Radxa Rock 5C and Orange Pi 5
I would do research on them because they are a similar form factor and usually cheaper for more memory… the software will be different.
Second hand mini pc's are a good option. Half the price of a pi 5 + sd + power and you often get them with 16gb ram, a decent ssd, etc.
If you need GPIO then many of the rockchip boards are still fairly affordable and easily had.
You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable.
I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port).
I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.
Being able to run two sides of an advertising board, or two control panel screens on a big hunk of metal doing fabrication things in a factory was more important to Raspberry Pi as a business apparently.
Why he heck they didn't just go with 1x normal hdmi and 1x usb-c +DP for the Pi 5 is a mystery, perhaps the SOC doesn't support it or something.
Have fun reading 40 answers about how discarded Lenovos from 2017 are cheaper and stay idle at 5W. It springs to 3x the power usage of a pi if they do anything with it but who cares about performance per Watt?
1. Yes, it's the new normal, then production capacity will be increased and prices fall.
2. No, it's not the new normal, the bubble pops and component prices come crashing down when buyers default etc.
Option 2 has been the normal outcome of these situations so far. But sure, questions remains how long all of this will take.
In that case prices will continue to rise (among other things).
Otherwise you may end up like others using a high-spec Mac mini to just access online models.
I’m sure they wanted to order more but were priced out for the increase in ram costs. Apple probably decided it wasn’t worth it until they revamped the architecture (and put a larger order in this time around).
I’m not a buyer but I suspect that’s what’s playing out right now behind closed door meetings.
Definitely “Caution” stage: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-studio/
The most I would say is that it was discontinued, but, depending on how it goes, it might be just sold out for now pending on memory procurement.
Not that they have to follow pattern, but the a Mac Studio ultra released later this year might be based on M4. Or one based on M5 might be released a year or more from now.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-unveils-m1-ultr...
Argentium 960 would most likely be the best alloy for the job, as it’s a good heat conductor and doesn’t tarnish like pure silver.
Reports and leaks strongly indicate Apple is preparing an M5 Ultra (likely fusing or scaling from the M5 Max using this advanced interconnect tech) for a Mac Studio refresh later in 2026, based on Bloomberg/Mark Gurman and other sources. This would bring back the top-tier "Ultra" option after skipping it entirely for M4.
Any idea why? Wasn't that on the M1?
M3 Ultra, 3.3k single core 27k multicore on Geekbench. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16959045
M5 Max, 4.3k single core 29k multicore https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16956481
Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k.
I think there might be a market failure guys.
That makes sense for a few products, but not something that takes billions of dollars, multiple factories, etc to produce.
You can't compare it to tariffs because the cheaper alternative to investment is to bribe your politicians.
128GB memory kits are not $3K. Closer to half of that. Amazon is not a good source of RAM pricing.
My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.
It can be about more than the single sale.
other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly
but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with
The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.
I just did a 14" MBP with M5 Max, 128GB RAM, 4TB SSD, nano-texture display. Price difference is $5849 vs 7004 EUR ($8136).
But my point is that's a 16GB jump for 200$ not 8GB
14' MBP M5 Pro 64GB - $2999 or 3449 €
The twist now though is they started soldering in the RAM with the retina macbook, so you can't run around apple's extortionate pricing like you could in the past and just buy components off the market.
Such a stupid cartoon evil villain move too, just to force us into getting RAM from them. I have never been memory bandwidth bound (Apple's excuse for soldering in the RAM) in my life and yet I am forced to buy computers that optimize for this at the expense of things I actually care about like serviceability. And also consider the fact it incentivizes people to buy more RAM than they need today in effort to future proof their device, in a time of RAM shortages. And who knows maybe by the time that RAM amount is relevant the CPU can no longer keep up so the hoarding might not even be for anything either.
This isn't even a plausible excuse. For the entry level machines, the soldered RAM only has the same memory bandwidth as ordinary laptops. For the high end machines it likewise doesn't have any more than other high end machines (Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon) which just do the same thing as Apple -- use more memory channels -- without soldering the RAM.
And it's especially a kick in the teeth right now because it means you can't buy a machine with less RAM than you might prefer and then upgrade it later if prices come back down. If it's soldered then only what you can afford at the right now prices is all the machine will ever have.
So yeah, Apple probably does pay less. But the market has enough demand that suppliers do say no.
If I buy contracts for 1 gold bar at $500, and the gold price runs to $1200, I can either continue to market my gold-containing product for the same profit margin, or I can unload all that gold for $1200/bar and make a profit of $700/bar. If my profit margin is high and it doesn't take many gold bars to make a thousand units, maybe discontinuation doesn't make any sense. But if my product is "solid gold statuary of Dear Leader", and the bars are most of my cost basis, I know what I'd do.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/26/apple-agrees-100-price-...
By comparison, ram seems much more a commodity, but the game has changed and it seems like there may be an important strategic interest in sourcing and supplying your own.
I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday)
My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc.
Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $)
(Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle)
Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial)
This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general.
The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1]
OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money.
