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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I feel sorry for any company trying to launch a new compute product during this window of extremely elevated RAM and SSD prices.

This looks well built with a lot of attention to detail. It’s impressive that the price isn’t higher for this level of machining and build quality on a low volume product.

I could see this doing well in some niche studios where they value design of all of the products in the office, but it’s a tough niche. The graphic and video designers are all going to be buying Apple. The CAD and engineering people want something with a real GPU. Most developers want a laptop that they can take with them. It’s nice that parts can be upgraded, but anchoring to that CPU is tough.

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Cost of RAM and SSD seems like a secondary challenge. Trying to piss up a waterfall is more in line with the reality that products that are first about design and second about capability face when entering the current workstation and laptop markets that have been iterated on for decades and haven't seen a dramatic new redesign ever.

The closest such advance in recent years didn't happen and instead turned into the macbook neo. Apple could have released an OS for the iphone pro max model of phones that allow them to boot Mac OS when attached to a docking station. And sold a laptop formfactor docking station.

> The closest such advance in recent years didn't happen and instead turned into the macbook neo. Apple could have released an OS for the iphone pro max model of phones that allow them to boot Mac OS when attached to a docking station. And sold a laptop formfactor docking station.

I find it more likely that Apple are working furiously the other way: to make Macbooks boot iOS.

> window of extremely elevated RAM and SSD prices

Is it a window? It seems likely to me that we're going to be paying the LLM tax on all of our consumer electronics for the rest of our lives.

They cant outspend each other forever. And with all the datacenters not even being able to be hooked up compute isnt the problem, its powering it.

Yes, even memory manufacturers believe it is temporary which is part of the reason that supply has not increased to match demand and prices have spiked.

> even memory manufacturers believe it is temporary

Do they? Is that why they've committed to literally doubling their production capacity in 5 years?

Yes?

And most of that is just announcements from SK Hynix and CXMT coming online. Samsung's announcements are more conservative, and Micron is barely building shit. All of it put together still drags far behind demand, according to every financial statement by every DRAM manufacturer.

This is intentional because DRAM historically follow boom-bust cycles. Literally, they have all said they are intentionally aiming to build less than demand. Nobody wants to be stuck paying for a fab that isn't running at capacity 10 years from now.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sky-high-dram-prices-set-1229...

Considering their position, I wouldn't trust a damn thing that memory manufacturers say right now. They're the ones taking advantage of the increased demand by increasing prices.

That's not how it works. There's a lot of DRAM pricing scandals but this is not one of them.

In this supply constrained market, DRAM manufacturers literally aren't the ones deciding to increase prices, buyers who are bidding up the price of future capacity are the ones increasing the prices.

What does what they say have to do with it?

If memory manufacturers believed that elevated demand were likely to persist indefinitely, expanding supply to reach the optimal market-clearing price is exactly what taking advantage of the situation would look like.

The extent to which they're not investing in expanded production capacity is the extent to which they manifestly don't believe the current demand spike will sustain over the long term

So you think supply isn't going to increase in the next ~40 years?

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