for purchasing power), has dropped from around 60% of the world's population in 1950 to under 10% today.
That people should be happy over this may seem obvious to commenters shuffling about charts and research papers. But ordinary people do not look at their living situation and feel overwhelmingly thankful on a daily basis that they're not living in a horrible shack eating nothing, like many people 100 years ago. They're looking at their immediate parents. Neither of them were likely to starve, or die prematurely, or be affected by many of the most horrible things that wiped out people for millions of years. And yet, people are still worried that what was seen decades, not centuries, ago is unattainable. Maybe most people aren't likely to be homeless, but that precarious threshold is getting closer than it used to be. There's less of a safety margin for most things.
You arw right.
But precisely that fact made life much less stressful than today: it was normal to be poor, it was normal to die young.
Ah yes ! You should have said that to the 10 000 people who died while trying to migrate to another country, due to drone wars, financial crisis and climate change. [1] And you should also have said that to the Congolese children who died while mining for the natural resources used to produce components for the AI datacenters. And yes, the future we're living in is wonderful for the 50 millions slaves all around the world to build things we don't really need. [2]
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
[1] : https://www.iom.int/fr/news/2024-ete-lannee-la-plus-meurtrie... [2] : https://news.un.org/fr/story/2025/12/1157994
Cool, compared to what?
Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
There's never been a time in history when that was true and there never will be a time when that will be true.
The point is you live in the most comfortable/easy/least violent/most democratic/longest lifespan/best healthcare/best technology/best educated/etc. time to be alive in all of human history.
On top of that, if you're on this website, according to similarweb you're one of the highest income and most educated people on the planet (you're the 1%).
So you're likely in the 0.005% luckiest humans to ever live, and yet you're pessimistic because some media channel preyed upon your empathy or fears of change to capture your attention so they can monetize it selling ads for toilet bowl cleaner.
The truth is some people just have a negative emotional disposition. Others have genuine issues in their lives they need to change. In all cases there are actions, medications and therapies for you. Seek help.
Pretending you're so virtuous as to care about all the worlds problems and yet also powerless to do anything about them is simply a giant excuse to never actually do anything but complain and contribute nothing to humanity.
> Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
Really? Because what OP said, it sounded similar:
>> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
I could read this as black comedy.
"Take him to a psychologist" was standard playbook in soviet block to silence dissent. Everyone knows of the gulag archipelago but just declaring someone insane was part of the toolkit.
I could afford to put a roof over my head and food on my plate easier ten years ago than today.
Sure big screen TVs have progressed, but let's not ignore that the changes of the world are regressive for some.
This is the problem in the discussion. Many on HN don't remember what it was like to buy a house in 2010, so they assume it hasn't gotten (far) worse. It has.
Or, they already have a house/mortgage and thus do not know how much worse it has gotten. I.e. housing costs as a % of your take home salary.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/europe-h...
[1] https://www.gu.se/en/news/democratic-backsliding-reaches-wes...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty
Nice cherry picked stats.
> There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Yes, there are. You're obviously in a bubble.
When it crashes, it's going to be bad.
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
>Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
My generation can't afford to own homes nor have children and the already pithy value of our labour is being outsourced to cheap foreign labour while the cost of food and basic living shoots into the stratosphere
But at least we have iPhones
People in the past raised children with much less income. My grandparents had their family of four live in a studio apartment.
Our expectations for what our life should be have just increased even more rapidly than our ability to pay for it.
Reading the replies is amazing. OP: a specific manufacturer raised prices on some products. Thread: endless argument about everything that's good or bad about the current living situation, in historical perspective, across the entire world.
Looking forward to being sent to a foggy planet in foreign start system to collect alien eggs for a daily nutripaste and bunk bed with corporate issuesd blanket.
I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future?
I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future.
It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism but what is the point anymore?
I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects.
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
That's funny. To me (mid-40s), the "glory days" of the internet were pre-iPhone, around 1997-2005 or so. Sure, speeds were lower, but that was ok for the time. And sure, everyone didn't have always-on internet access wherever they were, but I think that was mostly a good thing.
I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
Indeed. Early to mid 1990's, that's where it was at. FTP, telnet, gopher were awesome, and then, in short order: HTML, Mosaic, Netscape - the WWW. Really useful.
Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting.
I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
> I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
Hopefully, but there is something we know we cannot change in the next decade, and that's climate change. Heard of the heatwaves happening right now? That's only the beginning.
The only way it could stay as bad as it is today would be to reduce the emissions to 0 right now. There is no coming back, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it stays there for much longer than your lifespan.
Of course we won't cut the emissions in the next few years (kind reminder that they keep increasing actually), so every year will be worse.
And I'm not talking about the energy crisis that's coming. Nor about the current mass extinction we are living: biodiversity is measurably dropping, and until now it was NOT due to climate change (only human activity and habitat loss). Now climate change adds up as a bonus.
It's probably time to enjoy seeing insects and the occasional wild life. We probably won't go to Mars, but we're making the Earth look like Mars, so we may all get to live in a "bunker" and have to were a suit outside before the end of our life.
You seem to think you’ll have access to the benefits, heh
That’ll all be really cool if you’re in the 5% of the planet that can afford it.
5% is awfully optimistic! More like the 0.01%.
> maybe even senescence
To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
I genuinely wonder: in those monarchies in the past, were the kings as rich and powerful as Elon and Bezos? It feels like there have been revolutions for less than what we accept today.
I doubt it. With globalization the ability of the ultra-wealthy to extract resources is so much greater than whichever King ruling over his kingdom.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this stuff.
I agree with you on medical advancements, but I am skeptical about curing cancer (which is really curing hundreds of different diseases) any time soon. Alzheimer's might be nearer and a cure could come from a big breakthrough, but that's still in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory.
Senescence... oof, I think we're a good century or so from figuring that out, at best. And even if you're right, I expect this to be a closely-guarded medical technology, with near-immortality only available to the super-wealthy.
Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
Space travel is... mixed. It's amazing that the costs to getting things into space have been going down, and amazing that we have things like the JWST and so many different organizations and countries sending stuff up, but it's depressing that one single company (run by a megalomaniac) is so far ahead and owns all the technology to bring those costs down. The commercialization of space is not something I'm looking forward to, and I expect governments to do their typically shitty stuff when it comes to space.
Ugh, writing this all out made me sad.
> Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
I think it's too late for that anyway. Peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss (we are measurably living in a mass extinction era), those problems are here and now. Fusion may help (?) slightly reduce climate change but the only thing that can stop it is the end of fossil fuels (every time we emit CO2 we make the climate worse for the next generations). But fusion couldn't change the fact that we are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs: this one is unrelated to CO2 or climate change, just humans destroying wildlife habitat. Fusion may actually allow us to make it worse.
> Space travel is... mixed
Space travel is a big joke. The only advantage of looking for solutions to survive at scale on Mars is that we are rapidly transforming Earth into something that is as bad as Mars, and we many need suits and bunkers to survive here before the end of our lives. That's a bit ironic.
Fusion: well even if we had a reactor that could produce 5Q, just look at the power demands of the tech sector... They have an infinite appetite. Unless we demand/enforce optimization on them, their businesses, their code, their hardware... Any additional green MW we build, will just be eaten by the inefficiencies of silicon valley.
Mars: more like we are rapidly transforming earth into Venus.
Didn't the Combine give humans immortality?
Nah that was just Breen’s propaganda. They do however disable humanity’s ability to reproduce with the “suppression field”.
With all due respect, we have pills for obesity and computers think. If that doesn’t get you excited about the future, nothing will.
We have expensive drugs that make people less hungry, and essentially require they take them for the rest of their lives. We also don't really know the long-term effects of these drugs when used for this purpose. (Using them for diabetes is different.)
We do not have computers that think. And what we do have, if improved further, is likely to cause severe labor disruption, which could lead to mass riots and civil war if we're not careful. (And since when have we been careful?)
It's 40°C all over my home country right now. And as far as I am aware, each year is going to get worse, and the thinking computers are adding more fuel to the flame.
Think about that next year when climate gets even worse, and the year after.
And don't forget that it will get worse every year for the rest of your life. Unless we cut CO2 emissions to 0, in which case it won't recover: it will just stay as bad as it is when we stop the emissions. But no need to think about all the disagreements coming from cutting our energy use (because cutting emissions means cutting energy use), because we just won't do it. So we can happily focus on the wars that will come from the energy crisis and enjoy the climate worsening every year.
Not strictly true. There are possible interventions that would reduce temperatures.
The problem is bigger than it simply getting warmer... Too many to list here.
Temperature by itself is just the easiest to observe
The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot is to reduce the amount of energy and obvious way to do that is to block out the sun, clearly. That's why we need so much space lift capacity. Not to get to Mars, but to blot out the sun which will cool the Earth!
Problem. solved.
> Problem solved.
"The obvious solution to this invasive species is to bring a predator from where they come from, so that it will regulate it. Problem solved".
