Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
They already did, to an extent. The base Mac Mini used to be $600 with a 256 GB SSD, but they got rid of that and now the cheapest option is the $800 512 GB model. The typical Apple strategy is to make the base model of a given computer the price competitive version, and price gouge on additional storage and RAM to build up their margins. I guess the RAM price increase made the margins on the $600 model too low for Apple to want to sell.
I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.
The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.
A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.
I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.
I suspect you’re right, but if they don’t do it until the new stuff is announced I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that.
If they announce it on, to pick a date, July 1 then by the time the iPhone is announced it will be somewhat old news. It will still get mentioned but it won’t be the main feature of every story at announcement time.
Like so many other companies Apple is between a rock and a hard place with this stuff.
I understood this as a “the next generation will cost more”. By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales for each season and so they likely have a decent backlog for the current generation, procured at reasonable cost from hardware manufacturers.
It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.
Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.
On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.
Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.
>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle
This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!
Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading.
Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).
It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
Yes, exactly. Price hikes mid-cycle is not something I have seen Apple do historically.
If true, one reason could be that: Cook is retiring, while Ternus is on his way in. Ternus wouldn't wanna start off with his first announcement being a ginormous price hike. Makes him look bad.
So Cook becomes the fall guy. i.e., he increases the price by 15% in the existing M5 range.
When Ternus comes in, he keeps prices stable on the M6 range.
Makes Ternus look like an awesome guy...and gets him off on a flying start in his CEO tenure.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that I'm ok with them doing that. It's a matter of consistency.
The PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One all followed the pattern of dropping in price over the course of their lifetimes, because components got cheaper over time. The fact that the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have gone up in price is consistent with the general price elasticity.
I'm also OK with Apple having a rigid pricing structure and never really doing any sales or discounts, but then I expect them to not raise prices on the current M5 hardware, and leave those price hikes for the M6 generation that I assume is just around the corner.
> Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now
Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.
> It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.
This was inevitable. The better question is if AI related hardware costs drop after the AI bubble implodes, will Apple drop the prices? My answer is negative.
I think we might end up in a weirder situation: Apple _does_ drop their prices back down to current levels for the same quantity of ram, but ASP goes much higher, at least for the Pro tier buyers. My reasoning is that depending on how the benchmarks look, many of us may try to go big on ram on our next hardware purchases to run models locally as a way of hedging either model costs, or to ensure access.
This is understandable given the market but part of me really wishes this would wait a year even though it won't.
Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.
I think this is going to impact NVidia too but in a different way. Normally in NVidia's product cycle we'd expect 50x0 Super mid-cycle refreshes. It's clear that's not happening this time around. We might expect the 6000 series late next year. I think there's zero incentive for NVidia to do that so that'll likely get delayed into 2028 or possibly 2029. 5090 prices keep going up even though it's 1.5 years old.
Anyway, as for Apple I'm keenly watching for the anticipated refresh of the Mac Studio lineup. The previous gen (M3 Ultra, M4 Max) just don't have the raw horsepower even though they had configs up to 512GB (512GB and 256GB now discontinued). It'll be interesting to see what the max config is and when these come up. Q3 2026 is widely expected but I wouldn't be surprised if it slips into 2027.
Aren't their storage prices so inflated that they could just eat the difference?
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
They already did, to an extent. The base Mac Mini used to be $600 with a 256 GB SSD, but they got rid of that and now the cheapest option is the $800 512 GB model. The typical Apple strategy is to make the base model of a given computer the price competitive version, and price gouge on additional storage and RAM to build up their margins. I guess the RAM price increase made the margins on the $600 model too low for Apple to want to sell.
I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.
The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.
A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.
I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.
I suspect you’re right, but if they don’t do it until the new stuff is announced I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that.
If they announce it on, to pick a date, July 1 then by the time the iPhone is announced it will be somewhat old news. It will still get mentioned but it won’t be the main feature of every story at announcement time.
Like so many other companies Apple is between a rock and a hard place with this stuff.
I understood this as a “the next generation will cost more”. By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales for each season and so they likely have a decent backlog for the current generation, procured at reasonable cost from hardware manufacturers.
It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.
Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.
> By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales
The Neo being an exception I beleive.
That’s a new product line. Should have clarified but I meant mostly their existing product lines and specifically iPhone
On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.
Apple was on the ropes in 1999!
Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.
Tim justifying selling a computer for more than 10k when that Mac Studio comes out
>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle
This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!
Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).
It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
Yes, exactly. Price hikes mid-cycle is not something I have seen Apple do historically.
If true, one reason could be that: Cook is retiring, while Ternus is on his way in. Ternus wouldn't wanna start off with his first announcement being a ginormous price hike. Makes him look bad.
So Cook becomes the fall guy. i.e., he increases the price by 15% in the existing M5 range.
When Ternus comes in, he keeps prices stable on the M6 range. Makes Ternus look like an awesome guy...and gets him off on a flying start in his CEO tenure.
They’re not dropping in price though. PS5 is 25% more expensive than at launch six years ago.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that I'm ok with them doing that. It's a matter of consistency.
The PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One all followed the pattern of dropping in price over the course of their lifetimes, because components got cheaper over time. The fact that the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have gone up in price is consistent with the general price elasticity.
I'm also OK with Apple having a rigid pricing structure and never really doing any sales or discounts, but then I expect them to not raise prices on the current M5 hardware, and leave those price hikes for the M6 generation that I assume is just around the corner.
> Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now
Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.
> It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48580466
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576901
September.
Slow news day, I guess.
This was inevitable. The better question is if AI related hardware costs drop after the AI bubble implodes, will Apple drop the prices? My answer is negative.
I think we might end up in a weirder situation: Apple _does_ drop their prices back down to current levels for the same quantity of ram, but ASP goes much higher, at least for the Pro tier buyers. My reasoning is that depending on how the benchmarks look, many of us may try to go big on ram on our next hardware purchases to run models locally as a way of hedging either model costs, or to ensure access.
This is understandable given the market but part of me really wishes this would wait a year even though it won't.
Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.
I think this is going to impact NVidia too but in a different way. Normally in NVidia's product cycle we'd expect 50x0 Super mid-cycle refreshes. It's clear that's not happening this time around. We might expect the 6000 series late next year. I think there's zero incentive for NVidia to do that so that'll likely get delayed into 2028 or possibly 2029. 5090 prices keep going up even though it's 1.5 years old.
Anyway, as for Apple I'm keenly watching for the anticipated refresh of the Mac Studio lineup. The previous gen (M3 Ultra, M4 Max) just don't have the raw horsepower even though they had configs up to 512GB (512GB and 256GB now discontinued). It'll be interesting to see what the max config is and when these come up. Q3 2026 is widely expected but I wouldn't be surprised if it slips into 2027.
> You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
That config can be had for $5100 already: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...
> It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.
The Neo seems likely to.