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Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to Memory Costs

jimbobb24 said:
It might pop (some re-evalution of costs and corporate value) but it will be like the Dot com bust. AI isn't going away just like the internet didnt go away. It is never going away and it will only grow.
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But hopefully in a more sensible way. Object recognition in Photos or elsewhere is useful for example, generating text that superficially looks good, but is factually completely unreliable isn't.
 
It is not inevitable. Apple’s products defy Wright’s Law. Instead of getting cheaper, they’ve gotten more expensive since they were introduced nearly 20 years ago. Even with greater capability and a RAM and storage shortage, there is no way we should be paying these outrageous prices that we have been.
 
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Not that I would but quite crazy a year and a half after purchasing I could sell my M4 256GB Mini easily for the £499 I paid for it (with education discount) or even a slight profit!
 
macsimcon said:
Remember, this is a manufactured crisis. We should NEVER have relied on just three memory manufacturers. There never should have been any tariffs. AI should've only been allowed to buy parts they had cash to pay for, but their access to unlimited funds has driven prices to the Moon.

And Timmy? "We know what we're good at" is not a good reason to avoid building your own foundry. A company of your size knew decades ago that demand was surging for these parts. Ever heard of vertical integration? It saves you money in the long run. THIS is why you LEARN how to make memory, so you aren't flat-footed when supply is constrained.

What kind of company this size can't walk and chew gum at the same time?!
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I agree with some of what you're saying, but not with the conclusions.

Business dynamics lead to situations in which a whole industry depends on one or very few suppliers if those suppliers are the best or the most effective ones and the barrier of entry is high. This is how everyone came to rely on TSMC and Taiwan. Same thing about memory makers.

Starting up your own is not like spraying Febreze. Apple would have the capital, but it takes a few years to get up to speed.

And to your "What kind of company" question: I suggest you start buying computers from all these companies that make their own memory, like Microsoft, Google and... oh.
 
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macsimcon said:
Remember, this is a manufactured crisis. We should NEVER have relied on just three memory manufacturers. There never should have been any tariffs. AI should've only been allowed to buy parts they had cash to pay for, but their access to unlimited funds has driven prices to the Moon.

And Timmy? "We know what we're good at" is not a good reason to avoid building your own foundry. A company of your size knew decades ago that demand was surging for these parts. Ever heard of vertical integration? It saves you money in the long run. THIS is why you LEARN how to make memory, so you aren't flat-footed when supply is constrained.

What kind of company this size can't walk and chew gum at the same time?!
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It seems you have little knowledge about fabs... how much they cost to build and equip, the number of skilled/experienced employees required to run a fab 24/7, and how little sense it makes for Apple to go in that direction.
 
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robl5150 said:
It is not inevitable. Apple’s products defy Wright’s Law. Instead of getting cheaper, they’ve gotten more expensive since they were introduced nearly 20 years ago. Even with greater capability and a RAM and storage shortage, there is no way we should be paying these outrageous prices that we have been.
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Unspecific rant from you. Adjusted for inflation, Macs and other products have become considerably cheaper. I suppose what you're getting at is iPhones Pro Max. Nobody is forcing you to buy them.
 
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I think this RAM crisis will drive people back to native apps. Electron based crud shovellers and browser fatware pushers are going to suffer big time.
 
JesterJJZ said:
"Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable' Due to AI no one actually wants."

I fixed it for you.
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I absolutely want AI. Not at any price, but I generally want it.

People like you have been going on for years now how supposedly nobody wants it. That's great, because then those companies will all go bankrupt and we don't have to put up with Amodei's insane proclamations anymore.
 
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Smartuser said:
Unspecific rant from you. Adjusted for inflation, Macs and other products have become considerably cheaper. I suppose what you're getting at is iPhones Pro Max. Nobody is forcing you to buy them.
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apropos of nothing the SE/30 sitting on my desk would cost a whopping $19,000 today
 
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Grab your MBA or MBP M5's with minimum 16 GB RAM now people whilst the prices are reasonable! If you can stretch to 24 GB even better. Prices are increasing already with consoles etc, its going to be years until things stabilise.
 
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seek3r said:
it's going to be a while, AI companies are buying up *massive* amounts of RAM and NAND, like whole production lines for several years out
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They’re not. They don’t have buildings to put the servers in that need the RAM yet. Even getting power in for a DC can be a multi-year task after planning process, which isn’t going well. Before then they will need to pay up and they don’t have any capital so there’s going to be a glut of back ordered stock. That’ll drive prices down again.

Everything is running on a huge dependency stack and promises.
 
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I'm hoping for an M6 MBP with more than 128GB of ram this fall. Guess I'd better keep the car running for a few more years so I can afford the payments.
 
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Smartuser said:
I absolutely want AI. Not at any price, but I generally want it.

People like you have been going on for years now how supposedly nobody wants it. That's great, because then those companies will all go bankrupt and we don't have to put up with Amodei's insane proclamations anymore.
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I'd love for AI to make my bed, do my laundry and cure cancer. I don't need it trying to make soul-less art.
 
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mikerahl said:
Countries like Canada could help with this by restricting the availability of rare earth metals and other natural resources so none can be used for AI data centers. The minute it is found that any resources are used in AI chip manufacturing, the flow of such resources is cut off immediately.
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Other countries already doing that and it’s effective. Canada probably can follow suite.
 
citysnaps said:
It seems you have little knowledge about fabs... how much they cost to build and equip, the number of skilled/experienced employees required to run a fab 24/7, and how little sense it makes for Apple to go in that direction.
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Well... you could have said the same about CPUs in 2008 or so.

It's kinda ridiculous that the entire industry is throwing its hands up in the air and just staring slack-jawed at the situation. This is the kind of situation where you take action so something cannot ever repeat itself, no matter if it takes a few years to implement the solution.
 
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Heh, “unavoidable”? What’s wrong shrinking their ridiculous 50% profit margin to 30% just for a couple of years? If anything, Apple IS in that position to delay price hike as long as they please. But nope, ain’t gonna lose on profit margin so $100-$1000 price hike there is in September.
 
CWallace said:
It is not just the base capital cost. You also need to hire the expertise to run it. And that can easily run into the billions per year. And most of that talent is foreign and the current Administration is generally against immigration (though maybe Apple could get them all those Trump Gold Visas. 😛 ).

And of course you can't build a fab in a day. And I expect the equipment that goes into it has long lead-times. And once you have that fab, it is designed around a certain process and capacity. If what you need changes, then at best you spend billions making changes and at worse you spend tens of billions starting over.

Better for Apple to do what they are doing now, investing in existing Intel and TSMC fabs based in the US and helping them fund new US-based fabs on newer processes (I don't see TSMC ever letting their absolute latest processes leave Taiwan). That way, you have first-access to the product. This is what Apple did with TSMC in Taiwan to help them scale to the levels they are now.
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I was thinking more in terms of DRAM and maybe NAND. I don't think those processes turn over as quickly as CPU's.
 
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