How much had you been paying for computers before the Apple ][? We know the answer afterwards. I think the point here is that hardware costs have always trended downwards, until suddenly, they didn't.
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the mac mini increase that nobody is talking about.
- Thread starter Mrbiggestman
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Yeah even if regular customers rejected using AI, AI would likely still be in high demand from the many business customers that use it internally. They'll keep demanding it as long as they believe it will save them significant money in operations. Customers have little control over how businesses are run and what technologies they use. I suppose they could organize and boycott them, but I'm not sure customers are of one mind on this.
Yes, isn't majority rule the fairest system we got?
That's not a contradiction. I didn't mean consumers should get together and try to do what sounds like the consumer version of "colluding" by influencing each other's votes. For one thing, that's not very feasible when we're talking about huge markets. Nothing that happens in a tech forum affects the mainstream market made up of a gazillion people who don't go anywhere near a tech forum. What I meant by that "extremely powerful" statement was simply that as people (individually) vote according to their (individual) convictions/wants/needs, when there are enough consumers who vote the same way, it can have the extreme power to not only influence but force a company to bend to their wishes. Consumers have the ultimate power, but namely the mainstream majority.
You're free to try to convince people to see things your way, but I suppose my point is the actual vote is the only tangible thing that matters. There are many people who complain on these forums but still vote for the thing they're complaining about by purchasing it, so they're just working against themselves. Their talk doesn't actually do anything, while their vote, however small, does. That's like campaigning on a street corner for Harris and then voting for Trump, or vice versa.
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Apple's net profit margin is around 26% as a whole, from what I gathered from earnings calls. Looking only at the profit margin of an individual product isn't useful without looking at the whole picture, because companies don't try to make the same profit margin on every product--some lower, some higher, according to their business strategy. The overall profit is the relevant metric.
Dell and other major PC makers have made multiple price increases over the last year and/or are predicted to raise prices further in the second half of 26.
IT Hardware Budget Planning 2026: Dell +17%, Memory +90%
2026 IT hardware budget planning just got harder. Dell, Microsoft, RAM costs. What 5 analysts forecast and how to protect your budget.
5pointtechnology.com
Experts warn PC prices could rise even more in 2026 as RAM costs set to soar higher
Buying a new PC? You might want to hurry up
What seems to have happened is that Apple have done it in one "big bang" that (unlike any rises by HPDelenovo) has received a lot of headline publicity even in mainstream media:
Apple hikes some prices by nearly 20% while Xbox raises console cost
Apple said it had "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly".
www.bbc.co.uk
(Note that this is XBox's second recent price increase but Apple still gets top billing)
There's also been a lot of selective reporting linking this to a dip in Apple's stock - despite that being part of an across-the-board dip in IT stocks.
OK, I'm not going to break out a tiny violin for Apple just because being a media darling has its negative side, but their % price rises are no worse than other brands have already done or have announced plans for. Yes, of course Apple are a high-margin company and could have absorbed the price rises in the hope that they'd recoup the difference in extra sales (except they're also having supply issues & might not be able to cope with that) - but, honestly, that would have been a "who are you and what have you done with the real Apple?" event.
Yeah, right.
Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years
Big buyers agree to deals that will deliver historically enormous margins and profits
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
No one is disagreeing that PC makers have gone through price hikes. In fact I stated Dell had little wiggle room, and largely had to pass on the price hikes to their customers.
With Apple's profit margins in the 30 to 40% range for their laptops, Apple could have easily absorbed the price hike. Promoted the hell of their products and increased sales. They probably would have made more money, had more customers, and more people to promote their subscription services.
Rather then growing their business, by lowering their obscenely high profit margins, they chose reducing sales but keeping high sales margins vs increasing per unit sales with a smaller profit margin.
Parowdy
macrumors 68000
Oh brother you got it all wrong. I am not gaslighting you about anything, that anything being to punish Apple with your upgrade habit. I’m trying to keep you from doing that yourself.Oh look at someone being all skeptical and involved and gaslighty about my own decisions.
Does my decision matter to you that much? Why do you feel the need to tell me what I'm gonna do "anyway"? You're the only one looking bothered there.
"Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense skipping this and buying into the next cycle solely to “punish” the company you buy from anyway."
Do you see the pathetic delusion there? Yes it makes sense, because it saves money. Next, I don't know why it affects you so much, but if I'm switching to PC, I won't be switching back to Mac.
A Tahoe Hackintosh is still possible. I don't use Mac Specific apps.
Gaming will certainly be more accessible.
My Macbook is still working.