5 years later, the problem is two invasive species. My point is that messing up with the climate is not necessarily a good way to fix the fact that we messed up the climate. Naive hope like this is simply dangerous.
And that's assuming that this ridiculous idea is actually possible in practice.
> The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot
What about the mass extinction we are measurably living in right now? It has nothing to do with the Earth getting too hot. We've lost 80% of insects, we are emptying the oceans... it's not a risk, it's happening. We measure it.
Haven't you heard? We're gonna not measure it!
Oh, was it sarcasm? You can add "/s", it helps :-).
wait, so we have a pill that cures us from (some of) the effects of having turned all of out food into low-nutrition, high addiction items that negatively impact our health while they destroy our ecosystem? (ask where all the water that goes into making soda comes from, all the high frutcose corn syrup, all of the palm oil, ...)
And that's what gets you excited about the future?
Ok cool. Computers think. They're (trying to) use that to literally replace regular people. And not in a Star Trek way. "Permanent underclass" way. That's bad.
I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards.
When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat.
I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years.
Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
That hit home, man.
So far the main effect of "computers think" has been making my job both more precarious and more miserable— talking to agents all day instead of writing code sucks ass and I want to die by the end of it, it's like spending all day on Slack with particularly dimwitted coworkers. What about that should make me excited?
The pill has more power in the argument here. Thinking is still nebulous and the same could have been said in the 70-80s.
The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking.
However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement.
Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago.
No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.
No amount of pills or computer thoughts will fill the existantial void created by late stage capitalism
I'm excited for the future and think things are getting better. But in the US in particular it is happening at a snail's pace.
We are seeing the effects of the hockey stick curve of wealth inequality. It's only going to accelerate from here.
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
You are a carriage horse excited about the invention of the automobile, thinking “it will free me up from so much labor!”
More like a horse carriage owner no? I don't think the horses used to have a merry time dragging around a huge carriage with multiple people in it.
How many AI companies do you own?
Cars replaced horses. AI replaces humans.
The carriage owners in this metaphor are the capital class.
The worst people on the planet have this ability as well.
The glory days are always in the past by definition.
I was excited about the future...
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things.
But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous.
Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today.
We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
Don't worry, it's always ups and downs.
I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
Give Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher a quick read if you get the chance. I get the sense you'll resonate with it.
I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
I’m optimistic, but I’ve been like 99th percentile lucky.
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
I agree with your sentiment and would advise the same. However, I would caution anyone sympathetic to the idea: we are probably at the stage where the current generation(s) who can make a difference have to plant trees whose fruit they will not taste.
The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.
Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. I didn't have the choice (or agency) to make decisions and changes to fight back against the silo'ing of all digital spaces, ownership, and freedoms.
I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
> Whilst true, its your generation who got us here.
You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.
> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.
Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.
> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).
Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.
The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
It's always a wave. There will be a backlash.
Yeah this could end up being a good thing. We need more diversity in the computing space and this might make some space for that.
Not sure why you're donwvoted. I too see the downsides as well as the upsides. The high prices vs the people that use their excess solar to power a GPU that powers an agent that messed about with an ESP32 and some sensors to build nice Home Automation integrations. Etc.
Of course it's hard to be positive when you lost your job, I get that.
The downsides you're listing are real things that are already affecting us. The upsides are imaginary and reliant on a very positive outlook for the future. My view is that we'll be renting someone else's server time because GPUs will all be tailored to datacenters and either too expensive or useless for home computing. Only to generate the ESP32 home automation project that was probably already generated or human-written a thousand times in the past and could be found by a quick Github search. Silver linings or not, this doesn't seem like a deal I would take.
Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
> Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
Citations needed. From what I see is
(1) the demand for electricity is growing at an explosive rate
(2) The AI data center build out is relying more on natural gas than you might expect. I believe it was the utah one that plans to build the world's largest gas power plant, which the next largest one is orders of magnitude smaller.
(3) The US is actively blocking hardware from China being sold in the US (low cost high grade solar panels, electric cars, etc.)
So, yes I deny that energy is getting cleaner and cheaper. In fact, I think it's going the exact opposite... It's getting more expensive and dirtier!!!
Ah yes, personal computing was also supposed to come to an end. Yet here I am, on the best Linux ever with the most beautiful desktop being productive with all my favorite tools, not worrying about drivers or compatibility or anything. All for free, freedom included.
The "worst" part of this comment, is that it's not even exaggeration. In the last 6 months, my competition increased 5x. People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do. My margins will keep shrinking while hardware and servers gets more expensive.
It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.
Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...
It might be miserable for you, but it sounds great for your customers. I am genuinely sympathetic though.
A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.
A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.
In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.
Like the famous Market for Lemons, where a similar information asymmetry produces market failure that ends up making things worse for both buyers and sellers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
New signals of trustworthiness will emerge (are already emerging.)
More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.
The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.
Now we have 100 fly by night vendors! Awesome!
Reputation will matter more than ever before
How do you build reputation when you have 100 competitors who will do shady things to get customers before pulling the rug out from under them. Your pockets aren't deep enough to survive until there are pieces to pick up.
> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
I sincerely hope things work out for you.
Not sure if your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, if not, it’s totally narcissistic. I hope in next 6 months your competition would increase 10x
While I understand both of your perspectives, please think about how frustrating it can be to have poured years into building a product genuinely solving a problem and building a relationship with clients only for a dozens AI copy cats to come in. Even if your product is clearly better, the SEO slop alone will raise your marketing cost, price cutting will affect you as not all clients are able to tell quality before purchase or will know of your project, etc. And in the end, everyone is worse of. We get less for the products we build. Customers in many cases get a worse solution. And the AI copy cats multiply until none of them can make a living from it.
If your product is really good, then people will choose it over AI copy cats. If that’s not the case then it’s time to take a really hard look at your product and see if that’s really as good as you think
That's a naive view of things. People don't have perfect information about the world around them. They can only go on what limited information filters to them. AI copycats will by their very nature be better at marketing and pushing information into people's faces. It's bad information, but how are customers supposed to know that?
Exactly. People on a forum dedicated to a VC should know that disruption happens everywhere, AI just makes it easier but it's been happening for a long time, that is the nature of startups in general.
> And in the end, everyone is worse of.
I don't know, it really depends on the product. If we were all still paying for proprietary UNIX in the current year, then it's likely that these startups would never exist in the first place. Sometimes a SAAS has to admit that it's not providing real value before actual innovation becomes the status quo. I don't weep many tears for dying businesses because nobody lives forever.
The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.
Person who lacks empathy accuses another of being a narcissist...
I’m not empathising with narcissists
Honestly, 60-70% of this feeling is just inflation. If things were still affordable, the doom and gloom would be much less palpable. Inflation will get under control, but we still have other problems with the direction of social cohesion.
> Inflation will get under control
I wouldn't be so sure of that. But look at the bright side: By the time this administration's over, we'll all be billionaires!
hah, look at this guy with his keeping up with inflation talk...
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
You will own nothing and be happy
For most that hit the treadmill at 18 that may be true because the rat race starts then, live within your means save and invest start early or else or you will be left standing scratching your head later in life...
Why is this downvoted?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
Wish I could shake the hidden hand in gratitude
Welcome to the cyberpunk future.
I would never want to compel someone else to buy services from me if they had a better option available. My goal is to make money by contributing to society, not force others to pay me for services they don't want from me. If AI makes it so programmers aren't needed anymore, well, I had a good run and made good money while it lasted. I'll find something else productive to do.
I Me My Me Me I I
This feels like the car market during COVID.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
In 2024 I bought a used (2021 era) Dell for $400 to use as my home server. Just the ram that it came with now routinely goes for $600 or more. I'd sell it, but then I wouldn't have a server...
I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.
You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...
I was going to upgrade my M3 Max to an M5 Max with more RAM. The machine I priced out was $5400 yesterday and costs $7500 today.
I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door.
The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.
A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
I bought exactly that, in 14", last April. Before tax, it was $5,853 and is now $7,849
Hello, fellow traveler on this particular boat.
I just received my new MacBook yesterday. Today it's more than €700 more expensive than what I paid.
Yep, I had the exact same (but in euros), also a discounted m5 in December. I feel pretty lucky with that timing, not that it benefits me in any way but that feels like getting one of the last ticket for a concert
I bought an irresponsible pile of homelab equipment in 24/25. Hard drives, SSD, memory, GPUs.
I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.
At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.
Naaah, no way anyone buying that for profit
Sounds like hope...
Why not?
Apple did not have to be in this situation. Begging for capacity lost to startups. Everyone else can complain, but not Apple. They had a 250B warchest, exactly for such situations.
Now somehow openAI has capacity and Apple does not. And think about it Apple is not in a better position than Valve for example. A teeny tiny company in comparison.
It is an unprecedented managerial failure.
Begging? Component price goes up, they increase their prices. Where's the begging?
Just like US had oil but as the world prices went up, US oil prices went up. No one will sell it cheap inside the country for patriotism. Same thing here.
Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
Is your thesis that Apple is planning for the same number of sales as the previous price?
