Posted by virgildotcodes 5 hours ago
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
All the people running any computer appreciate.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.
And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.
Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.