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.

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.

And in a few years, all the manufacturers will be wondering why those customers don't consume as much any more.

2026 computing, brokies need not apply.

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.

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.

Wow the top end MacBook Pro with 128 GB memory went up $1600 overnight!

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?

Mediamarkt already had the neo on "special price" (launch price) until the end of this month, it was pretty obvious what would happen

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.

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).

> 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.

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!

2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.

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.

How is the mini not increased?

Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!

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.

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.

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?

Inflation babyyyyyyyyyy. See if your salary also raises by 10-20% this year. You're getting priced the fuck out of everything, have fun.

> 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.

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...

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 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

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.

>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.

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.

Do you really think the warranty justifies that price differential? A warranty only protects against manufacturers defects.

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 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.

If anything they seem to be ones who managed to delay increasing prices more than the rest.

Eggs. That was the last omg inflation is crazy story and now they're about as cheap as they've ever been.

Seems like an awful lot of work.

Already gone at least from what I'm seeing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

September new versions will likely start at a price point than they would have

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.

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.

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…

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.

If people are sure they can always short NVIDIA

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.

> 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.

What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.

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.

The old race to the bottom.

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.

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 will see once they go public Dario did claim profit margin on inference is 40% if memory serves me right