If not, they ordered less chips. Hence lost capacity.
No I don't have a thesis.
About pricing, Netflix is constantly raising its prices and making more and more money (their stock is broken for last few months only) because they learned how to maximize profit by serving less customers but more profitable customers. Thats just one example.
All I am saying is that price stability is not guaranteed and is not a corporate goal so whether they failed here, whether they regret something, it is not possible to judge that just from price increase. Maybe they did, maybe they did much better than we know today and will find out next year (or quarter).
The difference is that Netflix isn’t facing a situation where they have run out of product to sell. If Apple wants to sell 10k laptops, they need to have 10k laptops. If 10k customers sign up for Netflix, Netflix gets that revenue and they can worry about optimizing their selection / service later.
Are you suggesting Apple should have invested in internal DRAM production?
In the past they regularly have co-funded construction of fabs / nodes and getting exclusive access as a return.
Like SOC'S? Something is probably coming Motorola, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm (out in 2027-2028), and Broadcom said no then Apple did something and replaced them the Apple Silicon design group can certainly do memory wasn't a company called Anobit bought by Apple years ago and money isn't a problem Apple didn't flush billions down Sam Altman's toilet like Microsoft.
Timeline 2-3 years 10-20 billion dollars...
Note:(Microsoft thru the end of this year will spend 60-80 billion dollars on Capex and Google will spend 180 billion dollars).
Apple should have burned billions in cash, so that they would be able to sell RAM at below-market-rate prices? But why?
Because Apple doesn't sell socketed memory, but instead integrated SOC products that usually stimulate growth in their much more profitable services segment?
This is not Apple's fault and it is just the beginning of AI. Unlike every other software/algorithm/program known to mankind, AI based on neural networks threatens to extract exponentially the entire humanity's supply of computational capacity. Moore's Law hit a fundamental snag in the last decade (e.g. Dennard scaling) and cannot and likely will not keep up. This then would be the worst case scenario with serious long term consequences far beyond the price of consumer goods.
Micron said that they tried to tell 2 of their largest customers (one almost certainly Apple) that the prices they were demanding would result in the cancellation of a lot new construction in 2023, which wasn't in the industries best interests.
It is sort of Apple's fault. They are probably the biggest single buyer of DRAM and NAND globally and they pride themselves on their supply chain management under Cook.
It seems they over optimised this too far.
Apple is the most spendthrift of the rich tech companies.
Would Apple be in a better spot now if they given Sam Altman 80 billion dollars like Microsoft?
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.
I'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You think the state of personal computing is a-ok because most people have smart phones. Others pointing out the very real limitations of what you can do on those phones seems highly relevant.
How is it not related? You are saying that we have massive powerful devices (smartphones) that can take over personal computing. I'm telling you that for you to be able to do "personal computing" you need a device that you own and can modify/run whatever you want.
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.)
The latest Google Pixels are slower than a 12 Pro iPhone and barely ahead of a 11 Pro processor wise I think Apple is safe...
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.
Get an XPS13 for the same money, and put Linux on it. It's a much better hardware/software combo, and Apple can't unilaterally kill it by refusing to provide upgrades a few years from now.
Yeah it'll just be dead on arrival instead
Edit: Also Intel Core 5 320 that's way slower than the Neo, with same amount of RAM
> Also Intel Core 5 320 that's way slower than the Neo, with same amount of RAM
Arrant nonsense, the Core 5 comfortably beats the A18.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+5+320&id...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro+%28Ma...
Seeing the other way around on Geekbench 6, for example https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18371082 vs https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16884902 and the Intel has more samples there than on Passmark
n.b. the Geekbench multicore test is more like a 2-core test because it adds lock contention, which is arguably closer to the real use case for these machines but isn't what you normally think of a multicore test doing
Though it does seem safe to say your original claim of "way slower than the Neo" isn't correct. Considering it's losing in one benchmark and only ahead in Geekbench (that tends to show higher scores for Apple processors relative to other benchmarks anyway).
"Roughly equal" seems to be a more accurate description.
It's not normal for these two benchmarks to deviate that much, so I'm not gonna take an average between them, just trust one or the other. My default has always been Geekbench, I didn't even look at Passmark until it was mentioned, and in this case Geekbench thinks the Mac's single-core speed is 35% higher.
> 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.
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.
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.
GPU farms aren't that useful for general purpose work
Yeah but there's a huge amount of generic estate to support those GPUs.
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.
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.
A 2022 Dell laptop with windows 11 isn’t doing great in 2026 though
It's been like this for over a decade, and for legit reasons.
Ordered a refurb M3 two weeks ago specifically because I had a bad feeling about Q3. Now refreshing the refurb store to see if the prices there tick up too. The thing about "absorbing tariff costs" is that it's a great sentence to say when you also want to reset price anchors upward permanently.
I had just drafted a report to leadership that we should buy what we needed for everyone through August ASAP.
My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.
Look, this is going to suck for several more years. The western memory cartel was never truly dismantled or punished after their price fixing in the early 2000s, and now this is the result. With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative but to suck it up and ride out whatever this market is, be it bubble or blessing.
That said, China isn’t stupid and is gladly steering their domestic firms to produce more kit not just for data centers and AI customers, but to shore up domestic electronics manufacturing in general. If China can make a device that appeals to Americans en masse, western companies are arguably at their most vulnerable in the face of sky-high part costs and supply chain issues. Combined with rising public sentiment against data centers and a general “fed-up” attitude towards tech in general, and this could be quite the explosively expensive powder keg depending on how things end up shaking out.
> With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative
American companies, you mean.
Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.
That’s a fair critique of my limited, Ameri-centric perspective in my comment, but also a stinging rebuke of the decline of American hegemony abroad. As recently as last year having those Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list meant that those memory modules were unsellable outside of China and a handful of other countries that rebuked American power; the fact even American companies are now openly courting them for parts shows how weak the Empire’s power really is just two years later.
So yeah, you’re more right than you may realize.
If you're in the US, Costco has certain models at the old price through Saturday (or while supplies last). Just pulled the trigger on a 24GB/1TB 13" MbA for $250 off the new price.
Appreciate the tip. Just ordered the 24GB/1TB M5 Pro at $50 below the old price point.
Amazon has Prime Day discounts off the old price today.
Thank you!
Same with Best Buy!
Oh the bright side they do offer $AAPL with a 5% discount today.
And I'll happily take that discount!
Oof.
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.
>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.
> Taiwan invasion
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
If TSMC is blown up, how much RAM is used in new datacenters?
I was thinking this as well - DRAM and NAND demand instantly crashes because the primary chip supply ceases to exist. This "shortage" will pass.
China won’t invade Taiwan. Be realistic
If you wanted to be realistic, you wouldn't say for sure that they won't.
Uh oh 5 years ago nobody would believe there will be a war in Europe with almost 1,000,000 dead.
And now China knows that both US and EU are weak and cant even deal with Russia or Iran.
And they also have their own semiconductors manufacturing and cut off from what TSMC produces anyway.
And Russia would never invade Ukraine. And Germany could never make it past the Maginot Line
They don't need to they appear to be winning without firing a shot Taco makes it so.
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.
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.
Until China floods the market with their memory which is starting
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.
"By the end of 2026, we expect CXMT to reach roughly 350 kwspm, which is only modestly below Micron’s estimated ~385 kwspm. This would position CXMT close to becoming the industry’s third-largest memory supplier"
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
At current margins their capacity is going to commodity DRAM since their HBM process is not competitive. Will be interesting to see how it pans out
Initially no but the Chinese will play long and take over much of the existing market worldwide and some companies that are capable will move design and engineering of memory in house and fab with a third party. With in house SOC's now out there memory will be next out of necessity/survival.
The problem with these drives is that you can't ensure the grade of the NAND chips. They could be A+ grade with great endurance but they could also be bottom of the barrel.
I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.
I have another one which is 5 years old by now.
> Look at the AWS Prime ssds available
Where?
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.
They won't have choice the bad blood they are creating now won't buy them customers in the future there will be western companies and one country that will design around this AI fiasco.
Considering what's causing it, I can't imagine it's a particularly short timeline.
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-...
:(
as the line goes "wheat price goes up , bread price goes up. Wheat price goes down, bread price stays up"
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.
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.
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.
At least 3 years maybe more.
When the AI bubble pops.
So, it finally happened. The Project is so thirsty for RAM that not even the world's most well-capitalized computer company could have the final word any longer. There's only so many more powerful organizations in the world than Apple. Well... we'll find out soon enough if such a thing could be built, or should I say, summoned.
Personal computing is in shambles right now. It has been for a bit. It was hard to buy video cards for a while, now other components are affected too.
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I think you have it backwards. Personal computing was a huge market driver in the 80s and 900 and 2000s.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
OpenAI is a grift hardware wise.
When fabs are full, you produce silicon with the highest margins.
Personal computing was essentially dead when companies figured that renting hardware and software and charging monthly subscriptions was a lot more profitable.
