Companies also lose customers due to price increases. No one knows this better than Comcast.
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the mac mini increase that nobody is talking about.
- Thread starter Mrbiggestman
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Omega Mac
macrumors 6502a
The MM M4 has been €979 I think for much longer than these recent U$D price hikes.
It might have been since May, but I am not totally sure, but the base model price went from €699 > €979, but it was then a 512GB SSD, but now is back to the 256 SSD base config, so there was a short window there to grab what is now a bargain in hindsight, as the same entry level M4/16GB/512SS is priced at €1,199
You win some you lose some, and then there is the Ai bubble! 🙄
If you are on an old intel Mac mini and jump to an M4, on that count it's still amazingly incredible value because of the computational power under the hood.
It might have been since May, but I am not totally sure, but the base model price went from €699 > €979, but it was then a 512GB SSD, but now is back to the 256 SSD base config, so there was a short window there to grab what is now a bargain in hindsight, as the same entry level M4/16GB/512SS is priced at €1,199
You win some you lose some, and then there is the Ai bubble! 🙄
If you are on an old intel Mac mini and jump to an M4, on that count it's still amazingly incredible value because of the computational power under the hood.
philipma1957
macrumors 604
Yeah but my trade in was 335 the day before the raise of 20%. And my trade in stays at 335 after the price range.
Which make the price raise way higher than 20%. So the boycott continues. 2028 SEEMS SO FAR AWAY. Here is hoping new ceo bombs out before I Crack and buy from apple.
Which make the price raise way higher than 20%. So the boycott continues. 2028 SEEMS SO FAR AWAY. Here is hoping new ceo bombs out before I Crack and buy from apple.
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
philipma1957
macrumors 604
Wrong. The justification to raise one certainly means the other is more valuable.
iF the M4 is worth 20% more the trade in is. btw the used refurbished went up in price so the trade should go up.
Defending apple is fine but in this case the also raised the refurbished prices which means my trade in should go up.
I don’t need to upgrade and I won’t .
but 2028 is a long way off.
you are confusing two different things here
yes you can make the case that if a new computer goes up in price the a used item of the same model is now worth more
it does not mean that the price increase of the new item item is more than it actually is
what you can sell your used computer for does not change the price of a new one
The man is speaking sense. This whole arguing the trade in isn't simply profiteering off a crisis is bizarre. Pulling Mac mini inventory for the base spec and reintroducing at inflated pricing is also bizarre, let it sell until ready, they did with the neo.
Increasing pricing on Vision Pro - bizarre, The stock largely sits made (citation macrumors inventory report multiple times). Profiteering guised as all crisis. At least if they had some honesty to say once the crisis settles to a more predictable normal we will lower prices accordingly, but they don't... we all know why.
Well almost all of us.
1) no one is obligated to trade in a computer to Apple
2) the rest of your post is complete non-sequitor as it has nothing to do their argument that trade in value of a used item effects the price of a new item.
I find your entire argument to be reductionist and extremely binary, to the point you do yourself a disservice. In plainer English, it's disingenuous to acknowledge one without the acknowledgement that the other side has received no such increase - although all machines are considered higher value due to a crisis.
Suppressio Veri.
my argument is not reductionist at all, nor am I withholding any relevant information
the original commenter that I was replying to literally said:
this is simply not the case. if the price went up 20% it went up 20%
it doesn't matter what the trade in value is of something they already have in there possession might be just as it doesn't mater if they just lost their job or got a raise
let's say I have a $5 in my pocket and I'm on my way to the store to buy a loaf of bread that costs $5. if l lose a dollar out of my pocket on the way to the store the price of bread hasn't gone up by 20%. nor would the price of the loaf of bread be discounted by 20% if I found a dollar on the ground along the way. the price is $5. that's it.
or, to more accurately reflect what they were claiming, let's say that while I was on my way to the store, the price of bread increased from $5 to $6, a 20% increase, while the amount of money in my pocket remained $5. The fact that the amount of money in my pocket didn't increase as well doesn't somehow "make the price raise way higher than 20%"
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Bazza1
macrumors 65816
Yeah, but it will stop you from buying that loaf of bread. And maybe be happy enough to buy enough buns to tide you over from a different store.
