Hacker News Reader

Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. 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).

View on HN

> Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now

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.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

PS5's increased to compensative for the many Sony gaming flops, like the $100m Concord (closed down within a couple of weeks) and the $200m Marathon (still on life support but they had to cancel the much more popular Destiny 2 to prioritise it).

Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).

It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.

They’re not dropping in price though. PS5 is 25% more expensive than at launch six years ago.

Sure, and what I'm saying is that I'm ok with them doing that. It's a matter of consistency.

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.

I haven't seen other people call it but I think the ultimate force behind Moore's law is not transistors getting smaller but transistors getting cheaper. Like you can make them smaller all you want but if you can't make them cheaper you can't afford them.

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.

Yes, exactly. Price hikes mid-cycle is not something I have seen Apple do historically.

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.

My experiences have been that Macs last far longer than consoles.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm talking about the product lifecycle, not the device lifecycle.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com