Posted by virgildotcodes 2 days ago
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.
I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
Natural monopolies are a thing, and chip production has become pretty close to one with the vast resources and timescales required to attempt to compete.
Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
By the way OpenAI has postponed their IPO until next year 2027.
Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.