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Posted by virgildotcodes 21 hours ago

Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads(www.reuters.com)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/apple-price-increases-mac-ipa...
717 points | 1028 commentspage 14
functionmouse 21 hours ago|
2GB ought to be enough for anyone. It's our software that is unsustainable.
andrensairr 10 hours ago|
640k ought to be enough for anybody...
kwanbix 14 hours ago||
Thanks AI!
locallost 15 hours ago||
To be honest, Apple's pricing has been up to a point pretty user friendly the last few years. Two years ago I bought an iPad for around 400 because everyone thought they'll announce a new one. That didn't happen until last year where they announced the new one but for 350 or so. Macbooks are also "cheap" considering what you get for them with the M chips.
znpy 15 hours ago||
> M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)

I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...

drnick1 17 hours ago||
What is the point of posting a paywalled article? If you aren't going to paste the content somewhere else, please don't bother.
rvz 21 hours ago||
Cryptocurrencies never did this with the entire computing industry because it got its act together and efficient blockchains arrived without the need to constrain the supply of CPUs, GPUs and memory chips to the point with drastic price increases, and we have faster blockchains handling billions of transactions a week.

Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.

It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.

tencentshill 20 hours ago||
This is where regulators would normally step in and limit the clearly excessive buildout. It's well past harming consumer spending.
mrbungie 20 hours ago|||
Ah, come on. I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space. AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
rvz 19 hours ago||
> I remember the scalping of GPUs due to crypto-mining and then all the things Nvidia did to market segment crypto out of the regular (gaming) consumer space.

This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.

> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.

AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.

Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.

wat10000 20 hours ago||
Cryptocurrencies never did this because they were never popular. They were a big deal in tech spaces but the average person never really worked out what a bitcoin was or how they'd get one. AI, on the other hand, is seeing widespread use among ordinary people.
bix6 21 hours ago||
How is the mini not increased?
ndiddy 21 hours ago||
It is. They previously got rid of the 256 GB, $599 configuration, and the cheapest option was the 512 GB, $799 config. Now they brought back the 256 GB base model but at $799, and the 512 GB model is $999.
linguae 21 hours ago||
That’s terrible. I purchased my M4 Mac Mini (base 16/256 model) two months ago because I wanted an ARM Mac for a software project. I feared that the M5 Mac Mini would have a price bump, but I would’ve never guessed that Apple would dramatically hike prices for existing models.

I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…

cmdrmac 21 hours ago|||
I think they removed the "cheaper" configurations. In essence, the barrier to entry to mac mini was increased without actually changing the original price tag. I suspect the new mac mini (if one is coming) will sport a higher price tag.
AndroTux 20 hours ago|||
Models with more ram have also increased in price around 20%. The M4 Pro base configuration went up $200. It’s just that nobody cares about Mac minis.
elicash 21 hours ago||
I think when they eventually announce the M5 Mac Mini (September?) it'll just be at a higher price.
protoster 16 hours ago||
Uh oh. Should I grab an iPhone now before those prices are raised?
jl6 20 hours ago||
Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!
wrxd 20 hours ago|
I wish but I am not hopeful that's actually going to happen
jl6 19 hours ago||
It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.
cynicalsecurity 17 hours ago|
They simply couldn't cut into their fat margins, could they?
bluescrn 17 hours ago|
The huge markup on memory/storage upsells are were they make all their money
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