I feel sorry for any company trying to launch a new compute product during this window of extremely elevated RAM and SSD prices.
This looks well built with a lot of attention to detail. It’s impressive that the price isn’t higher for this level of machining and build quality on a low volume product.
I could see this doing well in some niche studios where they value design of all of the products in the office, but it’s a tough niche. The graphic and video designers are all going to be buying Apple. The CAD and engineering people want something with a real GPU. Most developers want a laptop that they can take with them. It’s nice that parts can be upgraded, but anchoring to that CPU is tough.
> window of extremely elevated RAM and SSD prices
Is it a window? It seems likely to me that we're going to be paying the LLM tax on all of our consumer electronics for the rest of our lives.
Yes, even memory manufacturers believe it is temporary which is part of the reason that supply has not increased to match demand and prices have spiked.
Considering their position, I wouldn't trust a damn thing that memory manufacturers say right now. They're the ones taking advantage of the increased demand by increasing prices.
> even memory manufacturers believe it is temporary
Do they? Is that why they've committed to literally doubling their production capacity in 5 years?
They cant outspend each other forever. And with all the datacenters not even being able to be hooked up compute isnt the problem, its powering it.
Cost of RAM and SSD seems like a secondary challenge. Trying to piss up a waterfall is more in line with the reality that products that are first about design and second about capability face when entering the current workstation and laptop markets that have been iterated on for decades and haven't seen a dramatic new redesign ever.
The closest such advance in recent years didn't happen and instead turned into the macbook neo. Apple could have released an OS for the iphone pro max model of phones that allow them to boot Mac OS when attached to a docking station. And sold a laptop formfactor docking station.