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Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs
- jannes 4mo agoProps to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices. It had even led to some anomalies where Apple machines were a better price than similar Windows machines.
- dataflow 4mo ago> Props to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices. Yeah, it's a laudable miracle that this $4T+ company could survive this long without raising prices on such razor-thin margins.
- looofooo0 4mo agoThe iPhone is also a vehicle to hook people into the Apple ecosystem, where Services like the App Store bring in 40% of all gross profit with margins of 75%.
- flaunf221 4mo ago> without raising prices. Because they were already selling memory at crisis prices when it was dirt cheap. And now they want those crazy margins again.
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt's nothing special, high-margin product prices are less sensitive to the costs.
- lostlogin 4mo agoIs that it, or did Apple negotiate long term contracts with suppliers? Tim Apple has never been one to shy away from squeezing out another dollar.
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt could be that too. But just seeing Apple not raise prices on the face of it, that could be purely from taking lower margins. I'd have to dig into the last earnings call.
- lostlogin 4mo agoApple hasn't had many models constrained by supply instil recently (Neo, Mini and possibly studio). The ram shortage doesn't seem have have hit them until quite recently. Existing agreements? They pay more to be prioritised?
- alt227 4mo agoTheir products were so overpriced to begin with they had plenty of buffer to swallow supply price hikes like this for some time.
- noobermin 4mo agoTbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."
- lysace 4mo agoLooks pretty darn efficient to me: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
- arthurbrown 4mo agoThat chart stops in 2023.
- ThePhysicist 4mo agoEveryone always wants to charge as much as they possibly can, and if SK Hynix would be the only manufacturer prices would be 10x of what they are today. Especially new incumbents will not ruin the market prices as they have the highest upfront cost and their calculation of entering the market is probably based on the high prices that can be achieved. In the long run, more competition is still good as everyone ramps up production to profit more from the high prices and at some point supply will outpace demand and prices will fall (assuming no cartel / price fixing is involved).
- tornikeo 4mo agoNobody's stopping you from taking advantage of that shortage :) Just don't forget to turn your garage EUV machine on and off if it starts glitching.
- adrian_b 4mo agoUS is stopping China to increase their DRAM and flash production as they would, by forbidding everybody to sell modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment and consumables to China. China is increasing their production of DDR5 and SSDs, but much more slowly than it would have been possible in a free market. The current prices for DRAM and SSDs would have never happened if USA had not started to sabotage the Chinese memory industry a few years ago, presumably because Micron wanted to eliminate their competition. The US sanctions against memory producers have started exactly when Apple was considering the use of Chinese memories in their smartphones, so Apple had to cancel their plans. The claims that the sanctions against the Chinese memory producers have anything to do with US "national security" or with military applications are just a big shameless lie. Military applications are content with older memories, which China can produce in sufficient amounts. The SOTA DRAM modules and SSDs are more important for consumer products and the US "sanctions" have the only purpose of maintaining artificially high prices for the consumer products, which steals money from millions of people all over the world.
- pjmlp 4mo agoOf course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock. What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be. In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
- bredren 4mo agoHasn't Apple's dev environment for iOS and its non-macos relatives always been about working with as little memory as possible? It seems like Apple, of all companies has been about doing more with less memory. That would seem to have helped in the % of BOM getting wrecked by the supply chain and discipline of developers in its ecosystem.
- pjmlp 4mo agoNot really, they just don't support pagination, which is another matter, plenty of GB on those devices for Cordova, React Native, Webviews in general.
- mathisfun123 4mo agoWhere do people get these goofy ideas about how Apple functions? Is there like a mythology section of the Wikipedia?
- Obscurity4340 4mo agoLot of astroturfers, no doubt. Its irritating, its like, no, how about they change their behavior and people stop expecting you to treat their computers as computers, which should be personalizable on your side, not just theirs
- keybored 4mo ago> In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming. I don’t understand why this comes up on all of these topics. Dire need will compel a naked woman to learn to weave her own clothes, but there is no weaving machine for just making more efficient software. (American) Software developers are expensive, now I guess compute will either be expensive, more centralized, or have much more demand from competing interests (vibe coders who are implementing their own bespoke software or abandonware-for-one), and compute-for-code (GenAI) is a whole emergent engineering problem. Then we hunker down and listen to or read a piece by Muratori, I guess, just practice some of those principles? But what seems to keep happening is that we get stuck by constraints that go beyond just writing more efficient code as a solo contributor on a solo project. That you can predict the efficiency of the code by the application domain suggests that there is a whole big system (of people and processes) above our heads that is not simple for any person or group of people to untangle.
- rjzzleep 4mo agoI'm not sure how much of it is just an unintentional side-effect of greed from promises of international capital based in NY, and Dubai, and how much was intentional malicious behavior to destroy home compute to force people to pay for openai subscriptions, but the role of a functioning government typically is to keep corporations from doing exactly this. Regardless of which one it is, I absolutely despise the cartel that is running the US government right now, that created this situation for their crony big tech buddies.
