4 ms·

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I bought an M1 Air for €1050. That same M1 Air is still being sold by that same store, but now costs €1126. That's a 7% rise in pric

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I bought an M1 Air for €1050. That same M1 Air is still being sold by that same store, but now costs €1126. That's a 7% rise in price for a laptop that's now 2,5 years old. This is just ridiculous.

HPsquared 4y ago
Technically the price did still fall in real terms. Not great, though.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Adjusted for inflation 1050 EUR in 2021 is 1,189.2 EUR in 2023. You're right that's a 7% increase in nominal terms but a 5.5% decrease in real dollar terms.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
    The tech is also 2.5 years older, which should be taken j to account.
- LoveMortuus 4y ago
  Technically correct, but I doubt salaries followed the inflation, so for most of people, it's just more expensive. :/
  - ajross 4y ago
    Salary growth leads inflation in virtually all cases, and in this one too. (Realized I can still edit: reply after reply is trying to interpret this as a statement about causality, which it emphatically is not. I'm just saying that ordering is complicated in feedback systems, and that the needed salary growth to compensate for existing inflation largely already happened. This is doubly or triply true for the tech salaries people here are making.)
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      Salaries are only redistribution of current money supply. Inflation means an increased money supply and only banks can increase it, wether it's government banks, private banks, or both.
      - ajross 4y ago
        It's a feedback cycle, arguments about which node in the graph is the "real" one are pointless. My point was just empirical: almost always, the proximate cause of "inflation" is increased consumer spending, and the proximate cause of that is usually salary growth. And it was this time too. So an argument of the form "salaries don't keep up with inflation" is backwards (usually). They already did!
        merpnderp 4y ago
        It is not so simple as to say salaries went up so inflation went up. Inflation from decreased supply at the same time as increased Treasury spending through stimuluses, coupled with the workforce shrinking, is what caused salaries to rise.
        ajross 4y ago
        Once more, I'm not making an argument about causality. I'm saying that the "compensation" of salaries for inflation already happened. Arguments about "why" just aren't helpful here. Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else and knows policies that will be perfect, and everyone is wrong for the same reasons. It's a cyclic feedback market and it just does this stuff, for the most part. But you absolutely can't look at things with a microscope and say "salaries don't keep up with inflation", because that's (almost by definition) never true.
        carlosjobim 4y ago
        It's not a feedback cycle. Inflation is the increase in money existing. Paying higher salaries do not increase the amount of money existing, as that money is taken from somewhere. Raising prices do not increase the amount of money existing. Only the money creators can increase the amount of money existing. Money is created by banks and governments in symbiosis. Increased prices of labour or products is always a consequence of inflation and never the cause of inflation.
  - factorialboy 4y ago
    @ajross, money printing leads to inflation, not salary growth.
    - CyanBird 4y ago
      Why make verifiably false statements like this? >... > It isn’t clear that increasing interest rates will have any impact on lowering prices. The nascent resurgence in inflation being experienced across the world is primarily still due to supply chain disruptions. The mechanism by which rising interest rates are supposed to impact inflation is essentially by increasing unemployment, which weakens workers’ bargaining power and thus slows wage growth. But lowering wage growth won’t do anything to address supply side constraints or energy shortages, which are a driver of ‘cost-push’ rather than ‘demand-pull’ inflation. > ... > The trade-off for policy makers between