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Nik

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 3, 2007
700
1,583
France
Memory prices have doubled over the last couple of weeks due to the A.I. boom.

I think it is only a matter of time (weeks?) before Apple increases upgrade prices considerably.

Look at the following chart. This is how prices developed recently. VRAM prices moved up the same percentage or even more than DDR5.

Bildschirmfoto 2025-11-20 um 05.35.28.png
 
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Apple already charges $200/8GB for RAM, they should have enough margin covering the price hike.
If memory serves me (pun intended), they had done that before. I forget the details, it might been related to the iphone but components spiked but they ate the increased cost and kept the price the same
 
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As a former pc build, though I probably will never get completely away from that, the content I consume is heavily in that segment so the news about this has been building for a little while.
It reminds me of when the crypto boon was happning in the early 2020s, and you couldn't find a GPU anywhere so the prices spiked crazily. Now thanks to AI, ram and storage are spiking
 
32 GB of RAM, in general, is enough for my needs in my setups. I can't run everything at the same time but I can manage that.

My last five systems came with 32 GB of RAM but one of the systems before that has 128 GB and the system is still reasonably usable so I'd use that if I needed a lot of RAM for a specific purpose. One approach on the desktop is to combine your older system with the newer one and put programs that don't require a fast CPU on one system and programs that require more on the newer system. This way you get more overall effective RAM without having to buy new sticks or a new system.
 
Apple is anyway charging 10x on memory, so even if prices double, it wouldn't matter one bit to them. You can get like 64 GB RAM for like $450 or so after the price double. And what does Apple charge for similar amount of RAM? 😂
 
Apple contracts custom LPDDR5 RAM from Hynix. The terms of the contract are unknown, and knowing Apple it is likely that they have hedged against these kind of market movements. Overall, Apple likes to maintain their historical price points, so I wouldn't be too worried about price hikes at this time. A price hike usually comes with a chassis change or similar.
 
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