Inflation only works for the retailer if the consumer can afford to buy the product at the increased price. And in this case, a sudden 20% increase is likely more than any one person is going to see in a wage increase this year (including at that retail store), and for a product that is - in most cases - discretionary.
A fun fact attached to that - while many states (but one) have a minimum wage that surpasses it, the official US federal minimum wage remains $7.25 / hour. And it has been that since 2007.
again, completely not even remotely close to the point.
I was merely pointing out that the potential trade in value of one item not increasing does not amplify the price increase of some other item
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You're missing the point. The trade in value not increasing DOES amplify the increase of the other item. If I say the cost of the thing I use in my machine has risen so it now costs more for the end user - that's not the same as me saying it costs me more to build than it did before the rising part cost, it's a part, the part is a cost item.
That same item has risen in value within the other products I previously sold, across the board.
If that wasn't the case I couldn't be honest and raise pricing on all existing stock on hand, in warehouses, already manufactured etc as those parts were obtained at lower rates.
If you say it's because of rising memory costs, the same memory in other machines is suddenly more valuable too - citation: used market where prices are rising. Apple is choosing to profit more than needed from a crisis by acting as though refurbished pricing on Macs didn't see large increases too.
Profit over acknowledgement that the crisis is across the board and they fairly recognise it by not expecting consumers to lose money on machines for trade in which have risen in market value - rather than expecting the same from all of us by acknowledging they can't keep absorbing costs. It's a two way street. Just apparently the other side doesn't exist.
Perhaps try reading this again slowly:
in this case, the trade in value is the money in pocket, whether that changes or not does not alter the % price increase of the bread at the store
You are trying to have a completely different discussion about the fairness of apples trade in value, or of their price increases, which are legitimate conversations to have in and of themselves, but has nothing to do with my original point. If the price went up 20% it went up 20%, no more and no less. Nothing changes that unless the price changes.
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akdj
macrumors 65816
The only reason for this thread and a gazillion like it all over the internet misses a massive point.
It’s nothing to do with corporate greed, stock prices, or Apple maintaining a certain margin in sales.
It has everything to do with DDR5(x) RAM.
THREE (3) companies make 97%+ of ALL RAM available to us. This includes HBM AKA DDR7 Used to power the most expensive consumer GPU in the history of me (55 years young), the 5090. And the pro cards.
The card with the same, in parity with last year’s models and their 32GB of vRAM. (A significantly tougher fabrication that includes a significantly higher profit than the slower DDR5).
But the tides changing.
The high bandwidth memory (HBM) manufacturers are Hynix, Micron, & Samsung. They are also the same three manufacturers of DDR5.
Apple’s usual supplier of the not so easy to manufacture shared memory on the same SoC as its C/G & NPU, I/O controllers (from USB1.1 to Thunderbolt 5 and the ability to use a dock to maintain backwards compatibility with USB 1.1 or 2.0).
I believe everything but the radio stack is on Apple silicon and regardless of the money they have/make/grow - they can’t give you a computer for less than it cost them to build!
The fact that no one has even mentioned (I’ll admit I haven’t read every reply but most) the Windows market. I feel kinda bad for the boutique, especially, builders of top shelf rigs. Apple controls horizontally and vertically their hardware and operating system.
Windows has the software and expensive little almost laptop almost tablet machines for a significantly higher price with significantly less performance than Apple ever has with what they had available.
But that’s less than a % of a point of x86 sales. The Dells, ASUSs, HPs, etc of the world make absolutely nothing! (Component wise, except ASUS😉)
Maybe they’ve started to build their cases but their motherboard is sourced out, as is their RAM, CPU, GPU, Power Supply, wiring, storage and case - etc.
