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Apple Best Positioned to Weather DRAM Price Surge, Says Counterpoint

Apple's RAM Pro Max prices seem somewhat reasonable now.

For anyone who uses Windows on the side and is looking to buy a new PC, it's best to stock up on RAM/memory at the time of order as some OEMs haven't (totally) jacked up prices yet (once you factor in their perpetual, but variable 'savings' at checkout.
 
Doesn't look like any Apple products are (so far) affected by this issue. Being they have moved around the tariffs as much as they did to keep pricing pretty steady. I don't see them jacking up prices right away.
 
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Radeon85 said:
Apple already charges an absolutely disgusting price for RAM and storage upgrades, so of course Apple will be fine. They’ve been making stupid amounts of profits on them for years.
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You can see it that or way or you can just look at the base models and how aggressive they are priced for being a premium product (both in performance and status).

If you need a 32GB/2TB MacMini, you either pay the price or you don't, price of the base 16GB/256GB variant is irrelevant.
 
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People are already tired of the AI slop being injected into their lives. The amount of damage that this stuff can do is beyond comprehension of many. It's getting so good that its hard for even savvy people to tell the difference what's real or fake.

It will not surprise me if this stuff crashes down hard in the next couple years.
 
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Come on folks, Apple has always been a significant "Pay to Play" company. Putting 32 MB of ram (eight 4 MB chips), a second floppy drive and a 80 MB hard drive into my IIfx in 1990 brought the price to around $10,000 before monitor, keyboard or mouse. Apple talk (ADB) was the communication over basically phone cable as coax cable was just starting for networking.

I remember unboxing my first Apple device, a IIsi with a 13" color monitor. I was so impressed because it worked just coming out of the box. The Intel PCs of the day was plug and pray the order was correct for the I/O cards and could take hours to get it to work.

My M4 Pro Mac mini has comparable power to my M1 Ultra as both have an 8 TB SSD and the mini has 64GB of faster memory than the 128GB in the Ultra. Both have 10Gb ethernet. The mini is about half the cost of my Ultra. Amazing what happens in four generations of the "M" chips.

And memory is still cheaper per unit than in 1990.
 
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switz said:
My M4 Pro Mac mini has comparable power to my M1 Ultra as both have an 8 TB SSD and the mini has 64GB of faster memory than the 128GB in the Ultra. Both have 10Gb ethernet. The mini is about half the cost of my Ultra. Amazing what happens in four generations of the "M" chips.
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This used to be the norm and expectation in tech.
Things are supposed to get wildly better at around the same price as time goes on.
 
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@switz I had buried my DMA/IRQ/Autoexec.bat config nightmares for years. Thanks to your post, they’re all coming back, so thanks for that, lol.
 
switz said:
Come on folks, Apple has always been a significant "Pay to Play" company. Putting 32 MB of ram (eight 4 MB chips), a second floppy drive and a 80 MB hard drive into my IIfx in 1990 brought the price to around $10,000 before monitor, keyboard or mouse. Apple talk (ADB) was the communication over basically phone cable as coax cable was just starting for networking.

I remember unboxing my first Apple device, a IIsi with a 13" color monitor. I was so impressed because it worked just coming out of the box. The Intel PCs of the day was plug and pray the order was correct for the I/O cards and could take hours to get it to work.

My M4 Pro Mac mini has comparable power to my M1 Ultra as both have an 8 TB SSD and the mini has 64GB of faster memory than the 128GB in the Ultra. Both have 10Gb ethernet. The mini is about half the cost of my Ultra. Amazing what happens in four generations of the "M" chips.
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There is very little value in bringing up 35 year old prices.
Negative value to be more accurate.
Its not relevant compared to what anyone considers normal or high priced today.

1990 IBM PS2 model 90 486 Tower: 14K-17K
 
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In the last few months I've definitely seen a constraint on nvmes and ram avaiability, its killing our lead times for PCs for clients, I need to start stocking up on parts.
 
jonnysods said:
In the last few months I've definitely seen a constraint on nvmes and ram avaiability, its killing our lead times for PCs for clients, I need to start stocking up on parts.
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I was hoping to weed out the last couple old HDDs in my setup, but looking at SSD prices it seems those old spinning drive get to stick around a bit longer...
 
TRANSLATION: Apple's margins are so high on their products, and they have so much cash on hand, they can afford, for ONCE, to absorb some of the increased costs, and soften SOME of the increases they WILL pass onto consumers.
 
britboyj said:
Of course Samsung will be fine. They literally manufacture RAM. All they have to do is a balance sheet swap.
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Not quite that simple.

Look at what’s happening at Micron who are shutting down their consumer division (Crucial) because it’s more profitable to sell RAM directly to AI data centers at sky-high prices than to be in the messy, high-overhead business of selling to consumers.

Likewise, there are reports that Samsung Semiconductor has already refused RAM orders from Samsung Electronics for use in Galaxy phones, because they can make more money selling that RAM to AI data centers.
 
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Maybe like in the movie Avatar, we will be thinking about memory being made of "unataininum" soon. 😱
 
How do you avoid increasing RAM prices in one year?
Have them be just as expensive in the decades before that year.

Apples is the last brand that can logically increase their prices. I hope they don’t dare to, not in the first year their RAM prices are actually competitive.
 
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