I've already listed the PC parts for my next build. It'll come right under €1000, allowing for sudden price hikes I'll chip in €500 more. Still a better deal than getting ripped off with no upgradeability, no SIRI AI in Europe, and my devices being dropped after 3 years of support.
I was planning on getting a M5Pro Mac Mini when they came out.
Not anymore.
"Their bottom line doesn't change", uhmm, sure, Jan.
Apple posts worst day in over a year after MacBook and iPad price hikes
Tim Cook said last week that Apple would hike prices due to surging memory and storage costs.www.cnbc.com
"Apple posts worst day in over a year after MacBook and iPad price hikes."
And that's not even me having upgraded to Windows in there!!
Your personally decision of what to buy and when doesn’t bother or affect me at all, you talking about it changing anything at Apple however is.
Call it saving money if you want to, to Apple you’re just a non-regular customer spending less, but still a customer. Something they obviously anticipate, otherwise they’d not support iOS 27 on all iPhones running 26, but apparently even with that there’s money to be made.
Calling me or my statement delusional is quite ironic.
Ok, listen, I understand your sentiment. But “voting with your wallet” is just as effective as voting per se.
That does not mean I discourage people from voting, but I’d like to curb the expectation that their vote makes a difference. It very much doesn’t.
However, conversing about why to make what decision in a public place, THAT makes a difference. There’s a record, there’s a discussion, there are people thinking and changing their minds.
Not giving Apple your money (now) doesn’t matter to them if someone else does and casts a vote that’s much more important to Apple and actually on record and quantifiable.
A silent boycott never worked.
Now, your computer remarks I don’t fully understand.
If working on Windows is right for you, great. If you want to use a Hackintosh, great.
It doesn’t affect me however what you use and for what and if you consider staying on sub-par Windows for personal reasons or not, and I’m confused why you think it would. Gaming is a valid reason and I won’t argue against it.
Getting ripped off by buying a MacBook doesn’t really sound like a real problem to me. Modern Mac’s are all very capable and hold their own weight compared to much of the competition.
Apple is. They are rather clear why and how they deny users the option to add-a-spec after purchase, and while I agree it’s bs that they could, if they wanted to, offer a motherboard replacement on older machines to upgrade them, but don’t, I still don’t see them as a ripp-off.
Siri AI is available on ALL Macs that support macOS 27, even to users in Europe. I recently got access to it on my M1 Mac.
And only 3 years of support is a weird fabrication. M1 was released in 2020, now it’s 2026 and M1 machines still support the latest macOS version set to release later this year… with almost all new features.
And yeah, price hikes are unfortunate, but so what? We’re just back to our regular pricing. The only thing that didn’t change is people wages but that’s not Apples fault.
As you're well aware, AAPL is a publicly traded company. And as such, gives guidance to shareholders on margins, EBITDA, etc.
They can't just reduce their margins by 50% and maintain the EBITDA that shareholders expect. The only other lever Apple would have is to reduce costs... and they would need to do this via layoffs. It's the quickest, most impactful lever that large orgs have, especially ones that are as streamlined from a manufacturing/cost perspective as Apple.
So you're essentially saying Apple should lay people off, in order to keep consumer prices static - which allows them to maintain margins to deliver the financial guidance they need to support dividends and capital reinvestment.
Every dollar in margins Apple 'eats' by not raising prices has to be offset by either a dollar cut in cost, or a dollar less returned to shareholders, or a dollar less in capital reinvestment.
As far as "probably had more customers..." Apple knows better than anyone on this thread what their elasticity of demand is for each product, as well as associated margins. Which is why some products' prices went up more than others.
"Probably" is an idea Apple knows better than us... they have lots of smart folks that analyze this stuff every single day, it's not guess work for them.
Not really. They just did one consolidated increase instead of slowly increasing over the past 18-24 months
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
News to me 😱
They could but chose not too.
Funny thing is when Steve Job was running apple his focus was building value for the customer and the investor value would follow. Now Apple's focus is on the investors and not the customers
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
I would call half this comment section a $hill game. So, so many Apple-pologists.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
When Steve Jobs was running Apple, they did a very similar thing to this with the entry-level Power Macintosh G4, only the difference was a 15% drop in CPU speed rather than a 50% drop in storage.
chrono1081
macrumors G3
It has actually been discussed and pointed out already. There really isn't anything devious or surprising about this either. Apple has historically tried to increase prices while dangling a carrot to make it feel less bad by bumping up the price and storage - that tactic doesn't work so well when memory prices skyrocket and continue into uncharted territory. They had to backpedal, big deal, they probably didn't expect prices to continue escalating or they overestimated their negotiating ability which has waned due to increased demand and competition to secure supply.