Any and Everything you need to make a computer work is sourced and built by Intel, Nvidia, Crucial (which is owned by m Hynix I believe), and on and on.
Dell is a good example of a company that puts the bike you bought together for you. Using parts from everyone but themselves. So is the IBuyPower’s of the world.
All are at the mercy of the market. The ASUS M16 I bought last summer for a decent sale price of $2199 at Best Buy came with the 5070ti, 32GB RAM and a 2TB stick of SSD storage with an empty slot for up to another 8TB. 240Hz OLED display and great little 3nm CPU. I love flight simulators and got it specifically for this and proprietary software that my company runs.
Today they’re building the same computer at almost 30% more cash ($2,899-$3,099) with half the RAM (16GB), ½ the storage (1TB) and no additional improvements. No TB5 port, same everything but less where it counts as the RAM is soldered to the board with no additional RAM slots. For almost a thousand more than I got mine for just a year ago. EVERY single computer manufacturer is dealing with the same challenges and you guys are throwing a fit over a hundred or two bucks for the best hardware on earth!
Micron has committed 100% tooling to HBM in 2027. Hynix, 50% is the number they have been talking about for a change in their fabrication and Samsung has teased their desire to get into the ‘AI boom’ and HBM’s profits as well. With a 10-15% tooling change to try to get an idea of what they will continue to do.
The idea that almost 50% of DDR5 or 6 will not exist (possibly more) will do one of two things. Both good for the consumer.
1. They all go all in on the DDR7X/HBM and we are forced to use the same as system RAM or
2. The price of DDR5/system RAM will get so high that it won’t benefit the fab plant to produce or retool for HBM as they can continue making the far easier DDR5 instead of retooling for what might be a bubble.
I was at Costco over the weekend and they had all their desktops turned on for the RGB lighting but connected to nothing. All of the GPUs and sticks of RAM were pulled on any of the accessible (desktop) machines.
I don’t know why but it was surreal.
If people are willing to steal RAM on display machines, it is very much in demand.
But only so much electricity is available limiting the amount of data centers and the massive demand for RAM (& SSDs for caching on a much larger scale)
The fact that the Apple tax is dead is enough for me to not get down. As well as the absolute fair amount that Apple hiked the prices.
Never in history have they offered a desk and laptop for a thousand bucks for students! I own a Mini M4 (I cheated and bought refurbished with my military discount so I could choose what they had). It came with a 50% increase in the base memory (24GB) and ten fold the storage (2TB) and a 10Gb/s Ethernet port. $1,209 I paid. It was almost $700 off at the time and immaculate condition when I received it.
The current M5 rigs are implementing faster and next generation SSDs with R/W speeds up to and above 12-14Gb/s or 12,000-14,000 Mb/s. From the M4 series unable to reach half the speeds.
The addition of an external SSD is a simple way to get around the storage issue and Apple has a box to check that’s specifically designed for this (install apps >GB to my T-7). It’s under manage storage.
I have seen $7,000+ PC desktops and the new norm on the $2800 rigs is 16GB of RAM. Unless you don’t need it. DDR4 systems and memory itself hasn’t been hit nearly as hard as 5. But the fact you can’t get the chief GPU for less than double the retail price is egregious. It’s already a $2,000 card and people are willingly spending $4,000+ to get one to build their own, home LLM/AI locally.
It’s not just the big companies responsible for RAMageddon.
I hope you have a decent device to get you through this tumultuous time but it’s possible we’re seeing a new normal.
Unless you’re trying to get an M3 Ultra (> of $1,300 in the US), you will be paying more for the hardware but not by a ridiculous amount. If you don’t have the cash for the Max M5, maybe you don’t need it. And you know resellers will have your Neo or Mini for a $100 off in a month or two. Same on the laptops but I think Windows is going to get very expensive. Especially if you’re trying to achieve consistent 4K Ultra with 60fps+ on every triple A game
Each, by the way, sell more on consoles and are optimized for the now 4-7 (?) year old XBOX series and PS5s.
