Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

There 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

Of 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.

Apple 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.

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.

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.

There’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.

Enough of this.

It is time to activate the Chinese.

Seriously let ASML sell to CXMT etc.

Tbf, 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."

Props 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.

Thanks, AI!

I'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.

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