What I am hearing is that developers don't necessarily want more competition; they just want a "better deal" on iOS (eg: lower / zero rates, not being held hostage by app review). This would allow them to continue doing what they are already doing, while (hopefully) getting more money out of it.
At some point that price increase will become visible anyway. 🤷🏼♂️
Governments want it to monitor their populations and attack their enemies. And they can just print money to pay for it.
A lower profit margin doesn’t have to mean less growth. But obviously they know that at Apple and find the sweet spot of maximising profits to keep shareholders happy. The current profit margin is just pure greed.
Sorry, but there is no Ram crisis at all, everybody have it and everybody happy about it
As consumers we have no obligation towards Apple whatsoever.
Anything beyond 96 GB is difficult to come by already. The days of 512GB studios have been gone for some time now.
That’s just the way it is, right? We are told to get a job and earn money so we can buy new things. For that dream to continue, there have to be new things to buy even if the old thing was still perfectly fine.
Just because you don't see it that way doesn't mean it's not an accessible alternative. Takes about 15 minutes to put Linux Mint on an old machine. Hell, I still have an old 11 inch macbook air on linux I carry in a bag.
I doubt it. Once they get you comfortable paying these high prices, they will never lower it.
This is 100% a 2016 mindset. Everything is in the cloud at this point. Want to do documents on your phone or tablet, Google Docs and Office365 just run in the web browser. Want to watch video, all on the web pages. Social Media, Facebook, X, Instagram, all work on the web.
It is amazing that thousands of years after the summerian marketplaces, and hundreds of thousands of years of human species exchanging goods, with books and internet and publicly available education and studies of economic systems....
Wrong question. The question is this... is AI actually hype? I see lots of people think that AI hype is not hype, but a fad. We'll get over this and then we won't have AI as a problem anymore. The hype could very well be real when we talk about company valuations who create these AI models and agents, but the use of it will not go down.
Price increases are unavoidable due to less product supply with more product demands. Memory units have been demanded more than ever with significant growth of AI technology impacting computing processors. All make sense!!
Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers.
"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," said Cook. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."
Cook did not say which products will get price increases or how much pricing will go up. The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max coming in September could be more expensive than the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Prices on iPads and Macs could go up in the near future.
Apple already raised the price of the Mac mini from $599 to $799 by eliminating its lowest-tier model. Apple has also eliminated several higher-tier Mac mini and Mac Studio options.
Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs. The Wall Street Journal suggests Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins given the cost of memory chips and SSDs. Research firm TechInsights claims Apple will need to make the iPhone 18 Pro around $270 more expensive to keep its existing profit margin.
Apple is struggling more with memory chips, but storage chips are also an issue. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Cook said Apple will use its cash to increase memory supply, but he did not give details on what that means.
Apple does not plan to create its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," Cook said. "We know what we're good at."
While memory chip makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are increasing production capacity, much of that added capacity will prioritize server chips. Demand for consumer-device chips is expected to continue to outpace supply. At the same time, Apple needs to increase the DRAM in its devices to support new AI features. Cook likened the memory shortages to a hundred-year flood. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years," he said.
Apple is one of the largest purchasers of memory and storage worldwide, but it is likely reluctant to make the same deals AI companies do. Those deals involve signing multi-year agreements with a large cash prepayment.
Multiple companies have already raised their prices, including Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Dell.
Article Link: Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to Memory Costs