Nobody likes price increases but Apple is going to try to maintain its gross margin, this is nothing new. Memory prices have been off the charts for everyone as demand for memory has been exponentially increasing and far outstripping any change in supply developments.
I think the folks ranting in this thread need to step back and look at memory prices over the years and the economy as a whole. It's not so easy to increase supply and the spike in demand by AI is unprecedented. Also, take a look back at memory prices over the years, we've been enjoying rock bottom memory prices for a number of years, it wasn't that long ago that memory was incredibly expensive.
For those saying its manufactured supply crunch or they knew this was coming - y'all need to wake up, suppliers aren't going to invest billions in capital to boost supply unless its contacted out or they know for sure the demand will sustain and it takes time to build out that additional capacity. Supply will eventually increase and the AI boom should eventually stabilize with prices coming back down likely in 2028.
Apple could have taken the "accept lower margins and increase sales" route at any time since... well, 1977 probably (Apple II was never the cheapest - they practically priced it out of the UK market by selling it at £1=$1)... Their RAM and SSD prices have long been usurious and those margins could easily have been cut years ago (apart from those pesky shareholders)
My argument isn't "Praise unto Apple for this wonderous price rise" - just that "It's Apple - did you really expect them to give up those sweet, sweet margins?"
Sorry for the repeat post, but:
Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years
Big buyers agree to deals that will deliver historically enormous margins and profits
To be even more blunt about all of this... If Apple choose to not offset costs by raising prices, they would have to reduce costs via layoffs. This is literally how every single large company works in America today.
If Apple was really so anti-customer, they would have raised prices a long time ago. Let's not forget, memory/storage prices under Jobs were also ridiculously high (and profitable for Apple).
akdj
macrumors 65816
RAM has come up more than 300% across the board. 5-600% in many case
Storage has also come up to double or triple last years pricing. Internal or external.
*Specific to DDR5 RAM
Can you show us an example of any storage anywhere that down in price? The same 2TB 990 module I bought a pair of last summer is more than twice the price.
You are so closely paying attention and missed the RAM/SSD increases across the board? Apple was partially prepared by purchasing ahead of the increase.
Your AhHa moment was not a moment. It continues as the market shakes out.
There’s THREE manufacturers of DDR5 RAM. Hynix, Micron and Samsung. Samsung’s the chief Apple RAM supplier.
Micron has retooled their fab lines for HBM (high bandwidth memory) used in Nvidia as vRAM. Much faster and where anything AI or LLM locally is run. Not off system RAM. Hynix has claimed to have already retooled their lines for 50%+ production of HBM. Could be 90% and Samsung is still quiet only admitting that they are ‘experimenting’ with and tooling ‘some’ of their fab manufacturing to HBM.
HBM is significantly more profitable and harder to manufacture than DDR.
I believe they are changing the HBM to DDR7+ or something similar.
It’s not just more money and more profitable, it’s also looking to 50% or more of DDR5 manufacturing is gone in commitment. We could be looking at a forever change OR a parity in pricing between HBM and DDR5 hits and DDR is as profitable and easier to produce than HBM
OR we could be running HBM as system RAM which would make prices even higher.
The first dozen or more comments in this thread seemingly are ignorant to these facts.
Three companies are responsible for >95% of RAM manufacturing.
The third party branding of Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk are rebranded from one of the three while others own the brands.
Apple doesn’t make RAM.
They don’t make silicon. They design it. It’s manufactured by Samsung mainly and some was through Micron. No longer.
The price increases were solely due to the increased price of memory. Not storage. However, you can use a Mini w/16-256. Maybe an external is in your future but you will run into a wall with 8GB of RAM and 512 SSD. The choice is simple. Keeping 16GB of RAM and decreasing the still expensive and gaining price of NAND/PCIe 5 storage.
We’ve had M5 available for a minute now and with some good sales at resellers. It’s over.
The pricing is still extremely good value in comparison with Windows rigs. Where just the GPU is double MSRP, the RAM’s been cut in half on the top shelf builds. Look at ASUS G16, Lenovo, Dell/Alienware, and any other new releases that had 32-64GB off the shelf options in 2024/2025 have been cut to 16. Storage cuts too.
And you have to run Windows. A paid for OS.
Apple isn’t immune to the ebbs and flows of the market that are out of their hands! They have the latest and fastest storage they’ve ever had, and they’re now out of their stash of previously stockpiled memory, NAND modules, and other diodes resistors and capacitors they don’t manufacture either.
I have been debating which MacBook Pro I was going to replace my M1 Max with (16”) and I am going to hold off a bit. Might be a mistake but anyone can use DDR4 and enjoy prices that are not much different than before the 5, 6, 7x increase in DDR5 pricing.
