6 ms·

Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.

by jdiff 3mo ago

cyanydeez 3mo ago
capitalism needs its profits. also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
- spwa4 3mo ago
  Indeed. Although it's investment that's the problem here, not profit.
- kingleopold 3mo ago
  "luxury brand" that offers best base models for bucks than any other windows machine is my favorite luxury. if you compare same $$ priced macbook air to windows laptops, speed and long term reliability difference is few times big.
baal80spam 3mo ago
If they could, they would.
- rtkwe 3mo ago
  They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.
whatever1 3mo ago
Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.
- spandrew 3mo ago
  Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?
  - whatever1 3mo ago
    I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up. Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
    - SoftTalker 3mo ago
      They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
      - whatever1 3mo ago
        Apple is not new in the game of booking the entire capacity of a fab.
- matchbok3 3mo ago
  They should have predicted AI? lol.
  - whatever1 3mo ago
    Should they lose capacity to OpenAI?
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    They very well could have. Apple was the only company poised to take on CUDA with OpenCL, and they got pantsed so hard by the HPC industry that the Mac Pro got discontinued entirely. Apple could have added a couple trillions to their valuation if they weren't addicted to service revenue. But today's Apple is too fat to see their shoes, let alone where the puck is headed.
toddmorey 3mo ago
I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.
Telemakhos 3mo ago
Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.
- jerlam 3mo ago
  Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
  - npunt 3mo ago
    Bingo. Cook is the heat shield now
- FireBeyond 3mo ago
  That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"? I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video. (b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
petercooper 3mo ago
(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
- dfunckt 3mo ago
  > I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
bel8 3mo ago
why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?
zonkerdonker 3mo ago
Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram. A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter. So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter. I can see how they succumed to the pressure. [1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reportedly-king-of-macs-by-long-way-achieving-60-more-sales-than-air/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte... [2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-navigating-the-volatile-memory-market https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...

Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.

by jdiff 3mo ago

Man, if there was anyone that could weather the storm with their thick memory margins (at least on upgrades), it should have been Apple.

cyanydeez 3mo ago

capitalism needs its profits. also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.

spwa4 3mo ago
Indeed. Although it's investment that's the problem here, not profit.
kingleopold 3mo ago
"luxury brand" that offers best base models for bucks than any other windows machine is my favorite luxury. if you compare same $$ priced macbook air to windows laptops, speed and long term reliability difference is few times big.

baal80spam 3mo ago

If they could, they would.

rtkwe 3mo ago
They definitely /could/ it's a question of do they need to. I think they'd just rather maintain their margins rather than eat the cost increase for an unknown amount of time for a potentially minor difference in sales. There's not much you /can't/ do when you're sitting on the amount of cash Apple is.

whatever1 3mo ago

Utter planning failure. At the same time they have a quarter trillion in cash sitting.

spandrew 3mo ago
Why would they give away a trillion dollars when their goal is to make a trillion more?
- whatever1 3mo ago
  I did not suggest to burn it. They could have bought years ago a ram fab and ensure their supply will not dry up. Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    They could have, yes. But that's not really in their DNA and mostly an observation with the benefit of hindsight. Apple aren't a hardware manufacturer. Designer, yes. But the making has always been outsourced AFAIK.
    - whatever1 3mo ago
      Apple is not new in the game of booking the entire capacity of a fab.
matchbok3 3mo ago
They should have predicted AI? lol.
- whatever1 3mo ago
  Should they lose capacity to OpenAI?
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  They very well could have. Apple was the only company poised to take on CUDA with OpenCL, and they got pantsed so hard by the HPC industry that the Mac Pro got discontinued entirely. Apple could have added a couple trillions to their valuation if they weren't addicted to service revenue. But today's Apple is too fat to see their shoes, let alone where the puck is headed.

toddmorey 3mo ago

I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.

Telemakhos 3mo ago

Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.

jerlam 3mo ago
Also, Apple probably wants the increases to happen while Cook is still CEO, rather than having new CEO Ternus announce the bad news.
- npunt 3mo ago
  Bingo. Cook is the heat shield now
FireBeyond 3mo ago
That's absolutely unlikely. "We don't want you to buy our products right now, so we're raising the prices"? I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video. (b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".

petercooper 3mo ago

(I know this is not how business works, but..) I worked out if they ate a $200 per Mac bump themselves, their reserves would run out in 58 years at current sales rates :-D More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.

dfunckt 3mo ago
> I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.

bel8 3mo ago

why would they cut their fat margins when customers line up to buy their products anyway?

zonkerdonker 3mo ago

Some back of the envolope math, Apple sells roughly 30 million macbooks per year [1], lets say they average out to 16gb per unit, their demand is about 500 petabytes of ram. A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter. So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter. I can see how they succumed to the pressure. [1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reportedly-king-of-macs-by-long-way-achieving-60-more-sales-than-air/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte... [2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-navigating-the-volatile-memory-market https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...