It's not dead. I refuse to rent hardware and software. I host all of my stuff at home on my own hardware, and encourage those around me to do the same. I have converted countless e-waste laptops to Linux and will continue to do so. Personal computing is only dead if you accept that outcome.
I started doing this in the mid-2010s, too. Used to grab throwaway hardware from a former employer and piece whatever still worked together. I've since moved on to a different employer. How do you procure throwaway hardware?
But the latter mindset from companies was a main reason why personal computing took off.
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...
Dont get the panic. :)
ryzenn 9800x3d 32GB ram 9070xt
about 2k
Then you overpaid a year ago. A 2x16GB DDR5 kit was around $90 a year ago and is over $400 today.
For DDR sure, now add all the other components :)
This is ridiculous. A used M1 MBAir is the best personal computing value ever offered in the history of the world.
Yep, replaced my old Mac Pro with an M1 Mac mini that's actually faster. MacBook Neo is probably faster and nicer for most people's uses than what they already have, except of course video games.
Such great value that it’ll stop getting updates next year.
It will get Golden Gate. Not sure what will happen after 2027. However, Apple will still provide security updates for older OS even after a new one has come out.
So you can expect ~2-4 more years of updates for an M1. Even after no updates, you can probably still use it longer.
This is entirely inaccurate. M1 is Apple Silicon and will be fully supported in Golden Gate (macOS 27). Support in macOS 28 is also practically a given.
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.
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.
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.
Already gone at least from what I'm seeing.
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.
Two weeks ago I purchased an M5 Max MacBook Pro 16 inch with 128GB RAM and a 4TB SSD from Microcenter for $5100. (They had a $900 discount on the machine.) Not sure if that deal is still around, or if Microcenter still has any stock, but if you're in the market, I'd make a run for it! $5100 is now $8000 on Apple (and if ordered via Apple, it won't ship until August.)
I thought Apple usually locked in contracts with TSMC and Samsung for years in the future? They should be best positioned to weather this storm. If they are getting buffeted enough to raise prices by this much, things are going to be dire for smaller manufacturers.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
Apple has been weathering this for a while. Maybe it was bad timing with a contract rollover but they seem to have lost their primacy with TMSC.
I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.
But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
Even when the M5 Pro MacBook 16 released, they did raise the price $100 but upped the hard drive to 1TB. I really thought they would wait to raise prices until the next cycle but this is a bit alarming.
If they never raise their prices, they can't drop them.
Apple is perpetually doomed with the stock market Intel and IBM have more pull.
Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.
Or it's just a bluff since their memory upgrade prices were actually some of the lowest compared to the rest of manufacturers.
The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.
Including Covid, it’s been like 6 straight years of supply constraints
It’s not a storm anymore but the new normal. People waiting for prices to come down are going to be very disappointed.
RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)
That's a double edged sword. Assuming it's an 18 month contract, even when ram prices do go back to "normal" it's a year and a half until Apple has savings to pass onto to customers.
If Apple knows it's been overpaying, you can be sure that they will leverage that in future negotiations.
Raising prices allows Apple to reduce demand, possibly creating some flexibility in the durations of the current contracts.
Right — if we can know how long ago the contracts were agreed we can predict how much more the price will have to rise, because 20% sounds like the beginning of the problem.
Apple is notorious for their prices being extremely stable for a given SKU. If anything, this is Apple getting out ahead of where they expect memory prices to be long-term, so they can rip off the band-aid once and don’t have to do it again.
Well, hopefully :-)
I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.
This kind of broad mid-cycle price update is essentially unprecedented for Apple. Their price points are extremely reliable, and even only occasionally do they tweak an individual product price up or down during a refresh.
I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.
If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.
Its a very, very long “storm”, at some point you have to re-adjust, even if it is very painful
I wonder if this is the real reason Tim Cook is resigning as CEO. He's a supply chain guy and semiconductor supply chains seem utterly borked right now.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
> So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
512GB unified memory is targeting local inference of large models, or local training of non-frontier models.
I doubt you can run a model that requires hundreds of GB of RAM at an acceptable speed (tok/s) on a MacBook.
What would be the bottleneck?
Compute? Inference doesn't only need memory bandwidth. You need to actually do work with the memory you're loading which needs compute power. Which needs more electricity, which needs more cooling, which isn't practical for something as thin as a MBP.
MacBook Pro has plenty of compute for local LLMs to be usable. I'm getting up to ~150 tokens/s with Deepseek-v4-Flash on a MacBook M5 Max. It's quite capable for coding assistant usage.
In general LLMs are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than raw compute power.
But it's quantized right? It's not the same almost-free DeepSeek you get from the API.
And once the context gets large, it slows down.
"up to" 150, is doing a lot of work there.
Yes, it's quantized (4 bit). Sure, it's... not quite as good as what's on offer via API. And sure, "up to" does a lot of work (I don't have an average/median for you but it feels fast to me).
But it's usable, fully local, fully private, and has no subscriptions and no operating costs other than electricity.
I mean it’d take minutes of research to realize people are successfully and efficiently running 4-bit quantized GLM 5.2 on MacStudio 512GB M3 Ultras at over 60 tok/s. K2 2.7 is quite literally designed for 4 bit quantization and runs even better.
This is already a thing
The integrated GPU. Not enough compute onboard to handle prefill for 100gb+ models, and the decode is constrained by memory bandwidth that's lower than most dGPUs that price.
Apple would be in a much stronger spot right now if they didn't pretend like eGPUs were inconceivable black magic that Macs are incompatible with.
I'm not sure I follow - 614 GB/sec is pretty squarely in dGPU territory (~5070 level). External GPUs can definitely exceed that on the very high end, but it seems pretty competitive, no?
Competitive for 16-24GB dGPUs, but for 100gb+ inference workloads it's going to be a decode bottleneck. For smaller models it'd be fine, but the same goes for the smaller GPUs.
In particular though, the fatal bottleneck is the weakness of the iGPU. Filling a KV cache on a 100gb+ model could take a few minutes, or even hours if you're trying to restore a 256k-to-1m token session.
A small but notable change: Apple now appears to require university verification through UNiDAYS for EDU pricing.
Previously, at least in the U.S., you could just use the education store and get the discount without much (if any at all) verification.
That's a big change!
WOW. I'm glad I bought the beast yesterday.
The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
Mac Studio?
I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
No, M5 Max MBP with all the options.
I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.
I have an M2 Max, as well, and I wonder what I could get for it on resale... or maybe I should just keep it.
Crippled how?
Only available with 1 memory config - 96 gb. They used to have 512 and 256.
Apple probably didn’t have enough memory supply contractually secured to satisfy the unforeseen demand for those models.
my M1 mac studio from 2022 is still going strong and i can't see a reason to replace it in the next few years anyway
Wow, how much did you pay? $10k? That’s a beefy config
$7349, and as of today, it'd be $10149
That price hike hurts to see
Apple Share price fell 6.12% yesterday. Perhaps indicating that expectations are of a reduced demand in response to the price rather than buyers accepting it.
Also investors seeing this announcement as an indicator that their margins have reduced
I feel sick to my stomach. Been saving up all year for a new 16" M5 Max to replace my M1 Max in July (I do indie game dev, so I routinely use everything it can give). It was already a was already a big stretch at $6k, now it's completely out of reach at $8k. There's no world where I can justify that price even if I could afford it.
You know what's extremely good value right now? The old "space bin" Mac Pros. You could get a maxed out one for less than 1k - 128GB RAM and with the dual D700 GPU's those produce around 12GB VRAM too. I've been eyeing these for local LLM purposes. To be fair the jump between the M1 Max and M5 is not that big in real usage, unless you're absolutely memory bound on the M1 - the M1 is likely to be supported for a few years more...
I have to have a laptop with how I work, unfortunately. And yeah, I really need more RAM and particularly GPU power, so the M5 Max would have been a very big improvement for my workflow.
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.
Devs reading this, please start making your apps less memory hungry.
All the people running any computer appreciate.
Don't get your hopes up. The industry is well underway in migrating everything possible away from native apps to Electron.
People for some reason forget that for most election apps you can run it in a browser tab and avoid almost all of the overhead.
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
I shift a 1 GB electron app to a 900 MB browser tab (i don't know what it actually is, but the number of Tabs I have taking up 1 GB memory is shocking these days).
Trying to vibe as many of my own CLI toolings as possible....
Doing that helps some, but it doesn’t help the fact that web engines and the balls of mud they’re so often tasked with running are quite heavy even with just one browser instance.
Message recieved, porting my webapp to Electron ASAP.
I do. No one cares.
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!
Saw a post two days ago right here about Apple raising its prices, and asking "when ?", should have bought 10 macbooks yesterday : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643079
What would I do with ten macsbook?
They would make an excellent Beowulf cluster.
Resell them, or make a tiny hosted cloud farm to help devs that don't own a mac build an app for ios
Seems like an awful lot of work.
Sell them.
I was literally ordering an M5 MacBook Pro tomorrow. The total is $900 more now. Might have to hold off and just live with my M4 Mini.