Same with 2.5” SSDs.
My Mac is the Mini with 24GB/2TB and works great (M4). Screams in comparison with my M1 Max and I have the M4 iPad Pro 13”. It is capable of 95% of what I can on a MacBook Pro with the Mini and Sidecar or Thunderbolt for transfers, a killer TB4 OWC dock that works well with the iPad Pro and the MacBook Pro - and everyone has the ability to buy a pre owned M2, 3, and M4 and not miss a thing with no M5 Max you are incessantly comparing it to.
Until the price bump which is fairly insignificant, same price as a Magic Keyboard or a Pencil - and until the bump, the Apple Tax was not a thing anymore. Still isn’t when comparing to similar setup PCs.
Apple isn’t conniving or strategically busting folks’ bank accounts because they can. Business is business and in computing, no manufacturers are making every component that makes the thing work!
While Apple designs their SoC and it’s built on (usually) Samsung silicon. And they are using a shared pool of RAM which is more difficult to build. And the other two RAM manufacturers have either entirely or at least half their business moving forward will not be DDR. The money is in LLM/AI right now and the faster the memory available to the model, the more tokens = the faster, more efficient and possibly with less hallucinations and more facts being noted.
Lastly, I don’t think there’s a single Windows machine available that compares with a Mac. Period. The prices are now closer than ever to each other but Windows builders have to buy every component separately. They only put the thing together.
That’s a tough position. Apple has increased pricing by 5-10% on products using RAM and/or solid state storage. It is not Apple’s fault.
It’s YOUR fault for not seeing your AhHa moment over the last six months of RAM pricing increases and the fact you could get a better spec’d Mac for less than it’s PC counterparts.
No more Apple tax. Just that is awesome! The fact that you are going to pay an extra $5 a month over the three year duration of holding your device is as good as it gets! Especially when it comes to increased pricing on an in existence product that had to come up to avoid losing money on the product and it’s cost to build.
The fact that the best Apple site online’s loudest commenters are making such egregious comments and complaints is crazy to me. Maybe I’m too old (55) and remember the days of underwhelming performance or battery, heat or other bottlenecks when using Intel or PowerPC.
What we got five years ago was special. Some might say revolutionary. Look how quickly Windows and AMD have bounced to efficient 3nm architecture.
It’s just a matter of time before they are all in on the same process of Apple’s silicon, sharing a pool of RAM, with C/G/NPU, TB and USB controllers, audio and video, etc on a single chip. Bypassing the highways and byways of the motherboard.
The fact is that we are all victims of an evolving market.
Two years ago AI was a pipe dream. Today it is baked in your browser. And the tasks you are able to do with the tools are incredible and accelerating at breakneck speed.
Who knows. Maybe it dies off and becomes AOL.
Or the flip side - we have 16GB of local RAM and use our bandwidth on our internet to connect to the massive system in a data center running a quantum system.
The writings on the wall and the size of the current cores are closing in on atomic size - with a hundred billion plus on/off switches for 1 or 0 not different from the tubes of yesteryear that we had six or eight in our TVs
That is the direction we are going. As 3nm is about the size of 3 atoms of silicon lined up next to each other.
To put it in perspective a human hair is about 80,000-100,000 nm wide. Or. A 3nm object is about 30,000 times thinner than the width of a single human hair.
This is beyond rocket science
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
Ram and storage prices were ridiculously priced under Tim Cook
Also don't forget about apple charging 700 dollars for wheels for you mac pro, or a 1,000 dollars for monitor stand.
Those are “luxury accessories” for high end products. Nothing unusual there and doesn't help your "Apple's not looking out for the everyman" argument.
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
Monitor stands are now considered luxury accessories?
I hope you're not defending a 1,000 price tag for what stand.
Bazza1
macrumors 65816
Go into any Apple Store and take a look at, say, 3rd Party external drives on sale there. Usually labelled 'for the Mac', the prices (even before current spikes) were absurd compared to the same product from same manufacturer down the street at Best Buy, Staples or your favorite tech store. And 'for your Mac' easily achieved on those with a quick reformat.
The Apple Tax (and now the Apple Memory Tax) routinely gouges its users for every product. May they interest you in a $20 microfibre cloth with a fetching imprint of the Apple logo on it?
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
Don't forget about that sock they were charging up to 230 dollars.
I was refuting the member's assessment that Apple has long watched out for the consumer when it came to pricing
Sure. It's not required for the monitor to work. It's mostly cosmetic.
Yes, I bought one. No, I don't regret it. I wasn't 'forced to' and if I was appalled by a $1000 stand, I probably had serious misgivings about a Pro Display XDR price in the first place.