I think Apple could easily swallow these price hikes in its profit margin if it wanted to, but then its shareholders wouldnt have as pretty numbers to look at in their quarterly reports.
All these AI companies need to stop hoarding RAM.
They could easily keep swallowing this if they wanted to.
But then they would only make $119 billion profit this year, and their reports would show negative growth. Cant have that now.
Their fiduciary duty just means they have to act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders and not act for personal gain. Apple just has to spin eating the margin as being in the best interest of those parties.
The real reason they don't isn't any duty to shareholders, its any sort of drop would wipe billions off their market cap and directly affect exec compensation.
If they ate an average $100 margin decrease on every one of those sales, that profit number wouldn’t go down from $120bn to $119bn, it would go down to $80bn.
Now you can absolutely argue that $80bn is still an excessively large number, but just so we’re being realistic about what the difference we’re looking at here is, it’s not a tiny percentage of their profits, it’s a third.
Still if I was ceo I'd take a third hit for another year and grab that sweet market share.
“We chose to invest in future market share, believing that was in the best interest of the company” is a perfectly valid choice for the company leaders and board to make.
I had the same opinion when they released the neo. In 3-4 years time there are going to be absolutely loads of them looking shabby and tired and running very slowly. Apple has been so careful over the past 3 decades to avoid that image, I'm surprised they are happy to go down that road now.
... having end user replaceable DDR5 RAM and end user replaceable storage. Even if it is a low end underpowered laptop.
Not everyone needs to render 8K videos in 5 minutes.