But that’s a tough place to be. No control of your component pricing increases. Apple, by designing its recipes makes the cook’s job easier and cost less.
In a few years this could be the time we look back on and appreciate how the AAA games are now optimized (with DX12) for ARM SoC rigs and Nvidia can sell their overpriced cards to the data centers. We’re otw. With the CPU switch a couple years back, the success of Apple silicon performance and efficiency… I think will be the key to see a RISC future of shared pools of RAM able to be used by the project(s) you are working on. The high speed PCIe g5 drives are almost unnoticeable when the RAM caches to the SSD - maybe not. But I can fly MSFS 2024 on my five year old Xbox and it is known as a taxing piece of software since its genesis.
The cheapest m5 product available will run circles around the Xbox or PS5. The performance is there and the price is fair. But I don’t game per se. Just flight simulation and XPlane is stellar on my Mini. It’s written on a Mac with Metal but they port an excellent x86 version as well. It’s got a lot of features beat vs Microsoft less the use of a real world current mapping system (Bing) for the increased fidelity and realism.
But Microsoft is a day late and a buck short on everything Apple builds. From the sluggish performance of OneDrive and continuously missing Excel power user tools to PowerPoint and extra content on a Windows rig.
While macOS is essentially bloat free. But if you want a stellar office experience; Pages Numbers and Keynote offer as good or better experiences and have become significantly better at exporting as Word without the font faults etc.
If you don’t want them don’t install them. Same with iMovie, GarageBand, Music, Fitness or Playground, etc are easily uninstalled and/or come without them installed and you choose.
If you want a bloat free PC you will pay more. On top of the RAM, storage and current CPU option
The price of a new MacBook Pro Max is in near parity if not cheaper than a PC capable of the equivalent performance (excluding gaming, but including graphics intensive workflows). This is shown over and over again by the benchmarks and real world usage with each iteration.
We shall see but I imagine many of us go to the grocery store too.
Have you not noticed how much less is in the cart compared with a year ago?
Gas?
Flights?
Going out to dinner?
Steak?
Beer?
Inflation is real and it’s here. Apple didn’t raise prices due to inflation but the fact that the parts they don’t make have increased. Maybe they need to buy Hynix or Samsung’s factory and IP to make their own memory and storage products
Sincere apologies for the novel. But seeing Costco pull the 5050 & 5060s as well as the RAM sticks from their demos was eye opening
It’s nothing to do with corporate greed, stock prices, or Apple maintaining a certain margin in sales.
It has everything to do with DDR5(x) RAM.
THREE (3) companies make 97%+ of ALL RAM available to us. This includes HBM AKA DDR7 Used to power the most expensive consumer GPU in the history of me (55 years young), the 5090. And the pro cards.
The card with the same, in parity with last year’s models and their 32GB of vRAM. (A significantly tougher fabrication that includes a significantly higher profit than the slower DDR5).
But the tides changing.
The high bandwidth memory (HBM) manufacturers are Hynix, Micron, & Samsung. They are also the same three manufacturers of DDR5.
Apple’s usual supplier of the not so easy to manufacture shared memory on the same SoC as its C/G & NPU, I/O controllers (from USB1.1 to Thunderbolt 5 and the ability to use a dock to maintain backwards compatibility with USB 1.1 or 2.0).
I believe everything but the radio stack is on Apple silicon and regardless of the money they have/make/grow - they can’t give you a computer for less than it cost them to build!
The fact that no one has even mentioned (I’ll admit I haven’t read every reply but most) the Windows market. I feel kinda bad for the boutique, especially, builders of top shelf rigs. Apple controls horizontally and vertically their hardware and operating system.
