I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.
The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.
A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.
I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.
Maybe that's why the 512GB RAM models are gone: they opt to pull a model without further announcement rather than increase its prices.
It's also a financial optimization: Even with the very expensive RAM upgrade prices, it's way better to use the same memory chips to manufacture and sell four Mac Minis or two Mac Studios, rather than a single high-RAM unit.
Demand for 512+gb hasn't gone away though. I suspect we'll see M5/M6 Ultra later this year with 512gb-1tb of ram going for the biggest premium we've ever seen from the company.
> I suspect we'll see M5/M6 Ultra later this year with 512gb-1tb of ram
I suspect the opposite. 512gb of LPDDR5X is enough memory to make sixty four Macbook Neos. Apple's HPC/server audience is not very large or demanding, it seems likely that they will avoid memory upgrades during the shortage to focus on delivering value to low-end consumers and driving service sales.
It was probably two birds one stone: they could use that RAM for other more likely to be purchased models, and the loss from selling 512GB of "pre-RAM-AI-tax" costs would have been too high. They would have certainly sold those models though.
I suspect you’re right, but if they don’t do it until the new stuff is announced I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that.
If they announce it on, to pick a date, July 1 then by the time the iPhone is announced it will be somewhat old news. It will still get mentioned but it won’t be the main feature of every story at announcement time.
Like so many other companies Apple is between a rock and a hard place with this stuff.
> I suspect the price hike would drown out the news of all the new stuff. And I really don’t think Apple wants that.
I think they could get away with it if they do something like drop the price of the lowest device tier (or minimally hold price steady) and only increase prices on their more premium line up, where the premium buyers are less price sensitive.
The problem is the things going up are core. It’s not like the cameras are getting more expensive, it’s the RAM and processors and storage. Which all the phones have to have.
If anything the percentage increase is probably higher on the low end phones relative to total bill cost.
It'll really depend on apple's contracts with suppliers and the types of ram used in certain products. I could see them having medium term contracts, with first right of refusal to purchase on the longer term.
Memory has been a boom/bust industry since the 1970s, so I imagine people are careful with long-term agreements, but that's just me spitballing.
This sure seems like the Apple way to do it. "The old stuff is now more expensive" is a worse marketing announcement than "the new stuff is awesome, and with it comes a higher price just like most years".
came to say this, there's almost zero history for this so unless their supply chain got meaningfully distorted I can't see why this would happen now
Yes, there's been a meaningful distortion in the global RAM supply chain.
> As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.
It seems unlikely that Apple created a rainy day fund from offering an legacy product at niche prices almost a decade ago. Equally unlikely that Apple will continue to sell at a loss today out of a traditional disregard for decreasing component costs.