Apple Price Increases

[TechHaus]

Thanks for vibe coding and talking to chatbots.

HomePod mini: $129, up from $99 (+$30)
HomePod: $349, up from $299 (+$50)
Apple TV: $199, up from $129 (+$70)
iPad: $449, up from $349 (+$100)
iPad mini: $599, up from $499 (+$100)
iPad Air: $749, up from $599 (+$150)
iPad Pro: $1,199, up from $999 (+$200)
MacBook Neo: $699, up from $599 (+$100)
MacBook Air: $1,299, up from $1,099 (+$200)
MacBook Pro: $1,999 up from $1,699 (+$300)
iMac: $1,499, up from $1,299 (+$200)
Mac mini (M4 Pro): $1,599, up from $1,399 (+$200)
Mac Studio (M4 Max): $2,499, up from $1,999 (+$500)
Mac Studio (M3 Ultra): $5,299, up from $3,999 (+$1,300)
Vision Pro: $3,699, up from $3,499 (+$200)

[ksandvik]

... and the scary thing is that most likely these prices (same with other company hardware) will not go down in future. SSDs / Hard drives might drop somewhat after the AI data center bubble, though. Also, the Chinese will flood the market soon with cheap SSD, but not sure about the quality.

[uOpt]

My desired Macbook Pro went from $5549 to 7149.

I should have ordered one on Wednesday. I would make a killing on reselling it when it arrives.

[starflakeprj]

[surferman]

I have a M3 Ultra on order with 256gb ram, 2tb hard drive. Supposedly not coming till August or September. Was also hoping the M5 versions would have been out by then and gotten a possible upgrade. Looks like I will be keeping it no matter what.

[TechHaus]

I have a M3 Ultra on order with 256gb ram, 2tb hard drive. Supposedly not coming till August or September. Was also hoping the M5 versions would have been out by then and gotten a possible upgrade. Looks like I will be keeping it no matter what.

They don't even allow you to select more than 96gb of ram now in those.

You can still order 128 in a Macbook Pro, it appears.

Keep us posted, I am curious to see how this will play out for you.

Apple used to be the supply chain kings. No longer...

[aMUSEd]

Good thing I'd decided not to get the next iPad mini when it comes out, the battery on my much used older one is gradually retaining less power. However as I use the Mini 99% of the time for reading books on, decided instead to get a Kindle on Prime day. I do have some iBooks but will gradually replace those with Kindle books.

[surferman]

I ordered it right after they removed the 512 GB ram version. I didn’t need that much RAM anyway, but I knew they were going away which is why I thought the M5 were coming out.

[PAK]

Pretty brutal increases, just when the Mac Mini looked a reasonable value. Though they can claim they’re “passing on component costs” Apple also have higher margins and could’ve absorbed more if they’d chosen to. Next up will be the new phone$ in $eptember.

There’s a couple of things going on here. The most obvious is just 3 companies, all with a criminal history of price fixing, are in control of the memory market. China is looking to fill the void but, the faster the ram gets, the harder the task. It remains to be seen if they’ll make a meaningful impact before any “market correction”.

“But wait!” some might say. Don’t they need customers? Surely there’s a finite limit on who can afford these inflated prices?! Ahh, you silly bag of meat. The AI is smarter than you think. Say hello to Agentic computing. The users who will pay the money for this compute power won’t be human. The customers are an infinite number of AI “agents”. Thus infinite stock gains are justified. Duh.

Of course, the other factor, in all of this, is the intent of “big tech”. For years many of them have been pushing “cloud” services. Yet some foolish users remain reluctant to participate. What if something happened to change that? It would be a shame if you couldn’t afford the machine to do the things you wanted to do locally. Not to worry though - they’re here to help. For a reasonable monthly fee. Here’s a little song they wrote, you might want to sing it note for note: Own nothing, be happy.

[Gamma-UT]

There’s a couple of things going on here. The most obvious is just 3 companies, all with a criminal history of price fixing, are in control of the memory market. China is looking to fill the void but, the faster the ram gets, the harder the task. It remains to be seen if they’ll make a meaningful impact before any “market correction”.

The Chinese suppliers are banking on the correction but they aren't pursuing the high-end PCs and Macs. They are gunning for cars and other goods that need cheap but serviceable memory. And Hynix, Micron and Samsung are going to find out they've lost that business long term unless they play very very nice once high-end prices start coming down. Which they won't be able to do, because the high-end prices will come down in a hurry. So they will find they've lost a solid if unexciting business.

[PAK]

I ordered it right after they removed the 512 GB ram version. I didn’t need that much RAM anyway, but I knew they were going away which is why I thought the M5 were coming out.

Supposedly M5 Ultra is coming late this year / early next, even though M6 will likely be out on their laptops by then too. It's looking likely they'll skip M6 for the Studio series (at least for the ultra - much like they skipped M4), instead moving to M7. Guess what that's said to focus on? Surely not AI compute power?!

We’ll see where everything ends up. Lately Apple have been taking a few too many customer service cues from Microsoft - the company who renamed “My Computer” to “This PC” because they don't think it's yours. Apple have been engaging in dark patterns with OS updates, have disabled ways to block a new OS, and right now the beta of Mac OS 27 has no way to turn off the Google Gemini Siri AI. Though I do assume they'll let people turn it off, on the final version, it remains to be seen. You will be able to disable it via policies, though that's not something the average user will know about.

The one thing to be said is, if Apple do move in that direction, it's usually pretty trivial to work around their crap, where it feels more like you're fighting malware on Windows. But the problem is the intent, and I can only hope Linux continues to improve for audio users..

[dayjob]

was expecting price increases. bought an M5 Max macbook pro last month. finally bought a computer at the right time, it seems.