So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.
I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.
TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.
Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.
The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.
I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.
The official one. The reality is a bit worse. A trip to the supermarket was 50 Euros some years ago, now it is 150 - 200 50 Euros. That is not "a few percent".
Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.
This is capitalism, as demand increases, so does price, regardless of the cogs.
Capitalism is simply where private individuals own the "means of production" (factories, tools, land) and operate them to accumulate profit.
That is private as in not lords, guilds, cartels, governmental authorities, tribal leaderships, etc.
There's a lot of stuff people conflate with capitalism like free market economics, currency, share based companies, free mobility of labor, or debt instruments of any kind.
Capitalism does require a market so goods can be exchanged, that's all it requires, and there's enough flavors of capitalism thanks to the different countries in the world that this distinction isn't superfluous.
I’m worried that this is a harbinger of dollar collapse.
Inflation doesn’t show up evenly everywhere. It shows up in assets and hot areas first.
The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.
We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.
IBM was extremely vertically integrated. What actually happened was that Compaq reverse engineered their BIOS and made a compatible system and the courts said it was okay.
The thing destroying the modern world is DMCA 1201. Adversarial interoperability is fundamental.
Rest assured there would be no IBM PC compatibles otherwise, in fact PS/2 and MCA architecture was a failed attempt to regain control.
The difference is that now if someone wants to make a competing store for iOS apps, or a competing client app for Reddit or Twitter, the incumbents use the DMCA and remote attestation and similar anti-competitive levers to lock those competitors out of the market and governments have been letting them get away with it.
It is easy to say that IBM had monopolistic tendencies, because they did. On the other hand, the 5100 sounds like a vertically integrated design and it ended up being extremely expensive. The Datamaster strayed away from IBM components, but was still based upon IBM software. One can blame it's failure on the IBM PC being released a month later, but in a way that would prove the point. The Datamaster had such a big head start that the IBM PC borrowed elements of it's design, while the proprietary software of the Datamaster held back its release date.
Undoubtedly, IBM wanted more control over the PC. Avoiding a completely proprietary design was probably a calculated bet, an intentional course of action rather than a mistake. It just happens to be a bet they lost.
Only a handful of companies can make high end memory, semiconductors and semiconductor equipment. And some of them are wary of creating overcapacity down the line. Creating new capacity takes years and creating a competitor to any of these companies takes even longer, even when the incentives (high prices) exist.
So it's absolutely possible that consumers change behaviour before a sufficient supply side response arrives.
Demand destruction is a market response as well.
Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.
And then the opposite can happen like an unknown drone with 100 kg warhead striking memory production facility.
China.
This market situation is a perfect storm for chinese manufacturers to step up. They don't have to chase latest-and-greatest, price-performance is one of the strongest demand drivers in consumer segment. They need a viable alternative, offer it at a reasonable price - which is much easier to achieve under current heavily inflated conditions - and that would quickly entrench them as a household brand.
Remember, it's not that there's no chinese lithography tech at all, it's just not advanced enough to yield mass production silicon at commercially viable prices. It might be the case that at current market conditions this caveat does not hold and all they need to do is ship. Even if the current prices mean they do it at break-even it would still be an enormously massive win.
Again, they don't have to compete at the flagship level from the get go, they need something commercially viable. There are tons of Chinese companies in the west and probably even more western on the outside chinese white-label goods. Chinese government has enough weight to push domestic silicon on those companies to create domestic silicon industry that can make the unit economies work.
All in all, there is a very likely scenario where this current AI boom and the resulting crunch on silicon supply creates a competitive silicon industry in China. If you think something in the realm of "I would not buy chinese silicon even if it was cheaper" it does not matter. Look at smartphone market share outside of USA, Japan and West Europe: in majority of the world Apple+Samsung barely touches 50%. What this "rest of the world" lacks in individual purchasing power it more than makes up for in numbers.
Even if somehow you had the super hero ability to create this silicon out of thin air and even double it, I'd argue that it wouldn't drive down prices.
Simply because both the AI datacenter's need and their ability to pay is bigger then the consumer market. So far it seems that the more silicon you throw at AI, then the better your reasoning output. So the cheaper the chips, the more these datacenters will buy. Arguably they would buy even more because then you can tell investors that you have more powerful models (due to more compute) and your price per output is cheaper (because average hardware is cheaper).
1. That a new player would offer enterprise level product, instead of consumer grade. IMO it's very likely that if such a scenario unfolded, the market would be segmented into enterprise/consumer not only at the product level, but at the supplier level too. At least initially.
2. That AI compute demand is essentially unlimited AND silicon production capacity is and will remain bottleneck in datacenter buildouts. IMO we are much closer to the point where physical infrastructure becomes the apparent bottleneck than it would seem, IF political climate allows. Datacenter buildout is THE talking point in Ohio elections and if the dems win, datacenters will become THE talking point in the whole USofA. In just a couple of months the landscape they are operating in could become very different.
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
What will happen once people are priced out of buying computers? I find this worrying.
I’m sure some kind capitalist will be happy to rent them a thin client linked to a computer in the cloud.
Companies will prioritize components for cloud computing and lease us thin clients...
Leasing not only allows Apple to keep "selling" people new devices, it will also mostly like accelerate the second-hand sales and resource recycling arms of the business. Consumers will be more willing to upgrade sooner and stay in perpetual payments vs having to buy out the device at lease end - and Apple gets back newer devices where the recycled tech is arguably more valuable.
- Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs
- Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform
So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative.
Government regulation will lead to:
- Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections
- Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Everything government involvement touches gets more expensive. See healthcare, college tuition, student loan debt as some easy examples.