Windows has the software and expensive little almost laptop almost tablet machines for a significantly higher price with significantly less performance than Apple ever has with what they had available.
But that’s less than a % of a point of x86 sales. The Dells, ASUSs, HPs, etc of the world make absolutely nothing! (Component wise, except ASUS😉)
Maybe they’ve started to build their cases but their motherboard is sourced out, as is their RAM, CPU, GPU, Power Supply, wiring, storage and case - etc.
Any and Everything you need to make a computer work is sourced and built by Intel, Nvidia, Crucial (which is owned by m Hynix I believe), and on and on.
Dell is a good example of a company that puts the bike you bought together for you. Using parts from everyone but themselves. So is the IBuyPower’s of the world.
All are at the mercy of the market. The ASUS M16 I bought last summer for a decent sale price of $2199 at Best Buy came with the 5070ti, 32GB RAM and a 2TB stick of SSD storage with an empty slot for up to another 8TB. 240Hz OLED display and great little 3nm CPU. I love flight simulators and got it specifically for this and proprietary software that my company runs.
Today they’re building the same computer at almost 30% more cash ($2,899-$3,099) with half the RAM (16GB), ½ the storage (1TB) and no additional improvements. No TB5 port, same everything but less where it counts as the RAM is soldered to the board with no additional RAM slots. For almost a thousand more than I got mine for just a year ago. EVERY single computer manufacturer is dealing with the same challenges and you guys are throwing a fit over a hundred or two bucks for the best hardware on earth!
Micron has committed 100% tooling to HBM in 2027. Hynix, 50% is the number they have been talking about for a change in their fabrication and Samsung has teased their desire to get into the ‘AI boom’ and HBM’s profits as well. With a 10-15% tooling change to try to get an idea of what they will continue to do.
The idea that almost 50% of DDR5 or 6 will not exist (possibly more) will do one of two things. Both good for the consumer.
1. They all go all in on the DDR7X/HBM and we are forced to use the same as system RAM or
2. The price of DDR5/system RAM will get so high that it won’t benefit the fab plant to produce or retool for HBM as they can continue making the far easier DDR5 instead of retooling for what might be a bubble.
I was at Costco over the weekend and they had all their desktops turned on for the RGB lighting but connected to nothing. All of the GPUs and sticks of RAM were pulled on any of the accessible (desktop) machines.
I don’t know why but it was surreal.
If people are willing to steal RAM on display machines, it is very much in demand.
But only so much electricity is available limiting the amount of data centers and the massive demand for RAM (& SSDs for caching on a much larger scale)
The fact that the Apple tax is dead is enough for me to not get down. As well as the absolute fair amount that Apple hiked the prices.
Never in history have they offered a desk and laptop for a thousand bucks for students! I own a Mini M4 (I cheated and bought refurbished with my military discount so I could choose what they had). It came with a 50% increase in the base memory (24GB) and ten fold the storage (2TB) and a 10Gb/s Ethernet port. $1,209 I paid. It was almost $700 off at the time and immaculate condition when I received it.
The current M5 rigs are implementing faster and next generation SSDs with R/W speeds up to and above 12-14Gb/s or 12,000-14,000 Mb/s. From the M4 series unable to reach half the speeds.
The addition of an external SSD is a simple way to get around the storage issue and Apple has a box to check that’s specifically designed for this (install apps >GB to my T-7). It’s under manage storage.
I have seen $7,000+ PC desktops and the new norm on the $2800 rigs is 16GB of RAM. Unless you don’t need it. DDR4 systems and memory itself hasn’t been hit nearly as hard as 5. But the fact you can’t get the chief GPU for less than double the retail price is egregious. It’s already a $2,000 card and people are willingly spending $4,000+ to get one to build their own, home LLM/AI locally.
It’s not just the big companies responsible for RAMageddon.
I hope you have a decent device to get you through this tumultuous time but it’s possible we’re seeing a new normal.
