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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

The massive spike in the price of RAM is making consumer electronics more expensive and worse.

True, for the average HN consumer

But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about

It seems to me that anyone going out of their way to compare current prices against prices from five or more years ago to adjust for inflation is not the average consumer, and shouldn't be juxtaposed as such.

To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.

The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...

High margin products are often the last to be impacted at retail because the seller has some cushion. And the impacts are only just getting started. We see the MacBook Neo with a somewhat sad 8GB RAM, most likely due to this. We'll see a combination of just plain higher prices (Steam Deck and Switch 2 have both gone up) and shrinkflation in the form of lower specs.

Interesting, thanks!

The Macbook Neo is 8GB because the A18 Pro has 8GB memory baked into its sandwich-style package at TSMC. The way these SoCs are constructed doesn't lend itself to having it paired with an arbitrary choice in memory specification the way other laptops do.

And Apple has longer-term contracts for delivery of their chips. Apple is more insulated from short term supply shocks because of this, and their giant pile of cash. But even they have discontinued some high-RAM configurations because of the situation.

As you mention, products elsewhere that use RAM have already gone up in price.

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