Medicare is cheaper that US private insurance:
* https://www.kff.org/medicare/how-much-more-than-medicare-do-...
Also:
> A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.
* https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage...
Oh, you mean like Apple, Google, and Microsoft?
> - Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.
Have you looked around? This is already happening.
And it leads to comments like the parent blaming "capitalism"
Literally everything listed for 'government regulation will lead to' can and has happened in unchecked capitalism. Insider connections rule everything right now in this current regime of chest-beating 'capitalists.'
Capitalism and socialism aren't real things outside of freshman year econ textbooks.
The one notable exception is if you're a group of workers and you negotiate a contract with your employer: the state can and will interfere to void it if it prevents the workers from being properly exploited.
Maybe we'll see a return to the late 1990's, when companies would give you a free computer as long as you allowed it to constantly display an ad banner on the top of the screen.
But yes, they all went out of business during when the dot-com bubble burst.
Macs, as nice as the hardware is, are hostile to repair.
We've been through.. 4? 5? memory boom-bust-boom cycles already. Nothing is pointing to this one being any different, aside it probably becoming the mother of all busts since AI isn't adding much productivity and as businesses realize this, they'll stop paying top dollar for access meaning AI vendors cancel all their reserved fab capacity.
The fabs already exist at that point so it's less of a loss for the memory fabs to crank out memory chips and have the RAM OEMs sell them at bargain bin prices. No pseudo-cartel pricing possible either with CMXT becoming a major player. $50 for 32GB-64GB of DDR5 in 2029 here we come babyy
Would love to know where this comes from. I am not sure about that. Could you point to data/anecdata?
There's been a few studies. Most find productivity gain from 'AI' to be negligible.
One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?
Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.
Right, but are you delivering 3x more software now, and more importantly, are you selling 3x more software now?
This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.
It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).
So, if the product isn't selling any more expensive even though you're adding ~8 times more features, or if you're still getting paid for the full 40 hours even though you only really work 5, then economic productivity hasn't actually increased.
You've returned one of the most valuable resources (time) back to a human. In my mind there's simply nothing more valuable, and no sign of of efficiency more poignant than that.
The reason why it is very relevant is that, in the way we have unfortunately structured our economy, the amount of work you have to do to be able to eat and enjoy your time will always expand to grow to at least force you to maintain (if not increase) your economic productivity. That is, if AI enables engineers to deliver 10x more features in the same unit of time, then their employers will expect them to deliver 10x more features to continue earning their current pay.
So, while the AI did, in principle, allow you to just reduce your work schedule while getting the same pay, as you're providing the same results in 1/10th of the time, the economic system does not - your previous work is instead simply worth less than it used to be. Assuming you're not happy to take a 90% pay cut, you'll have to continue spending 40+ hour weeks, just using AI as well now.
Look at all the shit github README before llm. Most repos didn't bother because it was effort. those few that did, were because of autistic focus. Of those, very few were "great" user documentation.
now llms are here, the effort barrier is gone, and now we're inundated with shit README that provide no value to users nor respect their time.
Once you start applying SKILL.md that revolve around fixing HOW to communicate value to users in a way that respects their time, you'll see this story change in noticeable places.
I doubt it will change everywhere because it also requires that you give a shit about doing this in the first place, so those people Ed Zitron talks about... business idiots won't care, because they're ultimately nihlist.
The Principles of Scientific Management was just wrong that these ideas extend universally but we are still doing this stupid Barnesian performance as if they do. It clearly makes no sense with knowledge work. It is stupid.
Then the efficient market hypothesis provides a type of circular proof because since the market is always right, if this didn't work we wouldn't be doing it. Another stupid idea we are not able to get past.
This goes back before AI, with computers not being found to be improving productivity numbers: Solow's paradox.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
For my job and basically everyone I know outside of programming, the productivity from AI is literally zero.
I think what this says is the productivity is in specific silos and why the experience of the utility of AI is so vastly different for different people.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/27/america-has-be...
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
I used to use it daily and now not at all.
no one remembers the last time things got better rather than worse. shitcoin-driven scarcity seamlessly transitioned into COVID-driven scarcity and now into hyperscaler-driven scarcity. the chipmakers' cabal decided to meet increased demand with four digit margins rather than expanding production.
It's Deja vu for NVMe and SSD drives this time as prices are way up there.
If it persists for years people will have time to spin up more fabs and meet demand
The m6 with same specs are $2000.
Also m4 Mac mini seem to now be in stock on their refurbished store.
What happens is that people start buying Chinese mini PCs, some of those even have spyware preinstalled along with another malware that is Windows 11
After several months of wasted lifetime, it died and got the deserved burial at a recycling center.
I may need to replace some parts at some point, but this far it's not been necessary.
I'd love to have the 16", which didn't exist when I bought the 13", but thanks to Altman, hardware prices are insane these days. :/
Same with my M1 Air for being on the move, even notebooks would be more expensive than they’re worth.
It will last longer and hopefully the GPU prices will recover in a few years.
I hope
My son is using my old ~2011 Mac mini with Linux Mint on it. Slow but works.
Personal assistant (e.g. openclaw) in the mac ecosystem. You need external models to power it ofc, but cool to have all the Apple integration and local network in your assistant. The claw can be addressed in multiple ways and can command your local hardware if you so wish.
If you are running Steam in the background, one of the buttons triggers an HUD keyboard, where the left trackpad types keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right trackpad for the right side of the keyboard. My guess is the new controller works the same way.
Also, some media center software, such as Kodi, have gamepad support. So a gamepad will feel completely natural to control it without having to resort to using the mouse and HUD keyboard.