creating jobs and wage growth, while simultaneously controlling inflation, goes back to a 1958 paper by economist William Phillips on the relationship between ‘Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957’, which became a cornerstone of macroeconomics. The paper identified the correlation between lower unemployment with higher inflation and vice-versa (see Figure 2). The explanation for this relationship was that as unemployment decreased the ability of workers to bid for higher wages increased due to less competition in the labour market. Higher wages mean more income to spend on goods and services, which leads to prices going up. This is bad for net creditors and net savers, because the inflation cancels out the interest on savings. By contrast, workers and net borrowers benefit from rising wages and prices, as it allows them to pay off their debt more quickly, which is depreciating in real terms relative to their income. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/bank-of-england-rishi-sunak-wages-inflation-interest-rates-covid https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/bank-of-england-rishi-sunak... Inflation is multifactorial, different types of disruption to the economic web cause different effects on it, the article then goes on to mention the overall lower wages on US and UK post Reagan Thatcher as case study for how labor and wage growth changes inflation rates
      - junofan 4y ago
        Would prefer to see a more reliable source on economics than a democratic socialist magazine website. Maybe a balanced review in an academic journal.
- blahblah1234567 4y ago
  [dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
senttoschool 4y ago
Adjust for inflation and exchange rate.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  What's the point of that? My mom who walks into a store doesn't adjust for inflation. Her income hasn't been adjusted for inflation, let alone exchange rate. Many people on HN can probably explain why the price is what it is now. That doesn't mean that people are willing (or capable) to pay that much.
  - yazzku 4y ago
    It really is hard for some people to understand, right? Mom makes X Prices go up Mom still makes X
    - bombcar 4y ago
      And Mom decides not to buy an M2, which makes perfect sense (to me) - most people's income eventually somewhat maybe adjusts for inflation at some time, but prices on milk and stuff adjust much faster. One of the best ways to look at the effects of inflation is how long between "upgrades" of various things like cars, computers, phones, TVs, etc. Also, everyone and their mother wanted to buy the M1 when it came out, because it was just so much better than what came before; but there's no real pressing reason to upgrade to the M2 from the M1, so most of the new purchases will be the last few Intel hold-outs upgrading, or new customers. At $999 and a major performance increase, a new laptop might be a no-brainer (especially compared to replacing batteries, etc). But at $1199 and a minor increase, why bother?
    - astrange 4y ago
      Not true for retirees because Social Security gets inflation adjustments. Probably not true in general either except in stagflation.
      - kipchak 4y ago
princevegeta89 4y ago
Lol, interesting how the price went up instead of down, even after having the next generation version released and with 2 years of time lapsing.
raydev 4y ago
All non-US countries experience this. Apple strictly ties pricing to some USD value, which at the baseline is not always 1:1 (meaning it may be more expensive taking into account conversion). If your country's dollar falls in value, Apple punishes your country. It's not fair to you as an individual, but it's how Apple have operated for at least the last 15 years.
- surfingdino 4y ago
  We ought to consider ourselves lucky in the UK. We have Apple Stores that we can walk into a buy Macs. In the 1990s Mac were sold by authorised dealers who closed their stores at the end of the working day. The first Macs you could buy from major electronics retailers were the Performa models. I am not defending Apple, but Macs are more affordable and accessible than they were before while being priced at levels that are way above similar PC hardware. Just like they were before.

