That phrase is always a warning for bad and emotional reasoning.
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Micron Suggests Apple Helped Cause Memory Price Crisis
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Numbers matter in this, and we simply don't have them.
We're seeing an entire industry held hostage by a cartel. Apple had to raise prices mid-cycle for the first time in at least a generation (they sure never did post-1996). If I was leading Apple, this would make me feel that something needs to be done so we (Apple) never see this again. Particularly so since it's part of Apple's major goals to minimize dependence on others.
Between 2005 and 2020, Intel CPUs have turned from the new hotness into total stagnation as far as Apple is concerned. The solution Apple went with was not to build its own CPU fab, but to pay for TSMC (and soon, others) to build these for them.
There are several ways to address the current situation besides doing nothing. Outside of creating its own fab, they include investing in one of these companies to have a facility built that only supplies Apple components. Or do something together with other major companies.
There isn't just the dichotomy of doing nothing or fully building and owning your own fab.
It's revenge from 2023. In order to clear stock, Samsung, SK and Micron had to sell at negative margin. Did Apple lower their upgrade cost back then? no. They din't have to, and the memory companies also are free to enjoy historical margin. It's capitalism.
Mentioning capitalism is another shibboleth. I'm sure this wouldn't have happened in the Soviet Union.
A reasonable business cannot be built on revenge. All that the comments in the article serve to do is trying to deflect blame. These memory cartel companies are rightfully viewed in the same category as gasoline suppliers, landlords and arms dealers. Of course they're going to try to shift blame.
I was fairly sure Tim blamed the “memory guys” not the “AI guys” in his interview last week. Pretty sure this is why they’re responding like this.
85% gross margin on a component that's critical for modern daily life, and national security, should be capped by the government.
loby
macrumors 68020
at least Apple's Cleaning Cloth did not go up in price...
zarmanto
macrumors 65816
You might be right; I'm not subscribed to the WSJ, so I can't actually verify. That said, every other source that I've been able to find (who were doubtless just paraphrasing the WSJ) offers some variation of Tim spreading the blame across both, without giving any specific company names. Likewise Micron did not give any names, because that's really just what PR folks do to avoid litigation -- but prior to the AI boom, Apple was easily their largest, most profitable and most high profile single customer, so anybody who pays attention to these matters at all knows exactly where to swivel their head.
Everybody likes to gripe about how Apple takes huge profits in the form of markups for memory upgrades in particular. One thing that nobody seems to mention is how much of that profit actually goes to Apple... vs how much goes to their supplier. We of course can't really know those values with certainty, but I guarantee you that Apple isn't taking all of that markup; it'll be written into their contract with the supplier such that when a customer comes calling for better specs, both Apple and Micron make bank.
Can mentioning this please be bannable? Same with the Mac Pro wheels. Those "jokes" are unfunny and so old that they're not dad jokes, but Pleistocene jokes.
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The world is always more complicated than people's hot takes.
maxoakland
macrumors 68000
Good point. Why is Apple the only one who gets massive profit margins?
So why is it our job to subsidize Apple’s huge margins?
Good as long as there are also antitrust suits brought against Apple and the rest of Big Tech
Apple has repeatedly demonstrated they don’t care about anti-trust
Sure and then we must also cap Apple’s profit margins.
I see it positively. Higher prices will force many customers to think twice before buying: is an iPhone 17 Pro worth your hard-earned money when your current iPhone 15 more than satisfies your needs? Why would you splurge in frequent/incremental upgrades, when Apple products are reliable and made to last?
“Could”! Ha ha ha. He’s technically right, but let’s not act like Apples about to lower their prices across the board anytime soon. Maybe a slight price drop in a few places that got hurt most by the increase, but I’m not holding my breath at all. Apple has never been afraid of high prices for as long as I can remember.
Apple CEO Tim Cook forewarned … that pricing needed to come back down to earth before Apple's own prices could follow.
For those of you protecting Apple, it was Apple who gauged the price of memory chips by racing to the bottom. Micro, Samsung, Hynix all confirmed that and Apple bought each chips for just $5 and sold it for $99. None of them but Apple made profits from memory chips for a long time and now, blaming others for their price hike? LOL. It was also Apple who cause this crisis after all.
Considering their insane market value right now, they better invest in scaling their production now. Or will they say the had no money to do so in a few years, because they were so busy producing memory for the AI bubble?
What an utter ******** argumentation, Keynes is flipflopping in his grave.
What an utter ******** argumentation, Keynes is flipflopping in his grave.
It is not just Apple has everyone looked at the computer industry as a whole at least all of the ones that are publicly traded their shareholders demand profit quarter after quarter and I was bored today so I looked at several computers from several brands and behold they were all higher in price than a year ago and some quite a bit higher look for yourself this AI thing is consuming large quantities of ram,nand and flash. So if they have all this and the consumer can not afford the products that use it now what.
I think in retrospect all of this will be one of the negative aspects of the cook era ie:
Iterating on the hit product (& making accessories for it ie AirPods and watch) but being unskilled at ‘skating towards where the puck is headed next’.
Then using economies of scale to decrease component costs and to increase services revenue from the massive user base.
Which is v sensible but has some consequences as outlined in this article & making Apple into too much of a services company, wheh Apple’s ‘DNA’ is a consumer hardware UX company.
Oh and alienating devs.
Cook is an amazing & incredible CEO who has taken Apple to unprecedented heights, but everyone has strengths and weaknesses - and towards the end of his era the weaknesses started to outweigh the strengths.
Doesn’t bother me too much. I bought micron stock at $73 so a bit of a price increase is just collateral.
I almost died of cringe reading this
Abazigal
Contributor
Apple asks Trump admin to approve Chinese RAM after product price increases - 9to5Mac
The Financial Times reports that Apple is seeking clearance from the Trump administration to purchase memory chips from a banned...
9to5mac.com
There’s more than one way of skinning a cat.
We also don’t know if paying suppliers more would have led to them expanding capacity (why would they if they didn’t think there was a demand for it?). My guess is that Micron is also looking for someone to deflect the blame.
Mark Gurman revealed last week the Apple Cleaning Cloth Pro is on the way at double the cost.
Right, and I'm seeing poverty in the world positively as well. Not being able to afford thins will force many people to think twice before buying things I'm against.
Also, I think people should be punished for not living the lifestyle I mandate.
It must be fun to see the world only through the filter of these cartel companies. Serves Apple right that now because AI companies build data centers everyone suffers!
Yes, I'm also unaffected, so everyone else in the world can just pound sand. I can't post here what I think of that kind of attitude.
When NVIDIA cards started to be used for bitcoin mining, the explanation I've heard from some people was "Yeah, but if they invest in that and in a few years demand is lower, what then?".
That reasoning made as much sense back then as it does now.