OMG that’s so sinister. 😱😱
I'm a great believer in Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence) but it is interesting that this is making it much more expensive (in real, fungible money) for people who want lots of RAM and storage to run local AI rather than buying services from these shiny new data centres (who presumably pay using money that might exist in the future).
He's not even in the Executive Suite yet - this is Tim's parting 'gift' to us all that the new CEO will have on his ledger.
they may lose the reputation, but only because the media is very loud about apple's price increases and rather quiet about all the dell, Lenovo, hp, etc. price increases. They're still better value because all of the competition has also raised prices in the last few months.
Apple generally doesn't build products and store them for months. Under Cook they went from "huge inventory in storage" to Just In Time inventory. When you click "order" on the website, the machine gets built for you. Only just before launching a new product do they build up some inventory.
Forcing a massive shift to AI and data centers that most of us never asked for. Then those same companies drive up hardware pricing because of a shortage of hardware of their own making. Then shoving AI on us, on their ever-more expensive hardware.
Pretty easy to do actually. My M1 Max is chugging along just fine, no need to upgrade right now. Phones is fine, iPad Pro is fine. May be a few years till I do another upgrade.
I wouldn't say that was orchestrated but the natural forces of how the market works, where one customer is willing to pay more then another.
Im pretty sure the Apple lottery is already a thing, or how is/was it called buying the same device as someone else but having QC issues and different components from different manufacturers performing differently?
Yeah, sure.
Not to pre-bubble levels, I suspect. This bump will give inflation a chance to catch up with consumer electronics. it’s incredible that the “dollar price” of a half-decent personal computer hasn’t changed significantly in 40+ years, while the specs of a “half-decent personal computer” have increased exponentially. There are explanations for that, of course - a rapidly expanding market and economies of scale from mass production- but that’s been petering out* over the last decade or so as technology passes the “good enough” threshold and the market starts to get saturated. It’s not the end of progress, but it might be the end of the booming, zero-inflation on ever-increasing specs era.
And take your money where? There have been similar price rises across the whole PC industry…
Voting with your wallet is the main (and probably the only) control a consumer has. And it is extremely powerful when consumers all vote together. A vote though is not a guarantee to get your way, it's merely one vote, and the majority (usually) wins. That's what happened with Apple reversing their stance on small phones and making the 6 Plus, and with iPhones steadily getting larger ever since. Personally I voted for small phones for as long as I could, but the majority won and now we have all large phones. If you voted with your wallet and didn't get what you wanted, it's likely because you were in the minority. There are other powers at play, but if enough people vote a certain way, even those powers are usually overcome.
I think that in this situation "voting with your feet" means not engaging with AI services, which are the cause of the immediate problem (although, as I've posted earlier, I think inflation was about to catch up the IT industry anywar, but it didn't have to be such a big bang).
Well, they are hardly handcrafted for each individual order - and available stock of products at places like Amazon and Best Buy (when Apple said they had none left) for weeks prior - and at original prices (if not less) - certainly suggests the stuff was not built the day the spike in prices were announced.
Given how they talked on the investor talks after results about the problem of higher cost RAM and storage for several quarters now, I also doubt they raised prices the minute their costs increased. They are the last of the big computer makers to raise prices.
Exactly. The majority and market trends dictate what products get released when.