Unless you’re trying to get an M3 Ultra (> of $1,300 in the US), you will be paying more for the hardware but not by a ridiculous amount. If you don’t have the cash for the Max M5, maybe you don’t need it. And you know resellers will have your Neo or Mini for a $100 off in a month or two. Same on the laptops but I think Windows is going to get very expensive. Especially if you’re trying to achieve consistent 4K Ultra with 60fps+ on every triple A game
Each, by the way, sell more on consoles and are optimized for the now 4-7 (?) year old XBOX series and PS5s.
But that’s a tough place to be. No control of your component pricing increases. Apple, by designing its recipes makes the cook’s job easier and cost less.
In a few years this could be the time we look back on and appreciate how the AAA games are now optimized (with DX12) for ARM SoC rigs and Nvidia can sell their overpriced cards to the data centers. We’re otw. With the CPU switch a couple years back, the success of Apple silicon performance and efficiency… I think will be the key to see a RISC future of shared pools of RAM able to be used by the project(s) you are working on. The high speed PCIe g5 drives are almost unnoticeable when the RAM caches to the SSD - maybe not. But I can fly MSFS 2024 on my five year old Xbox and it is known as a taxing piece of software since its genesis.
The cheapest m5 product available will run circles around the Xbox or PS5. The performance is there and the price is fair. But I don’t game per se. Just flight simulation and XPlane is stellar on my Mini. It’s written on a Mac with Metal but they port an excellent x86 version as well. It’s got a lot of features beat vs Microsoft less the use of a real world current mapping system (Bing) for the increased fidelity and realism.
But Microsoft is a day late and a buck short on everything Apple builds. From the sluggish performance of OneDrive and continuously missing Excel power user tools to PowerPoint and extra content on a Windows rig.
While macOS is essentially bloat free. But if you want a stellar office experience; Pages Numbers and Keynote offer as good or better experiences and have become significantly better at exporting as Word without the font faults etc.
If you don’t want them don’t install them. Same with iMovie, GarageBand, Music, Fitness or Playground, etc are easily uninstalled and/or come without them installed and you choose.
If you want a bloat free PC you will pay more. On top of the RAM, storage and current CPU option
The price of a new MacBook Pro Max is in near parity if not cheaper than a PC capable of the equivalent performance (excluding gaming, but including graphics intensive workflows). This is shown over and over again by the benchmarks and real world usage with each iteration.
We shall see but I imagine many of us go to the grocery store too.
Have you not noticed how much less is in the cart compared with a year ago?
Gas?
Flights?
Going out to dinner?
Steak?
Beer?
Inflation is real and it’s here. Apple didn’t raise prices due to inflation but the fact that the parts they don’t make have increased. Maybe they need to buy Hynix or Samsung’s factory and IP to make their own memory and storage products
Sincere apologies for the novel. But seeing Costco pull the 5050 & 5060s as well as the RAM sticks from their demos was eye opening
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philipma1957
macrumors 604
In the cart when I went to sleep.
540-335=205
In the cart when I woke up
680-335=345
205 to 345 is over 60% price jump. Edit
I get ten percent off so the 600 air is 540
The 750 air is 680 and if you look 600 to 750 is a 25% jump in price.
As 600x1.25=750
I am still boycotting them till 2028 .
Hodl is my new model Mac.
So Apple loses new
New iPad Air buy ——right now
Mac mini buy ———- when it comes out I will delay
Mac Studio buy - when it comes out I will delay.
My hope is enough Mac buyers do this lowering all sales of all Mac products.
Causing new ceo to be forced out.
And Apple eating some humble pie for a change.
Btw. I have owned and purchased not ten or twenty products.
But 100 to 150 products since 2005. To jump 20% and not raise trade values is a joke and an insult as I have traded in most of my purchases when the new models come out.
So I am facing not 20% on my new buys but more like 50 and 60%