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Some very steep price rises here! I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contract
by Reason077 3mo ago
Some very steep price rises here!
I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
- aarond0623 3mo agoThe prices are set largely by what consumers will tolerate. If everyone else is raising prices so consumers expect that, why wouldn't you do it, too?
- byzantinegene 3mo agoare consumers really tolerating current prices?
- phatskat 3mo agoDo they have a choice? Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.
- simondotau 3mo agoLong term contracts probably don’t last forever and probably don’t represent 100 percent of their demand. My guess is that they’re already having to pay inflated prices for some non-trivial fraction of their inventory.
- kjellsbells 3mo agoAIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price. Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
- mh- 3mo ago> Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
- bombcar 3mo agoDelivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why. They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
- angoragoats 3mo ago512GB of matched DDR5 DIMMs at retail will currently run you $14k-20k+ depending on speed. So I’d imagine a now-hypothetical upgrade to 512GB on the Mac Studio would be in that ballpark.
- nl 3mo ago2 year supply contracts are expiring and they need to lock in the next one.
- nemomarx 3mo agoApparently their long term contracts ran out in January and suppliers are asking for quarter to quarter prices now. No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoWhen Apple isn't big enough things are really screwed up. I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
- zakki 3mo agoLet's see if Apple can spin up a company to make memory.
- alt227 3mo agoThey havent 'spun up a company' to make anything else, so I doubt it. Apple are not a maunfacturer.
- megablast 3mo agoApple messed up since the memory is integrated?
- wolvoleo 3mo agoWell it means nobody can avoid their extortionate upgrade pricing anymore so I think that decision paid off well for them. The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself. I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
- palata 3mo agoOr simply they have an opportunity to raise prices? They probably will announce record revenues in a year or so. Happens with all kind of companies: oil goes up, prices go up, record revenues for the companies. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with Apple.