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> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margi
by jsheard 7mo ago
> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins.
- philistine 7mo agoThey bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet.
- scottyah 7mo agoCommodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out". I wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.
- sally_glance 7mo agoHm I don't think a secondary market would work very well, using fab time productively requires lots of knowledge and collaboration with the provider. Compared to resources like grain or oil where it's basically "just come and pick it up when it's there".
- omcnoe 7mo agoThere were/are DRAM futures markets based on this hypothesis, historically they never worked very well because DRAM prices (at least for the same size/speed) have moved downwards so consistently over decades. That is until <6 months ago.
- mlrtime 7mo ago1) Every airline buys futures for oil, this is (one of) the points of the futures market. 2) If there is a market to hedge/speculate, it will exist. Maybe not 'fab futures' but there is definitely one.
- 1-more 7mo agoFun finance fact: "time on a machine that makes a precious commodity" is the first known futures contract, although in _Debt_ David Graeber posits that futures contracts are the original form of currency. The concrete example I'm thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presse...
- stingraycharles 7mo agoI thought they bought RAM externally, before soldering it on their chips? Regardless, point still stands, they probably ordered this several years ago.
- daveidol 7mo agoTheir margins may not have changed actually. https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o
- niwtsol 7mo agoThis is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.
- abhikul0 7mo agoM5 Max starts at 36GB memory at $3599. M4 Max started at the same memory at $3199. They have doubled the default storage from 1TB to 2TB, that's a $400 increase I'm paying even if I don't want the extra 1TB.
- aroman 7mo agoThey raised the base price by $200.
- carefree-bob 7mo agoApple's previous policy of price gouging for RAM means no need to raise prices yet, they still have a buffer.
- sgt 7mo agoIn practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB during the old Intel days.
- jsheard 7mo agoRAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
- sgt 7mo agoRAM isn't just RAM though. Unified memory on Apple Silicon provides significantly better memory management and efficiency compared to trad RAM
- ezst 7mo agoSays your rose-tinted marketing-loving glasses. Unified memory only means you lose some to graphics. Only your GPU wins this bargain, not your usual workloads.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoOther workloads win because on Apple Silicon the GPU memoy remains accessible by the CPU so there only needs to be one copy of computed resources for the GPU to use.
- cardanome 7mo agoThey advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit. Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling. Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.