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.
It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.
Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.
Also we know that it's coming soon, that's why Cook is running cover for the new CEO. They don't want the new CEO to be the one taking the fall on higher prices, so before September 1 will be my guess.
Thank God I made the right decision and I bought a max'ed out Macbook Pro 5 Max with 128 GB of memory a couple of months ago. I think prices will continue to keep going up.
I suspect this is because of its CPU, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB RAM directly soldered on the CPU package, being overstock or something, or Intel secured the RAM supply upfront. I don't know but it's wild that this laptop is still early 2025 prices.
This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!
Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
For years with every other OEM I have bought the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and saved $800 or so buying the largest memory sticks that work with the machine from Crucial (R.I.P.) Doesn't work if the memory is soldered to the board though!
Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.
It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.
I think this is going to impact NVidia too but in a different way. Normally in NVidia's product cycle we'd expect 50x0 Super mid-cycle refreshes. It's clear that's not happening this time around. We might expect the 6000 series late next year. I think there's zero incentive for NVidia to do that so that'll likely get delayed into 2028 or possibly 2029. 5090 prices keep going up even though it's 1.5 years old.
Anyway, as for Apple I'm keenly watching for the anticipated refresh of the Mac Studio lineup. The previous gen (M3 Ultra, M4 Max) just don't have the raw horsepower even though they had configs up to 512GB (512GB and 256GB now discontinued). It'll be interesting to see what the max config is and when these come up. Q3 2026 is widely expected but I wouldn't be surprised if it slips into 2027.
I also think now, with RAM prices increased, ALL hardware manufacturers should be considered an illegal mafia aka cartel. It can not be that they steal money that way. That is not how capitalism and free market work. This is a de-facto monopoly. States need to do something; the USA under Trump is just a corporate disguise right now. They are doing nothing about it. The EU is not much better, slow and like a behemoth focusing on "data privacy" (but then handing over all of our data to the USA anyway and on top of that mandating age sniffing soon). They don't protect consumers from exploding RAM prices.