I came very close to pulling the trigger on an M5 Air the other night to replace my venerable M1 Air. Wound up deciding I'd wait until M6. Doh!
I replaced my M1 Air with M1 Max 64GB few weeks ago, not the biggest upgrade, but memory was that made me decide. It's hard to find even 64GB models nowadays.
Go to Amazon, they still have old pricing.
I mean the writing was very clearly on the wall.
Go to Amazon quickly. They still have yesterday's prices.
I was just about to buy a new macbook myself but I guess I'm out now. Not sure what else to do except install linux on my current macbook to keep things supported.
Third party retail may very well have not reflected the price increase yet. If not BTO, you could order today possibly for store pickup tomorrow.
Check your local Costco, I snapped up a 512 GB model for 1197 last Saturday.
I regret not RamMaxxing my M4 mini
My niece graduated and is headed off to college in the fall and I picked her up a macbook as a graduation present, knew that apple's prices were still artificially low and a price hike was coming and ordered it the day before they announced that prices were going to go up.
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
> What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market?
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
That's kind of my point, the existing manufacturers are falling short, in apple's eyes. Every single device they sell requires storage and ram, every single item's price is going up. That's going to hit them very hard.
I hate it when my time machine does that.
Just got a MacBook Neo (512GB model) for CZK 19 990 (roughly US$950) from a local reseller, which was the original list price back when the model entered the market.
Models with US keyboards currently still sell for CZK 19 990, Czech keyboard models sell for CZK 21 990 ($1050), probably someone forgot to update the price on the US models.
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”.
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
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.
Honestly the M1 Air still has many years of life still. It's an amazing machine.
I think nowadays the Apple TV is more about smart home than TV. But as long as they keep calling it a "TV", most of the people will compare it with the built-in apps in their smart TVs and think it's unnecessary. Even if you tell them that it can do much more than watching TV, they will think the money they spend on the TV related functionalities is a waste. The old price was already hard for them to justify, the new price is almost impossible.
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
What smart home features does Apple TV have? All I've ever used it for is to watch TV. To be fair, I pretty much dismissed Apple for anything smart home after they launched that ridiculously priced Pod thing.
It's a thread border router and matter controller, providing Remote access to local-only devices, scheduling, automation... with better track records on security and privacy than competitors.
Buy out all the hardware to price me out and sell me back the compute at $200 a month. well played.
The personal computer is getting more and more expensive. Here we are, where it's getting harder and harder to get a computer to create your art but you can get a subscription to any AI company for a fraction of the computer's cost and get your "prompt" art. And that's ridiculous.
Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
> And that's ridiculous.
Change and the future are uncomfortable. You can embrace it or be left behind. You cant stop it.
It's funny seeing this kind of comment get made over and over. I don't think those regurgitating this line realize that getting "left behind" (whatever that even actually means) is appealing when the direction the future is heading is very unappealing.
> be left behind
Left behind on what exactly?
Mediocrity
Glad I bought a fully loaded MBP a few weeks back and not now. The price on my exact configuration just went up a whopping 29%!
Yep, I knew this was coming and did the same. Can't believe my MBP is now an appreciating asset!
Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%
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.
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
> You really believe food, gas and house prices are not increasing at the same amount?
No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.
> 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.
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!
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm
Eggs. That was the last omg inflation is crazy story and now they're about as cheap as they've ever been.
What doesn't inflation consider though? Government numbers on inflation make no sense to average folks.
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]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
Politicians pretend it’s much lower. Or claim that deflation is occurring through statements like “we are bringing prices down”.
The base model 13" MacBook Air released in 2020 was $1,299. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to... $1,299.
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.
The base model 13" MBA was $799. I remember because I needed a laptop for our son to continue attending school during COVID shutdown.
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
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%.
I went looking for a comparable PC product a few months ago and nothing is even close in price for the same feature set.
You're proving my point. It's no longer at the same price.
Wow, I guess no one is immune from supply chain issues. To Apple's credit, I remember the time (a while back) when people overpaid for the Apple brand while not getting as much performance for their money as they would have with other laptop / smartphone manufacturers. Things have really changed over the recent years. Thanks to all the vertical integration, Apple is about as cost-effective as you can get for top-of-the-line hardware. So the fact that they are raising prices is an alarming sign.
What surprised me was that they increased across the current lineup. When Cook announced that they'd have to raise prices, I had assumed he was referring to new launches, as is Apple tradition I did not expect such a large and widespread bump across the whole line up.
Same, I was reading discussion just yesterday that these were expected to go in place with the September releases.
I was considering getting M5 Max mbp with 128GB, but at that price it is just ridiculous, 64 version costs now roughly what 128 was before and that was a stretch for me. At this point might as well stick to my ol reliable M1 Pro mbp.
Edit: I'll say that now it seems also very hard to justify buying top of the line apple hardware for the enterprise. Getting top laptops for just a team of 10 people now means extra $20k just for RAM on top of already a higher base price.
Wonder how long this can continue. Wages are stagnating while consumer items are going up double digit percents.
Damn, this might trigger a hoarding + buying frenzy, further driving up prices.
I have a macbook pro wit m1 pro and I was waiting for the mac mini m5 pro, but I might pull the trigger on the macbook pro m5 pro. Ugh.
These "hidden" costs of AI/LLM driving up IT (and energy) related price inflation are starting to feel more and more as a kind of an inescapable, AI-imposed tax. We should start calculating these increased hardware costs (that at this point basically affects any product with storage and RAM inside) into the real price we for our AI/LLM usage, and not only think of the price in terms of a monthly subscription or $/tokens. How much have you, both personally and at your workplace, in reality spent extra on equipment and on price increases of services per year since the LLM-boom started?
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.
If you wanted to buy in the near term, Amazon is offering Prime Day discounts off of the old prices today.
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
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?
It's the flamebait detector. Any post which gets a lot of comments in a short time gets pushed down quickly. Though the mods usually push it back up if it doesn't involve touchy topics like politics.
Oh interesting! Thanks for the context I had no idea that was a mechanic - also it seems like the mods merged it with another thread and now it’s back on the front page.
I had plans to buy two Airs, was not sure if I needed 13 or 15, 24 or 32, which was better for my wife and what's the best strategy to buy one for her first and then understand my needs test-driving it. Maybe I actually needed Pro. Lot's of procrastination as none of us had a real need for an upgrade. It's all in the past tense now. I've just bought a 16GB model with 1TB on Amazon at 480 EUR cheaper that the new price, and it seems cheaper than the official old price. I will forget about MacBooks until a real need comes, or maybe good ARM laptops happen sooner. It's funny that if they did not have the dichotomy between 13 and 15, I would have thought less and bought M4 as soon as it was out with the support for 2 external displays + built-in.
I've been dragging my feet on upgrading my M1 Air, guess now I'm just going to wait a bit longer. Truth be told, it's still sufficient for web dev but I figured at ~5 years old I should upgrade it..
I had an M1 Pro MacBook and I agree with you about not needing a new computer. However, it seems like things are at best going to be the same if not worse over the next 5 years with AI prices. I went ahead and updated because although I’m still happy with my M1 Pro today, I am unsure how it will fair over the next 5 years.
That's why I updated, as well.
My M1 Max is still great. I was considering upgrading before prices went up but decided to just wait. I will admit though, a tiny voice in my head is telling me prices will never come back down, even if the ram shortage goes away. :-(
I think it is fully likely that Apple will extend the life of the M1 in OS support terms because of this problem.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
They can "make the choice" to continue Intel support also. It's not like they don't know what chips they used and have all the insider NDA info about them.
It's a pretty huge cost to support an entirely different set of hardware with different kernel extensions and an entirely different build (x86 instead of arm64e). Could apple choose to do that? Absolutely. But the cost of supporting an M1 is very different than the cost of supporting Intel.
Yeah. I also meant that this is an inflexion point with Apple Intelligence at the OS level.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
I wasn't implying that new releases of the OS and new software that depends on new hardware would be made to work on the old hardware. I interpreted "extend support for anything they make themselves" to mean keeping it updated with bug/security fixes and generally usable as it was when it was purchased. I don't find the fact that they made it themselves vs purchased it from Intel to be a big factor in that decision.
Right but I said nothing about bug fixes, which we'll continue to receive for some time.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
I have a 8GB M1 that still worked great, until macOS 26 severely degraded its performance. Thankfully the macOS 27 beta somewhat improved things (although Xcode is more of a slog than it used to be).
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
You can also buy something now that not all shops have adjusted to the new pricing.
Though this window is very short. Apple don't leave much in retail channels.
M5 Air is still incredibly cheap on Amazon and Best Buy ($950). This is perhaps the best deal you are ever going to get for a MacBook, because they are all going to raise prices.
Pfft. It's been 6 years, they just introduced a shittier version, and it's a smash hit. Most ahead-of-its-time computer ever made.
Base iPad went up almost 30%, including refurbs. Was recommending one to my parents for $299 - now it’s $379.
Is Apple also offering more money for trade-ins?
A few weeks ago they bumped up Mac trade-in value, and it slightly went down now but not too previous levels.
