Posted by virgildotcodes 10 hours ago
Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ 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.
Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.