I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.
Happens with all kind of companies: oil goes up, prices go up, record revenues for the companies. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with Apple.