Ha, as if.
I bought one last month for $299. Now the Apple Store is showing $449
Just bought a new iPad A16 128GB from Staples website a few minutes ago for $279
https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...
damn I was in the market for a new iPad
Fighting words, it’s Apple’s fault (doesn’t he know that Apple can actually (in House for good) replace them? Maybe not today, but certainly in three years)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/micron-exec-suggests-apples-a...
Fabs are notoriously costly and time consuming to setup by which time you become obsolete, assuming you even have access to equipment which will take years to reach you. I wouldn't be surprised though if Apple was considering becoming a fab at this point regardless. Apple has a history of not letting its suppliers toy them around. Given the political and AI pressures going on, I think apple could just decide to make its own SOCs and memory at some point in America. Unfortunately the person who could can pull this off is retiring.
As an app developer, having to eat an ever increasing Mac hardware cost upfront may push people like me to just focus on Android.
You think the situation is better on Android? The margins for Android OEMs are even thinner.
Except you only need to eat that hardware cost once a decade.
You would think, but My 2019 MacBook can barely run an older xcode that doesn't emulate newer phones / tablets.
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
what brand isnt going to raise prices with ram hikes? there is no other choice
Hold on! Even people like you?
Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
It was only a matter of time. I wonder how long this silicon drought will last.
I wonder if they will give more for trade-ins now or keep the old rate and just resell it at these higher prices.
I just checked this. I bought a secondhand 15" M4 Air last weekend and the trade-in value is still $630. So no, trade-in values didn't go up 20%.
That's cute.
My sweet summer child.
When Apple made MacBook Neo with a reasonable, and then destroy it with the price...
The shine of the Neo just rubbed off somewhat.
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.
The $599 XPS13 is a better value, and it can run Linux unlike the Neo.
Until they raise the price on that too. Dell has explicitly stated it's a "limited time" price, so don't be shocked if it becomes the $699 XPS13 almost immediately.
Maybe, but Apple has already raised it, and you can still buy the XPS (a more capable device that supports Linux) for $599.
Or you could buy a MacBook Neo on various retailers who still have it for $599. Heck, it’s on sale for $589 on Amazon right now.
I don’t think the market shopping for $600 laptops is the same market that wants something that runs Linux.
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.
My prediction is that the semiconductor price increases is going to cause a lot of demand destruction. The semiconductor companies revenues is not based on new products but rather on the fact that there is scarcity. Once that scarcity is removed then I suspect that we're going to have some reckoning happening across the industry.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...
I got Mint back in 2022 for my desktop built in 2014. Everything worked fine and I was even able to customize my install (though I regret some choices). It used considerably fewer resources than Win10 (never mind Win11, which I don't think would even install on this machine) out of box. I'm talking 40% less RAM use at the desktop before opening programs; and that's for Cinnamon (Xfce would be leaner still). And grindy I/O that touches a lot of small files is about three times the speed. No fancy configuration necessary. I did a simple install for a relative on even older hardware, again no problems.
If I needed to change a kernel version, it's literally as easy as selecting it from a menu in a pre-installed GUI "update manager", letting it do its thing and rebooting. I can get up to the bleeding edge (although I have no good reason to).
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.
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 it's already enough to make an impact.
Fair point, but I'd say
> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.
Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.
I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.
The M5 Max 128GB RAM MBP I was eyeing went up by $1600. Thankfully Amazon and some other retailers haven’t updated their prices yet, so I immediately picked one up this morning.
14 or 16 inch?
As Anakin Skywalker once famously said, "We need to build more Data Centers, AI needs it."
Let's see if they increase the new product next September.
Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
I can see how they succumed to the pressure.
[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...
[2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...
Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.
Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
Bingo. Cook is the heat shield now
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"?
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.
why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?
capitalism needs its profits.
also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
"luxury brand" that offers best base models for bucks than any other windows machine is my favorite luxury. if you compare same $$ priced macbook air to windows laptops, speed and long term reliability difference is few times big.
Indeed. Although it's investment that's the problem here, not profit.
Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.
Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?
I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
Apple is not new in the game of booking the entire capacity of a fab.
They should have predicted AI?
lol.
Should they lose capacity to OpenAI?
They very well could have. Apple was the only company poised to take on CUDA with OpenCL, and they got pantsed so hard by the HPC industry that the Mac Pro got discontinued entirely.
Apple could have added a couple trillions to their valuation if they weren't addicted to service revenue. But today's Apple is too fat to see their shoes, let alone where the puck is headed.
The Mac Pro was a stopgap and they weren't going to work with Nvidia, Intel and AMD anymore good riddance in the long run.
If they could, they would.
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
I was planning to take a Mac Book Air next month, should have taken it this month. :(
I asked this ~6 months ago and I'm going to ask again - if AI is supposed to make creating digital things easier, where are we going to publish these digital things? On rocks? Is AI industry essentially eating its own tail?
What do you mean where to publish? On a website?
Website runs on a server, which requires components that AI labs are buying years in advance, driving component prices to astronomical levels. What happens when only AI labs can afford to have a server?
I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
There are many, many free hosts, like GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, Railway etc.
I was considering an upgrade this fall. I think I can do another year or two without. who knows, I might the same spec for even more $$. Just as the trend goes....
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.
I'm confused why you would replace your 16" M1 Pro with a 15" M5 Air... on which axes is that an upgrade over your M1 Pro?
The biggest reason is I move around a lot and the 16" MBP has weighed on me. It's a really chunky and heavy laptop. Sometimes I don't even want to carry it anywhere.
The M5 is also significantly faster than an M1 Pro. I definitely feel the snappiness on day to day use. I'm also upgrading from 16GB/512GB to 24GB/1TB.
The screen is quite a downgrade and the battery life, surprisingly, is only marginally better than my 5 year old M1 Pro with only 79% capacity left.
Other than that, I don't miss anything else about the M1 Pro. I hear rumors that they're making a smaller MBP in the M6 Pro/Max generation which is why I wanted to wait originally.
The M5 air is much faster than M1 Pro (I have the same setup as OP)
For sure, on paper - I'm curious, do you actually notice that difference in your day-to-day? I struggle to think of times in my usage of my computer where I think "this feels slow", but maybe I'm blind to it.
I supposedly just snagged the exact same model on Amazon for $1549, as opposed to $1999 on Apple’s site today!
I doubt these discounts will last much longer.
The Studio I looked at yesterday jumped from $2600 to $3400 (30%). I was saving for it and was about 1/2 way there. I was expecting these increases in 2027, so planned to buy late in the year. Apple moved faster than I expected after the price increase announcements.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
Does somebody have a price increase by currency table? A lot of losers vs. USD since apple last set their prices.
Stock is not going brrr.
i just realized that i could sell my (almost to the day) year old mac mini for a profit
that never happened before :)))
The configuration I’m interested in (I’m waiting until new M5 models are launched) just increased $1000 :-/
Dodged that bullet. Heard Tim Cook's comments and decided to pull the trigger on the machine I was debating as I didn't think Gruber was right on them waiting until new models to change prices.
Yes Gruber's comment about not making Ternus debut with a shit sandwich was right on the money, so I wondered why that alone didn't sway him to think that Apple would do the price increase sooner.
I bought an M4 Air about a year ago for under 1000$, it beat out my 2019 Intel MBP by quite a lot.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
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.
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.
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.
> The only challenger is Chinese fabs, but they could just as easily end up banned from western markets.
It's more likely that China will simply impose export controls. It's unlikely Chinese fabs will be able to fulfill local demand, leave alone global, for the foreseeable future. And they do need these components for their own manufacturing.
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.
Even the upstarts are cashing in. I believe CXMT is making some serious cash now.
Which they will put back into the business, this will be remembered as the time when the Chinese entered the worldwide memory market in a big way.
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.
Apple makes their own CPUs what is stopping them from making RAM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
Where would they make that which isn’t constrained already?
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
FYI - other retailers still have the old prices. Some even have discounts. The cheapest MacBook Air is now $1300 on Apple and $950 on Amazon and Best Buy. I imagine this will change soon, so grab them while you can.
And "analysts" flip out on the stock, when these products are < 15% of Apple's revenue. Clowns.
Breakdown by segment (FY 2025):
Mac: $33.71 B — 8.10% of total revenue
iPad: $28.02 B — 6.73% of total revenue
MSFT is also down 3.5% today, so there's just lots of volatility in big tech.
Buying opportunity.
This is sudden, I thought of buying macbook air, but now i have to hold it
Some of the price increases seem disconnected from the component cost increases.
e.g. The HomePod and HomePod Mini share the same amount of RAM, but the HomePod is up $50 while the HomePod Mini is only up $30.
Bring back upgradeable RAM and storage.
Obviously AI hardware crunch will get blamed for this, rightfully, but there's another story here: inflation is back.[1]
I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...
Xbox just increased prices this morning. I think Apple was the canary, expect large increases in tech soon. If you need something remotely in the future buy it now.
