Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.
Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.
The Neo being an exception I beleive.
Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.
I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but also often true for Windows 95/98 as well!
Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time.
My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad.
People think "you have race conditions or you don't" and that is true on some level but if your utilization factors are low they might cause problems once a month but increase the load and those problems are happening once an hour. I saw all the symptoms that I expected such as a brand new and faster mac crashing less often than the old mac because it had more capacity to process events and less overlap between them.
Yeah '95 was bad, NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise (had terrible fights w/ a prof who was a roommate of Bill Gates who got a grant from Wintel to get new x86 machines.) Once we got those machines there were two of us you'd always find in front of the NT machines: the student who liked NT and myself who would use VNC to log into one of the few Linux machines. One day that prof came around and said "you win Paul!" and announced that most of those NT machines would be switched to Linux.
They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Toolbox still had to run in the main thread and be cooperatively multitasked so it wasn't much of an improvement (hence the lockups).
Classic Mac OS used a cooperative threading model which meant that one program locking up would lock up the whole computer, but Windows 95 was only slightly better in this regard. It didn't have any classical race conditions with the network as you can't "race" in a world with no preemptive threads--control is only ever handed off when a program explicitly yielded.
Win 95 had real processes and threads, memory protection and all of that but it wasn't terribly effective. The whole machine would go down frequently (as did Win NT despite Microsoft’s insistence otherwise; Microsoft kept repeating "It's the hardware stupid", Win2K was a great improvement but WDDM in Vista meant you could crash your display system and not crash the rest of the machine and I think got us in "rock solid" territory except for the the power management crashes that still dog us today) and it was absolutely endemic that applications would crash, I think because of memory safety problems. The industry went through a transition of "those crashes are annoying" to "those crashes prove your system is vulnerable to hacking..
I have had to argue with people so many times over that "you can't have race conditions in systems that have cooperative multithreading" in teams that couldn't fix those race conditions because they didn't believe they can exist.
Like yeah, thread A can't stomp on data that thread B depends on but you can definitely have situations where different things happen because of different orders of events. Like I was working on a knowledge graph editor in GWT around 2005 or so that had problems because it would try to cache results of XHRs and very different things could happen if a function called a callback synchronously with data from the cache or if later that callback got called by a callback that was called by the XHR. If you are systematic about things you can do it right, everybody is aware of these problems in threaded systems and threaded systems give you tools for protecting your data but in cooperative systems people will tell you don't exist even when the systems are crashing and corrupting data right before their eyes.
(Look at how Python has synchronization primitives for async that are roughly parallel to the ones in threading. In old school cooperative multithreading you are taking code that could be threaded and cutting it up into pieces manually and that gets super-difficult as complexity. Even if you don’t want to face up with concurrency means concurrency doesn’t want to face up to you.)
Only if the application explicitly set the cursor. There was no default indication that an application had stopped processing events - your only clue was that everything stopped responding.
You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
I think that was very hardware-dependent. I don't recall what hardware I had, but it had a > 90% success rate of resuming from suspend and/or hibernation under Windows XP.
Apple's advantage there being pretty obvious: they control the entire range of hardware
> You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
The irony being that I still have to turn wifi and bluetooth off and on on my macbook air regularly today, as airplay stops working every ~10-20 transfers / every other week.
The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.
A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.
I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.
If they announce it on, to pick a date, July 1 then by the time the iPhone is announced it will be somewhat old news. It will still get mentioned but it won’t be the main feature of every story at announcement time.
Like so many other companies Apple is between a rock and a hard place with this stuff.
I think they could get away with it if they do something like drop the price of the lowest device tier (or minimally hold price steady) and only increase prices on their more premium line up, where the premium buyers are less price sensitive.
If anything the percentage increase is probably higher on the low end phones relative to total bill cost.
Memory has been a boom/bust industry since the 1970s, so I imagine people are careful with long-term agreements, but that's just me spitballing.
It seems unlikely that Apple created a rainy day fund from offering an legacy product at niche prices almost a decade ago. Equally unlikely that Apple will continue to sell at a loss today out of a traditional disregard for decreasing component costs.
I suspect the opposite. 512gb of LPDDR5X is enough memory to make sixty four Macbook Neos. Apple's HPC/server audience is not very large or demanding, it seems likely that they will avoid memory upgrades during the shortage to focus on delivering value to low-end consumers and driving service sales.
Customers will be forced to buy the higher capacity iPhone. So iPhone 17 512GB start at $999.
Effectively Apple hasn't really up the price, customer just don't have the lower storage option.
Also we know that it's coming soon, that's why Cook is running cover for the new CEO. They don't want the new CEO to be the one taking the fall on higher prices, so before September 1 will be my guess.
Thank God I made the right decision and I bought a max'ed out Macbook Pro 5 Max with 128 GB of memory a couple of months ago. I think prices will continue to keep going up.
One thing is for sure, people consider that Apple hardware starts at $600.
They are not raising prices. They are keeping them low (in marketing) to outcompete others like Microsoft (aka Valve).
Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft for 15 years - people need to start considering Valve an extension of Microsoft. Their unofficial App Store for games.
This is a really weird take, considering Valve's push into Linux.
Valve is not an extension of Microsoft, they are a company that out-competed them.
I actually find it somewhat surprising that Microsoft is as warm as they are toward Valve. If there is a personal relationship factor, maybe that’s part of it.
But I think another part of it is that Microsoft ultimately makes more money via Steam than if Steam wasn’t a part of their ecosystem.
The argument “the market cornered us” is ridiculous for a behemoth like Apple. They had the opportunity to end, android, pc, consoles overnight.
Tim blew this.
And then what, sell it for cheap? Right, Apple is well-known for subsidising their hardware.
I could absolutely imagine Apple buying or creating a new DRAM plant, with a strategy of Apple being the primary customer and being able to undercut the rest of the consumer electronics industry.
If they had extra capacity they could sell chips at market rate as a bonus, but they’d be able to prioritize themselves as a customer.
Seems like a strategic slam dunk to me. Apple has only been getting more vertically integrated over time. With the way Apple subscription services work they have much more of an incentive to prioritize market share over hardware margins than in the past.
I suspect this is because of its CPU, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB RAM directly soldered on the CPU package, being overstock or something, or Intel secured the RAM supply upfront. I don't know but it's wild that this laptop is still early 2025 prices.
I think the M6 Pro/Max generation will have a substantial price increase given the new design, OLED, N2 TSMC node, and memory prices not coming down.
This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!
Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
The PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One all followed the pattern of dropping in price over the course of their lifetimes, because components got cheaper over time. The fact that the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have gone up in price is consistent with the general price elasticity.
I'm also OK with Apple having a rigid pricing structure and never really doing any sales or discounts, but then I expect them to not raise prices on the current M5 hardware, and leave those price hikes for the M6 generation that I assume is just around the corner.
In the 2020s we've blamed extrinsic causes such as the pandemic and the AI bubble but I am suspecting the intrinsic cause that new processes are more expensive to develop and more expensive to operate.
The tragedy of the PS5 is that even though it has sold a lot of units it doesn't represent the kind of generational change like the PS3 was. There are roughly 15 exclusive games and closest I come to one that I want is a remake of one of my favorite games from almost 20 years ago.
If true, one reason could be that: Cook is retiring, while Ternus is on his way in. Ternus wouldn't wanna start off with his first announcement being a ginormous price hike. Makes him look bad.
So Cook becomes the fall guy. i.e., he increases the price by 15% in the existing M5 range.
When Ternus comes in, he keeps prices stable on the M6 range. Makes Ternus look like an awesome guy...and gets him off on a flying start in his CEO tenure.
The M1 Mac mini, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S were all released on November 2020.
Since then, Apple has released the M2 mini (Jan 2023) and the M4 mini (Nov 2024), and I'd be willing to bet we'll see an M6 mini later this year. The PS5 has had the habitual mid-generation "Slim" refresh and the Pro (a smallish specs bump), and Xbox Series X|S has seen barely any changes.
My M1 Max MBP is still a beast of a laptop, but it hasn't been the current model in aeons. My Xbox Series X is still current.
Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.
> It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.
Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.
I think this is going to impact NVidia too but in a different way. Normally in NVidia's product cycle we'd expect 50x0 Super mid-cycle refreshes. It's clear that's not happening this time around. We might expect the 6000 series late next year. I think there's zero incentive for NVidia to do that so that'll likely get delayed into 2028 or possibly 2029. 5090 prices keep going up even though it's 1.5 years old.
Anyway, as for Apple I'm keenly watching for the anticipated refresh of the Mac Studio lineup. The previous gen (M3 Ultra, M4 Max) just don't have the raw horsepower even though they had configs up to 512GB (512GB and 256GB now discontinued). It'll be interesting to see what the max config is and when these come up. Q3 2026 is widely expected but I wouldn't be surprised if it slips into 2027.
The Neo seems likely to.
The technology all exists to do this and it’s ideal for the kind of local inference Apple wants to push.
That config can be had for $5100 already: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
Yes but to a point. Like Microsoft raised their Surface series prices. There's internal threshold of what they can tolerate before raising prices.
You can see the price and trend here: https://www.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Yet, remember that costs are more complex with currencies and shipping prices.
I bought it with 32 and OWC sold me the exact same sticks of memory (manufacturer, timings) for $1,050.
Same. $3,000 for 8TB of SSD. $1,200 for 4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pros and a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe enclosure. Which actually ran about 500MB/s faster than the Apple SSD.
I also think now, with RAM prices increased, ALL hardware manufacturers should be considered an illegal mafia aka cartel. It can not be that they steal money that way. That is not how capitalism and free market work. This is a de-facto monopoly. States need to do something; the USA under Trump is just a corporate disguise right now. They are doing nothing about it. The EU is not much better, slow and like a behemoth focusing on "data privacy" (but then handing over all of our data to the USA anyway and on top of that mandating age sniffing soon). They don't protect consumers from exploding RAM prices.