HPsquared 4y ago

Technically the price did still fall in real terms. Not great, though.

arcticbull 4y ago
Adjusted for inflation 1050 EUR in 2021 is 1,189.2 EUR in 2023. You're right that's a 7% increase in nominal terms but a 5.5% decrease in real dollar terms.
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
  The tech is also 2.5 years older, which should be taken j to account.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
Technically correct, but I doubt salaries followed the inflation, so for most of people, it's just more expensive. :/
- ajross 4y ago
  Salary growth leads inflation in virtually all cases, and in this one too. (Realized I can still edit: reply after reply is trying to interpret this as a statement about causality, which it emphatically is not. I'm just saying that ordering is complicated in feedback systems, and that the needed salary growth to compensate for existing inflation largely already happened. This is doubly or triply true for the tech salaries people here are making.)
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Salaries are only redistribution of current money supply. Inflation means an increased money supply and only banks can increase it, wether it's government banks, private banks, or both.
    - ajross 4y ago
      It's a feedback cycle, arguments about which node in the graph is the "real" one are pointless. My point was just empirical: almost always, the proximate cause of "inflation" is increased consumer spending, and the proximate cause of that is usually salary growth. And it was this time too. So an argument of the form "salaries don't keep up with inflation" is backwards (usually). They already did!
      - merpnderp 4y ago
        It is not so simple as to say salaries went up so inflation went up. Inflation from decreased supply at the same time as increased Treasury spending through stimuluses, coupled with the workforce shrinking, is what caused salaries to rise.
        ajross 4y ago
        Once more, I'm not making an argument about causality. I'm saying that the "compensation" of salaries for inflation already happened. Arguments about "why" just aren't helpful here. Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else and knows policies that will be perfect, and everyone is wrong for the same reasons. It's a cyclic feedback market and it just does this stuff, for the most part. But you absolutely can't look at things with a microscope and say "salaries don't keep up with inflation", because that's (almost by definition) never true.
      - carlosjobim 4y ago
        It's not a feedback cycle. Inflation is the increase in money existing. Paying higher salaries do not increase the amount of money existing, as that money is taken from somewhere. Raising prices do not increase the amount of money existing. Only the money creators can increase the amount of money existing. Money is created by banks and governments in symbiosis. Increased prices of labour or products is always a consequence of inflation and never the cause of inflation.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  @ajross, money printing leads to inflation, not salary growth.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Why make verifiably false statements like this? >... > It isn’t clear that increasing interest rates will have any impact on lowering prices. The nascent resurgence in inflation being experienced across the world is primarily still due to supply chain disruptions. The mechanism by which rising interest rates are supposed to impact inflation is essentially by increasing unemployment, which weakens workers’ bargaining power and thus slows wage growth. But lowering wage growth won’t do anything to address supply side constraints or energy shortages, which are a driver of ‘cost-push’ rather than ‘demand-pull’ inflation. > ... > The trade-off for policy makers between creating jobs and wage growth, while simultaneously controlling inflation, goes back to a 1958 paper by economist William Phillips on the relationship between ‘Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957’, which became a cornerstone of macroeconomics. The paper identified the correlation between lower unemployment with higher inflation and vice-versa (see Figure 2). The explanation for this relationship was that as unemployment decreased the ability of workers to bid for higher wages increased due to less competition in the labour market. Higher wages mean more income to spend on goods and services, which leads to prices going up. This is bad for net creditors and net savers, because the inflation cancels out the interest on savings. By contrast, workers and net borrowers benefit from rising wages and prices, as it allows them to pay off their debt more quickly, which is depreciating in real terms relative to their income. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/bank-of-england-rishi-sunak-wages-inflation-interest-rates-covid https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/bank-of-england-rishi-sunak... Inflation is multifactorial, different types of disruption to the economic web cause different effects on it, the article then goes on to mention the overall lower wages on US and UK post Reagan Thatcher as case study for how labor and wage growth changes inflation rates
    - junofan 4y ago
      Would prefer to see a more reliable source on economics than a democratic socialist magazine website. Maybe a balanced review in an academic journal.
blahblah1234567 4y ago
[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

senttoschool 4y ago

Adjust for inflation and exchange rate.

donkeyd 4y ago
What's the point of that? My mom who walks into a store doesn't adjust for inflation. Her income hasn't been adjusted for inflation, let alone exchange rate. Many people on HN can probably explain why the price is what it is now. That doesn't mean that people are willing (or capable) to pay that much.
- yazzku 4y ago
  It really is hard for some people to understand, right? Mom makes X Prices go up Mom still makes X
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And Mom decides not to buy an M2, which makes perfect sense (to me) - most people's income eventually somewhat maybe adjusts for inflation at some time, but prices on milk and stuff adjust much faster. One of the best ways to look at the effects of inflation is how long between "upgrades" of various things like cars, computers, phones, TVs, etc. Also, everyone and their mother wanted to buy the M1 when it came out, because it was just so much better than what came before; but there's no real pressing reason to upgrade to the M2 from the M1, so most of the new purchases will be the last few Intel hold-outs upgrading, or new customers. At $999 and a major performance increase, a new laptop might be a no-brainer (especially compared to replacing batteries, etc). But at $1199 and a minor increase, why bother?
  - astrange 4y ago
    Not true for retirees because Social Security gets inflation adjustments. Probably not true in general either except in stagflation.
    - kipchak 4y ago

princevegeta89 4y ago

Lol, interesting how the price went up instead of down, even after having the next generation version released and with 2 years of time lapsing.

raydev 4y ago

All non-US countries experience this. Apple strictly ties pricing to some USD value, which at the baseline is not always 1:1 (meaning it may be more expensive taking into account conversion). If your country's dollar falls in value, Apple punishes your country. It's not fair to you as an individual, but it's how Apple have operated for at least the last 15 years.

surfingdino 4y ago
We ought to consider ourselves lucky in the UK. We have Apple Stores that we can walk into a buy Macs. In the 1990s Mac were sold by authorised dealers who closed their stores at the end of the working day. The first Macs you could buy from major electronics retailers were the Performa models. I am not defending Apple, but Macs are more affordable and accessible than they were before while being priced at levels that are way above similar PC hardware. Just like they were before.