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- Hacker News
- Ohhh look, the companies that started the problem have to raise the price! sure yes, I will not buy any product, untill price goes down. And others should do, but each on their own. Price hikes on my food, home and now tech. I have a pocket and a voice, and I will stop buying any product.by annagio_
- Why did Apple start the problem?by ralfd
- Do we have any estimates on how much the price might increase? I was waiting for the MacBook Pro with the M6 Max and 128 GB of RAM, especially since there are rumors that it will come with a design refreshby lossolo
- Thanks, AI!by dist-epoch
- You can offset this cost by investing in memory stocks.
Apple product got $200 more expensive? Well you made $200 speculating on $DRAM.
Lost $200 speculating on $DRAM? Well at least your Apple product got less expensive.
by unsupp0rted - Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."by noobermin
- Umm… a simpler explanation is that supply takes a lot longer to ramp up than demand.
See analogues in oil booms (then busts).
by jbs789 - This is Capitalism working exactly as intended - resources (RAM) are allocated to those which can use them most productively (AI data-centers)
And the AI data-centers are using the RAM so productively, that they are willing to buy them at any price whatsoever.
by dist-epoch - As if simply entering the market is trivial.by rapsey
- You don't want to build a huge factory if you believe the market might deflate suddently.
A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID. The reality is the market was overly and abnormaly inflated and consumers who bought the stuff during COVID period were equipped for the next ~10 years in stuff like sporting goods and had no reason to buy new items in the subsequent years.
I do believe we will always need more RAM even if there is a market correction or AI bubble burst whatever you want to call it. It will not destroy AI completely, just cleanup the market. But how much will we need? I guess the chip makers makes their own guesses but don't want to make their company in peril either.
by prmoustache - Looks pretty darn efficient to me:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
by lysace - Could you please expand on this?
Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand? And they’d collapse in turn if demand disappeared.
My understanding of economics is entry level so please forgive my ignorance. I’m just curious what you mean.
by herodoturtle - Nobody's stopping you from taking advantage of that shortage :) Just don't forget to turn your garage EUV machine on and off if it starts glitching.by tornikeo
- Everyone always wants to charge as much as they possibly can, and if SK Hynix would be the only manufacturer prices would be 10x of what they are today. Especially new incumbents will not ruin the market prices as they have the highest upfront cost and their calculation of entering the market is probably based on the high prices that can be achieved. In the long run, more competition is still good as everyone ramps up production to profit more from the high prices and at some point supply will outpace demand and prices will fall (assuming no cartel / price fixing is involved).by ThePhysicist
- Enough of this.
It is time to activate the Chinese.
Seriously let ASML sell to CXMT etc.
by chvid - Except, that won’t help. By the time a new fab is up and running, we will probably have a massive surplus.by djsjajah
- CXMT will sell their RAM.... to the AI labsby dist-epoch
- Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast if it allows me to run coding models locally.by ThePhysicist
- there's no local AI model that comes even close to the ones you get access to by paying 1000 USD per monthby dirasieb
- > you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick
Why?
by esperent - That's an expensive looking 'if'.by Xiol
- I would wait until the next Mac Studio. Rumors are it will have 768GB max memory and with the M6 Max chip, even faster prefill. I feel like it’s the endgame.
- The funny thing is that currently Apple's RAM upgrades are cheaper than the loose dimm sticks.
I've just got a new MBP this month, because I expect the prices to rise significantly with the new macbooks in the fall.
by yreg - I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts.
It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.
by AnonC - > I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
* when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect
* when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature
Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.
by johnvanommen - There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.
Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
by jl6 - this used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else
and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even
- I doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.by Hamuko
- It's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.by steve1977