Just don't buy an Xbox. It's hot garbage and requires a pricey yearly subscription to play online. A PC pays for itself quickly once you factor the subscription in and cheaper games.
Just got a new MacBook Air.
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing; there is a push from who-knows-who to shift the balance of power back to (essentially) mainframes and corporate computing.
Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
I feel the same, but then I have to be honest with myself that the MacBook Neo is still a sub-$1,000 solid personal computer that's broadly available. Now... if that starts going out of stock, yeah, tin foil hat time!
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.
They also inexplicably snuck in a 50% increase for the TV 4k, just to be extra greedy.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
The majority of the component cost in the AppleTV is likely the storage so that's a big hit.
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.)
at a (previously) $20 price difference, why would they add a 3rd model?
I don't know what makes sense for Apple's supply chain and BoM, I'm just saying that the price for my home's worth of Apple TVs with the minimum functionality I use has gone up by over 50% since the previous-gen model and now sits at over $1,000 in local pricing.
That's the kind of pricing that makes me start to consider the Google 4K Streamer even if it's a UX downgrade - for $300 I get ethernet and Thread on every TV.
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.
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.
I think the Neo was eating into their Air sales, and not merely bringing the Mac to a new market.
The increase to the old Apple TV or Homepod is egregious.
the 4 year old Apple TV getting a price doubling makes it a horrible value compared to any other TV streamer, quality be damned.
With all the inflation going on and the AI boom affecting things like memory prices, I was surprised that eg. MacBook neo was priced where it was.
Yeah, for a few short months Apple had a really nicely priced entry-level machine. Now so much with a 20% price hike on an 8GB machine with soldered RAM
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.
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.
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.
Both my personal and work machines are M1 Max - guess I’ll be holding onto them for a few more years
Matter of time before they where hit by the market prices. If you take the day of today, and calculate back. You can see how long apple locks in the prices for their hardware supplies. Interesting note to make. Wonder if they will increase the duration in the future or become more risk averse.
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.
Wouldn't surprise me, but Cook did rule out building their own anyway
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.They don't need to just design and engineer the memory and partner with TSMC in America somewhere why the Chinese are coming into the market.
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?
The refurb M3 Ultra with 512gb of ram went from $8k+ to $14k+.
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.
And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.
The price increases are absurd for some configurations. Glad I placed my order for a new mb pro a couple days 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.
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.
Old enough to remember several memory price boom cycles. In the late 80s at the place I worked we bought a bunch of DRAM for a production run that became delayed because the CPU needed wasn't ready. The DRAM was in a large cardboard box under my desk for a while, acting as a foot rest. I remember the price of DRAM spiked and we calculated that box/foot-rest was now worth more than...one million dollars.
No price increase in iPhone to save the sales number, this clearly shows that Apple is iPhone first company.
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.
Concerned about apple. First late to Ai, having to surrender to google and now a hit to their hardware. Very unfortunate for apple customers.
Just stop buying new gadgets for 18 months and then see what happens
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.
Check costco/another third party, they still have yesterday's pricing right now
Valve: "We're releasing a $2k gaming computer!"
Consumers: ????
Apple: laughs in $500 laptop
Valve: "FINE it can be $1k but we're taking the controller away"
Consumers: "bro what is this"
Apple: cracks up laughing in $2k laptops
> We have shielded our customers from these increases so far
Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!
Wild that they increased the ipad prices as well; the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool to avoid cutting into macbook marketshare.
How does that contradict the price increase? iPads still have RAM, yeah? If anything, not increasing the prices on iPads would undermine Macbook marketshare, would it not?
> the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool
amusing nonsense
Mac Studio M3 Ultra: $5299 (+$1300)
Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?
This is just the new normal.
They did increase the base Ram for mac configurations in late 2024 from 8GB to 16GB.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
While these new Mac prices are probably here to stay, the upside is that once the AI market saturates and RAM prices fall, future Macs will likely get a significant memory boost at all price tiers.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
Sure, quite often. They usually have a price target in mind, but their costs and margins mean they can't always hit it.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.
Not really usually they add more features and bump the price.
So this is how Apple makes up for the margins on the Neos.
So Apple did not ge the benefit of the AI hype (in stock price) but caught the bad repercussions of the AI aftermath
You didn't think it would be any other way? Smile...
Would MBP M5 32GB RAM be adequate for small model post-training and small RL experiments?
Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.
Mac Studio Desktop, M3 Ultra Processor, 96GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Silver up by £1100 (£4,199.00 -> £5,299.00)
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.
> the new intel framework 13 pro
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
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
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?
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.
I got a Mac Mini on Amazon in July 2025 for 575€, the exact model is currently 969€ in the Apple Store.
You just know that upcoming OLED Macbook Pro is going to start at 3k for the base configuration.
Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen
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.
Still no 256GB or 512GB Studio models at any price. 96 is the max for any Studio configuration on apple.com right now.
I suspect this is because the next models are more imminent. Not imminent per se, but Apple doesn't want to be left holding the bag on most of a factory run of 512GB Studios.
Absolutely no point selling those now with the M5 or M6 coming up.
I guess the days of engineers getting to be so casual about memory footprint and CPU cycles is over.
Nope.
1: most of them dont use their own products
2: someone else pays for their laptops
1: true. 2: that someone else has to get approval for the cost
Fully loaded costs for an engineer where I live are anout 15-25 a month, plus a maybe 2-3k in token consumption. Whether the laptop costs 9k or 6k makes no difference and apple knows this.
3 months ago "mac mini, neo, and air prices are to good to be true"
and then the monkeys paw curled
What we want to really know is the cost of Ultra Mac Studio 512gb if that will happen or 256gb.
Different article, but accessible to non-subscribers: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ryj81ywlro
2026 computing, brokies need not apply.
Computers are the new cars - only rich people (or people assuming debt) buy new ones, everyone else gets to buy used.
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!
Nano texture display option also got a price increase. Thankfully, AppleCare+ didn't.
Hard to make a case that's related to increased RAM or SSD component prices.
Exactly. It's the "why not" which makes you wonder whether they actually need to bump prices at all and their contracts are still in place...
What a beautiful way for Tim Cook to end his career at Apple. supply chain genius can’t overcome market forces so they can keep a healthy profit margin.
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
Tell me who can overcome market forces. Literally no one. I'm starting to think bots are writing these low-quality inflammatory comments.
Maybe those bots should send micron or Samsung a gold bar and some glass to get them to care about consumers again.
In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.
Weird that it’s the Neo that is affected why it famously has hardly any ram.
Hikes coming soon to AWS/Azure/GCP bills ...
Tell me again how AI is a benefit to actual people?
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.
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
Building a new memory fab takes 3-4 years, extremely capital intensive. Micron is spending $25B+ on Capex and more than half of that is for new memory capacity, a 3x increase over 2 years.
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
It *is* hard to make memory, especially HBM (...which is what the AI market wants, and is what the manufacturers are focusing on) and bringing on new capacity takes years. There's the additional wrinkle that the manufacturers we have left are the ones who survived periods where the market was glutted with oversupply in the wake of previous shortages.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
I mean lets not pretend that Apple hasn't done this for years. I had a cheesegrater Mac Pro 2019, but I had a choice with memory - I could upgrade from the base 32GB to 192GB one of two ways - pay Apple $3,000 for 160GB, or get the base 32GB model, and buy 192GB of the exact same sticks of memory (same manufacturer, timings, etc.) from OWC for $1,050. And I could sell the 32GB if I wanted.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
>If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
It's not exploitative either. It's just supply and demand.
I agree man. I’m just quoting Donald.
It all depends on how much they're investing in increasing capacity.
Quite a bit:
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-b...
Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.
Good luck applying your US antitrust law against Samsung and SK Hynix which have 75% of the market.
Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
As I understand it, the dynamics are similar to generic drugs where there is a large capital hurdle to new production facilities and a likelihood that prices will soon drop to a point that a new facility will lose money.
https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-c...
Is there anything new actually worth paying for?
They seem to confuse hard drive and ram memory on these articles
Flash storage prices have also risen substantially, just not as exponentially as RAM
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.
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.
Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort? Surely everyone except the datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models has exactly the opposite incentive.
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
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
We have to get real, here - most people are not replacing GPT or Claude with local inference, even on M5. If you can afford to do that (RAM shortage or not), then you are in the minority of customers.
Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
You’re out of the loop if you don’t think m series chips with unified memory aren’t one of the best platforms for running local inference
They aren't. Apple Silicon is unusable for interactive prefill and decode speeds in agentic workflows and SOTA LLMs.
You’re just out of the loop, and that’s fine but it’s worth learning about.
There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.
I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.
I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
My hardware isn't powerful enough to try, so I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not to push back: what do you use DS4 for? Did it replace e.g Claude Code with Opus for you, or was it replacing something else?
I use it as my main coding agent - so its running DS4 server on my 128gb mbp and I run the pi coding agent on my other machine which calls out to it. Mostly Go and Typescript work.
I also use it in local agent mode if im coding directly on the machine which is nice cause you can save sessions and resume them, and so for personal projects and training related stuff it's been great.
