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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?

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15 years ago I was an intern at Micron and learned they passed on a contract with Apple because Apple insisted on discounts and there wasn't a compelling reason to reduce profit at Micron.

So yeah, Apple probably does pay less. But the market has enough demand that suppliers do say no.

This is actually relevant, because DRAM costs just as much now per Gb as it did 15 years ago (that's controlling for inflation; it's as much as it cost 20 years ago on a pure price basis).

>Apple buys and uses so much RAM across all its product lines that it’s in a better negotiating position than the likes of Framework or Raspberry Pi, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the company’s last earnings call that memory pricing could begin to eat into Apple’s profit margins later this year.

I would think the price gouging on memory tiers is why its in a better negotiating position. Having 200% markup means minor market conditions wont prevent them from payment.

There's also the fact that they were charging $200 to add 8GB of RAM before the prices went up, when that much RAM was something like $70 at retail.

The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.

I was configuring my M5 MBP preorder and 48=>64 was 250 EUR so not sure if they cut prices or your numbers are outdated ?

Prices in the US are usually much lower than in Europe. I just checked and 48->64 ram bump is still $200

I just did a 14" MBP with M5 Max, 128GB RAM, 4TB SSD, nano-texture display. Price difference is $5849 vs 7004 EUR ($8136).

I'd say half of that difference is that we have VAT included in price.

But my point is that's a 16GB jump for 200$ not 8GB

US prices are often low enough that it's almost worth the flight just to grab one.

14' MBP M5 Pro 64GB - $2999 or 3449 €

That's not US prices, it's just price without VAT vs with VAT included. US also has sales tax it's just not included in list prices.

Well but some states don't have a sales tax.

Actually that is relatively cheaper than Apple has ever sold ram. They would always charge $200 for each ram upgrade and it might have been only 4gb or less back then.

The twist now though is they started soldering in the RAM with the retina macbook, so you can't run around apple's extortionate pricing like you could in the past and just buy components off the market.

Such a stupid cartoon evil villain move too, just to force us into getting RAM from them. I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM) in my life and yet I am forced to buy computers that optimize for this at the expense of things I actually care about like serviceability. And also consider the fact it incentivizes people to buy more RAM than they need today in effort to future proof their device, in a time of RAM shortages. And who knows maybe by the time that RAM amount is relevant the CPU can no longer keep up so the hoarding might not even be for anything either.

> I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM)

This isn't even a plausible excuse. For the entry level machines, the soldered RAM only has the same memory bandwidth as ordinary laptops. For the high end machines it likewise doesn't have any more than other high end machines (Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon) which just do the same thing as Apple -- use more memory channels -- without soldering the RAM.

And it's especially a kick in the teeth right now because it means you can't buy a machine with less RAM than you might prefer and then upgrade it later if prices come back down. If it's soldered then only what you can afford at the right now prices is all the machine will ever have.

I think part of what's happening lately is that chip folks are start to realize they can make margin too. Maybe it's possible thanks to consolidation but for sure folks see the crazy margins nvida, apple etc have, and I suspect they're like - we want that too!

It costs the same, we just mark it as an opportunity cost of unloading the memory on the spot market.

If I buy contracts for 1 gold bar at $500, and the gold price runs to $1200, I can either continue to market my gold-containing product for the same profit margin, or I can unload all that gold for $1200/bar and make a profit of $700/bar. If my profit margin is high and it doesn't take many gold bars to make a thousand units, maybe discontinuation doesn't make any sense. But if my product is "solid gold statuary of Dear Leader", and the bars are most of my cost basis, I know what I'd do.

You’re thinking only finance. Their goal in buying the contract is to secure the good. The ability to maintain price will allow them to sell more units which is the number they want to show.

More importantly it'll probably get some people to switch, and potentially they have a customer for life now.

Yes but the clock has been ticking, new products are being released, and at some point they will be renegotiating the next contract

Yup, and it looks like it will be a tough negotiation:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/26/apple-agrees-100-price-...

Apple needs to seriously consider some sort of vertical integration on memory, it has proved it can do it with CPU's

Amazing that it's gotten to that point but I think that's right. It's more intuitive that you would need vertical integration with your processing chips because of the degree of expert specialization necessary to produce them, especially in close coordination with a major product release.

By comparison, ram seems much more a commodity, but the game has changed and it seems like there may be an important strategic interest in sourcing and supplying your own.

Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.

Not if their margin on the completed product is higher than the potential profit on the memory.

My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.

Or they believe the long term value of two customers is bigger than one.

It can be about more than the single sale.

That doesn't take into account the profit generated by selling the mac in itself

Or the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.

The story is literally about them cancelling a product variant...

And you think this is the first sign that they’ve decided they’re going to spend the next few years being a RAM reseller before starting to sell consumer products again?

No, but "shipping less RAM" is clearly on that spectrum. The point wasn't about literal product strategy, it's that there's a limit to what actions are financially feasible and it's set by "what else could you do with that junk?"

Yea, wwdc is happening soon and the M5 ultra is in production . The new pricing will be respective on the highest config (768 gb is rumored) though.

M5 Max has still only 128GB RAM at most; one would expect 192GB if there was any indication M5 Ultra would have 768GB RAM?

The maximum memory configuration for the M3 Max MBP was also128GB.

That's my whole point. M3 Max 128GB -> M3 Ultra 512GB. M5 Max 128GB -> M5 Ultra 512GB. But if M5 Max 192GB -> M5 Ultra 768GB, i.e. Ultra having 4x the memory of Max.

It is a rumor at this time and we are going from M3 to M5 on the Ultra not the M4 to the M5

it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market

other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly

but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with

But they did raise the price of the 256GB model.

Yep, but it they had to double or triple it on short notice, they'd have just removed it from the store instead, and I imagine that the RAM is going into 256GB systems for more $$$ but still nothing really that alarming for the consumer.

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