- bxk76 4mo agoWell no one gets a free pass for too long. If prices rise consumers hold politicians responsible. Its just that the feedback loop plays out at different rates for the corps, cronies, politicians.
- Frieren 4mo ago> malicious behavior to destroy home compute It is part of the global trend to "rent everything, own nothing". High inequality means that everybody wants to sell to the hyper-rich individuals and corporations. And selling products and services to the working class is a losing money endebour. So, money accumulation means asset accumulation, that means more renting, that means more money...
- frollogaston 4mo agoHome compute doesn't matter to them, their advantage is the model. If they're trying to squeeze anyone out, it's the other AI companies.
- nullorempty 4mo agoBut the governments had been this way for decades now. It's just that things are accelerating and people notice it more.
- ThePhysicist 4mo agoApple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast if it allows me to run coding models locally.
- Xiol 4mo agoThat's an expensive looking 'if'.
- dirasieb 4mo agothere's no local AI model that comes even close to the ones you get access to by paying 1000 USD per month
- digitaltrees 4mo agoThe large models are really close in my experience. Just slower.
- esperent 4mo ago> you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick Why?
- kg 4mo agoIIRC modern Apple devices integrate the memory into the whole SoC instead of making it separate on the board and replaceable. It's definitely not swappable like a DIMM or CAMM module would be. Can't find a photo of a decapped M4 chip to prove it, though...
- MadnessASAP 4mo agoIts not integrated to the SoC, it is soldered to the mainboard though.
- jl6 4mo agoThere’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer. Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
- Hamuko 4mo agoI doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.
- throawayonthe 4mo agothis used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even
- krieger_857 4mo agothey still exists, although google is phasing out some of the Go line of apps
- steve1977 4mo agoIt's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.
- cm2187 4mo agoThere was a very interesting podcast that went into all the details of the AI supply chain shortage [1] The key takeaway for smartphones isn't so much that iphones will cost $150-200 more, which apple customers have shown they can stomach. But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE
- brailsafe 4mo ago> But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market. Hmm. Even if iPhone users can theoretically stomach the increase, they have many other options available, whereas if the cheap $200 phones are the bottom of the market, there's no other real options. I'm in the ~$450 USD Pixel range atm, and never buy the current flagship or anything. If that increases by $200, I'll look to the used market for the same phone. I really don't care that much about it, and it mostly acts as a fancy 5g modem for tethering. Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media, and I wonder if it's just older addicted richer millenials that'll keep buying at even more than the already idiotic prices.
- teiferer 4mo ago> Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones That's an effect that has always been claimed (younger generations rejecting new tech and going offline/low-tech/anti-...) but it's never been more than a minor very temporary fad. In the mid to long term, younger people are always at the forefront of tech adoption and it would be very surprising if it was different this time.
- cm2187 4mo agoI can't tell the difference between a 5 years old smartphone model and the latest generation.
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- jdw64 4mo ago[dead]
- chvid 4mo agoEnough of this. It is time to activate the Chinese. Seriously let ASML sell to CXMT etc.
- dist-epoch 4mo agoCXMT will sell their RAM.... to the AI labs
- chvid 4mo agoThey will sell and keep selling until the price is too low to justify production. And then some more to gain market share.
- djsjajah 4mo agoExcept, that won’t help. By the time a new fab is up and running, we will probably have a massive surplus.
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoYou assume demand for AI stays flat.
- johnvanommen 4mo ago> You assume demand for AI stays flat. RAM has become an asset class, like real estate, or orange juice, or cattle, or collectible cars. It’s wild to see. I don’t know if there is an options market or a futures market for RAM. But it seems inevitable. Imagine the United States hoarding RAM the way that nations of old hoarded gold.
- brikym 4mo ago$DRAM calls
- dist-epoch 4mo agoThanks, AI!
- AnonC 4mo agoI read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have. It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts. It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.
- johnvanommen 4mo ago> I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have. * when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect * when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.
- annagio_ 4mo agoOhhh look, the companies that started the problem have to raise the price! sure yes, I will not buy any product, untill price goes down. And others should do, but each on their own. Price hikes on my food, home and now tech. I have a pocket and a voice, and I will stop buying any product.
- unsupp0rted 4mo agoYou can offset this cost by investing in memory stocks. Apple product got $200 more expensive? Well you made $200 speculating on $DRAM. Lost $200 speculating on $DRAM? Well at least your Apple product got less expensive.
- fortyseven 4mo agoOr, considering you're already considerable markup, you could just make a little less money on each one... HAHAHA I'm just fucking with you Apple.
- ChrisArchitect 4mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576901
- sukuva 4mo agoperfect time to make smaller phones, simpler UIs, smaller apps, smaller screens. SMALLER EVERYTHING. Affordable, small phones is all most of us need.
- lossolo 4mo agoDo we have any estimates on how much the price might increase? I was waiting for the MacBook Pro with the M6 Max and 128 GB of RAM, especially since there are rumors that it will come with a design refresh