Even got an autoresearch loop going where the agent looks at the previous run, adjusts parameters and code if needed, and then hands off training to another script (so full system resources are available for training), ad infinitum - it works really well - what antirez has done with that project is pretty incredible.
Isn't Deepseek V4 Flash still like 150+ GB even at Q4?
I think most people running deepseek locally are using DS4: https://github.com/antirez/ds4
Which provides a 2-bit quant and a mixed 2-bit/4-bit quant - which range from 80gb to 97gb
Deepseek is particularly well suited for quantization and the quality of the 2bit quants antirez has provided have been validated by folks like ggernov of llama.cpp project
> From GLM 4.7 flash
GLM 4.7 Flash is a 30b model that was far behind SOTA at launch, and I know that because I pay for z.ai inference and have run the model locally. Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash have the same issue, and beg the question; are you really going to process a 64k agentic context at 450tok/s? That's 2+ minutes that you spend waiting for the first token to generate! Of course nobody can sell that as competitive inference, and it only gets worse with larger models. We're talking about non-interactive speeds, here.
If you're satisfied with small local models, more power to you. It puts you in the same barrel as Strix Halo enthusiasts or the guys that bought 2x3090s on Reddit. You are completely ignoring the market if you think that any of those SOCs are unprecedented or unparalleled for inference workloads, though. The free DS4 API is faster at prefill and decode, you could not give away Mac inference at zero cost and compete with what China provides for free. That's how far behind Macs are for local inference, to put things into perspective.
I think you’re confused - nobody running local models is concerned about SOTA - that’s just marketing hype from large providers - we are interested in data governance, security, control and freedom. You can’t compare hosted services to local inference, these are two very different things, out of principle we aren’t interested in handing our code bases over to untrustworthy third parties.
On your first point, nobody is pasting 64k tokens at once as context, if you are you’ll experience very similar wait times even with hosted providers - context is built up piecemeal and by virtue of being context does not need to be replaced constantly - this is how all agents work.
100% local models are not SOTA, but they are good enough to be incredibly useful if you are a skilled engineer, and I understand the industry is pushing engineers to offload more and more of their work to incentivize higher token spending, but talented engineers can absolutely be just as productive using local models today - it’s just a different style of working that folks who have become accustomed to large providers can’t really comprehend at this point. They’ve vendor-locked themselves into a delusion that they absolutely need SOTA for everything and as a result see everything as black and white.
You sound like IBM in the mainframe era...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673500
The rich.
> Who exactly is “coordinating” that effort?
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
I would get nervous carrying around a $10k laptop.
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.
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.
Related, I just realized that Apple uses the same numeric price in multiple regions but just changes the currency. At current price, you'd save $3149 USD flying from London to New York City (minus travel costs) to buy a maxed out 14" MBP vs buying it in London, since the price is 9849 GBP vs 9489 USD...
The EU price includes the warranty, which is at least 2 years but is officially for "the expected life of the product", which in the case of an $10,000 laptop would probably be a decade plus.
You can get AppleCare+ in the U.S. for $149/year which is just as good (or better) than any warranty.
Do you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.
> 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!
You save a lot less after paying import duties.
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.
It seems like there aren't extra duties (anymore), but then again it's all very confusing and hard to navigate so who knows.
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).
Yeah, unsustainable to maintain their insane profit margins made possible by their locked down walled garden.
They need to do layoffs and get rid of dead weight
I was expecting this. Glad I just upgraded my wife and myself in December.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
I guess it was inevitable. Is it only RAM related ?
I bought a full spec M5 Max MBP. Yesterday.
I'm relieved.
> The average price increase is $269.23.
How is that calculated?
Markov chains
Back to old expensive apple pricing
Did any sci fi books predict an AI world where computer hardware was soaked up by AI mega corps and compute was undemocratized?
> 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.
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
640k ought to be enough for anybody...
Total failure by Apple supply chain! Reflected in $AAPL right now.
Thanks AI!
To be honest, Apple's pricing has been up to a point pretty user friendly the last few years. Two years ago I bought an iPad for around 400 because everyone thought they'll announce a new one. That didn't happen until last year where they announced the new one but for 350 or so. Macbooks are also "cheap" considering what you get for them with the M chips.
> M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
What is the point of posting a paywalled article? If you aren't going to paste the content somewhere else, please don't bother.
Oh wow, now I‘m even happier I got my M5 Pro last month.
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.
This is where regulators would normally step in and limit the clearly excessive buildout. It's well past harming consumer spending.
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.
> 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.
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.
How is the mini not increased?
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.
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…
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.
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.
I think when they eventually announce the M5 Mac Mini (September?) it'll just be at a higher price.
Uh oh. Should I grab an iPhone now before those prices are raised?
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
I wish but I am not hopeful that's actually going to happen
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.
They simply couldn't cut into their fat margins, could they?
The huge markup on memory/storage upsells are were they make all their money
My pre-built desktop PC is as cheap today as last year at the same store...
Dont get the panic. :)
memory and storage companies are like oil oligarch right now
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.
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.
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.
>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
Now tell me again how the Steam Machine is “overpriced”..
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?
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
You're going to have to work remarkably hard to link your comment to the parent without looking like a disingenuous ass.
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.
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.
It's not just a RAM problem. All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
> All silicon shares the same process. CPU, GPU, SSD, etc
No, no they don't. CPUs and GPUs do, broadly, but SSDs and RAM use specific processes catered only to their respective usages. You can't use a NAND flash process for anything else. Likewise for a RAM process.
Inflation babyyyyyyyyyy. See if your salary also raises by 10-20% this year. You're getting priced the fuck out of everything, have fun.
I mean that and the effects of multiple LLM vendors affecting supply and demand.
> 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.
Apple has never been a charity.
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.
>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.
The solution for Apple is move design and engineering of memory to Apple Silicon design in house and team up with TSMC on shore fab in America.
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.
"Apple has increased the price of MacBooks and iPads by about 20 per cent worldwide, one of the broadest price rises in its history, as the iPhone maker blamed memory chip shortages caused by the AI infrastructure boom."
Expect this trend to continue -- firms have delayed price adjustments to avoid retaliation from Trump as doing so would draw attention to Trump's many inflationary policies.
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
As much as I despise trump's administration, isn't this more because of AI farms pressure onto the semiconductor forges?
You're right it's not only trade policy, but I think most of the fab contracts on current models were already negotiated and Apple ate $3.3B of tariffs as a COGS increase (delaying passthrough avoids spotlighting tariff-driven inflation). Increasing DRAM prices are a factor, but would not be a 20% BOM price increase at all (much less on the total price) for most of the impacted devices. The magnitude and the simultaneous across-the-line timing look more like margin recovery than a component passthrough.
One of my 2024 predictions was that Trump would push through the biggest tax increase in history, and that his anti-tax base would cheer it. (Deficit spending doesn't exist and tax increases aren't tax increases if a Republican is in office.)
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
maybe in our lives people will start to realize there is really only one political party and its always going to be them vs us until we are all serfs earning below subsistence wages.
They're not all the same.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.
Catering to the top of the k-shaped economy is indistinguishable from evil
Apple has always done this.
This is a weird way for Apple to admit the Mac is dead.
If this is your interpretation of “Mac is dead” you might as well say “personal computers are dead.”
If it wasn't for Linux and open source, I very much could!
This is just pure greed. There is a memory chips shortage and it’s partly due to high demand, but at the same time the manufacturers trying to squeeze as much profit they can while the demand last without investing on increasing the manufacturing capacity.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.
Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.
I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
Or in a few years time memory chip production will meet demand, and prices will decrease.
Or the winners of the AI race will make enough money to buy up the majority of global production indefinitely...
But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
> Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.
Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
Memory pricing right is due to phantom demand from AI model/data center builders handing out future memory IOU'S has OpenAI accepted delivery?
By the way OpenAI has postponed their IPO until next year 2027.
> This is just pure greed
Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.
Pretty sure greed existed long before capitalism was a twinkle in any economist's eye. The East India Company was rapacious and evil and full of greed. But it was mercantilist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
This is unfortunately the market and “capitalism” working as it should. Price goes up, incentive to produce more goes up too.
Not necessarily. If the entire industry triples its prices and alienates 40% the market, it's still coming out ahead. It only incentivizes producing more if there are enough people unwilling to pay for the new prices, or if it were easy for a newcomer to come in (it's not)
best way to handle this is to stop buying/upgrading
Agree, us consumers should respond with our pockets
Bought my CTO M5 Pro just a month ago, i was a little bit skittish, thinking i should wait for the OLED one, but i think i'll be happier with the 64GB of RAM rather than that overpriced monitor.
Definitely not justified. You think Apple doesn't have warehouses of hardware. It's climate inflation based on a narrative they can exploit because of data centers being in the headlines. Smart, obvious, move because no one will jump ship.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.
They absolutely don't have warehouses of hardware. Tim Cook is a supply-chain-efficiency hawk from before he was CEO -- he was famous for reducing Apple's inventory.