All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal.
But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so.
Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud.
I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well.
I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire.
I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose
And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too.
OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-...
[1]: https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...
Thanks. I appreciate your kind words, I was thinking of writing some piece/blog about it but procastination is definitely something :) But I am just happy that I finally wrote a comment atleast explaining all/most of my understanding. That's more than fine for me.
> Incredible digging. I remember reading comments about the reason the price hike was the Sam Altman secured a deal with the few ram producer in secrecy were they promised to reserve a large portion of their production to OpenAI for the next years (I don't remember how long). Supposedly Sam will just to put them in a warehouse to collect dust.
I do believe that's gonna be the case as well. Most of the ram is probably not needed currently (thats what I feel like) so its gonna sit on dust, That, or oracle/microsoft will use it within their datacenters as old ram breaks apart to have some more monopoly given their close ties to OpenAI.
Even if OpenAI internally sells them at half the market price to microsoft/oracle, they still technically turn a profit.
I actually felt too conspiratorial thinking about it when I had first discovered it because I was under the previous assumption that OpenAI actually needed the ram myself too. But seeing recent events of OpenAI with Department of Defense, I definitely think that they did this on purpose.
it'd be interesting to just hear some thoughts and opinions from someone who has done some research on the topic in a light way vs a huge article/documentary
>[...]
>All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI
Nothing you described is actually "cartel/monopoly-ish" beyond "big players have more money to splash around". It's fine to go look at that and go "grr, I hate big tech companies", but the claim of "It's not a shortage, it's a cartel." isn't substantiated. The latter implies some sort of malice beyond what could be explained by standard scarcity thinking, eg. "there isn't enough RAM to go around. We need RAM, so let's stock up".
So it isn't there isn't enough ram to go around (period) but rather an ideology similar to this town ain't big enough for the two of us (OpenAI vs Anthropic/Google/Chinese-Open-Weights-Models)
Atleast that's my understanding of the situation and I can be wrong about it too for what its worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
+ showing the people responsible have only been promoted in those companies
+ pointing out 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) companies at the heart of it now have 95% of market share
+ hypothesis they've doing it again (or rather, have continued doing it "business as usual")
While there is some market variance like the 2022 to 2023 glut, DRAM prices haven't fallen in real terms in over 15 years. This was all done by controlling supply, and it was all done in public. It starts with one of the big three putting out a statement like, "Samsung is considering reducing DRAM wafer output due to softness in the mobile PC segment." The actual reason varies and often makes little sense.
This is followed by similar public statements from the other large vendors expressing a willingness to reduce supply. Once everyone commits in this way, the companies follow up with announcements of actual supply reductions. You can watch this happen any time prices start to dip.
My bet is if the DOJ investigates, they will not find the same sort of embarrassing smoking gun emails between representatives of Micron, Hynix, and Samsung. The collusion was all done in public. The companies will claim it is just good business management, a strategy known as "conscious parallelism." They used this exact defense to get a 2022 antitrust lawsuit dismissed.
That said, their goal seemed to be just keeping prices fixed. They wanted to avoid boom and bust cycles, keep profits high, and keep prices stagnant. A massive price hike invites investigations and creates problems. If DRAM prices just never fall, they can enjoy healthy profits with little risk.
But what happens when your intentionally constrained supply hits a sudden large spike in demand? Prices skyrocket, everyone gets mad, and demands investigations. My guess is instead of being thrilled with the price spike, the executives at the large DRAM manufacturers are very worried someone put something incriminating in a document somewhere that can be subpoenaed ("how we're going to fix prices in public and get away with it").
In all seriousness, though, as one of the uninitiated, what would be the value of hosting LLMs on a machine like this that has a lot of memory that you pay for up front versus some sort of VPC-based approach?
is it because iMessage?
Hooking things up to puppeteer maybe?
You can use pupeteer to then use the chromium control remote (debug?) option iirc which uses websockets underneath the hood
Then you can connect this from your pc or theoretically any Control server. Surprised to not hear much work on that front now that you mention it.
One is that it’s a more complicated part with tougher fab requirements.
Two is that it’s not a commodity. AMD can’t make nVidia GPUs. They have to design their own. Everyone has patents and trade secrets and copyrights. Patents expire and knowledge diffuses but that adds another time lag.
AMD and Intel are fully aware of the demand and are working on it.
RAM is a commodity. Totally interchangeable standard part. Also simpler to fab, thus quicker and easier to scale up.
Oh, and I’d like to add: everyone is afraid it’s a bubble that will pop. Nobody wants a bunch of stranded capex. That has also happened before many times. So that puts brakes on it too.
Then how do you not remember the DRAM shortage of the late 1980s?
This shortage in 2026 is more consequential across the board and impacts consumer electronics as a whole and the fact it's going to last years means that many low cost manufacturers are going to close up shop because they won't be profitable.
This may just be a sign that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is shipping sooner rather than later, as it's common for Apple to push out ship dates for soon to be replaced products.
We do have leaked benchmarks showing that the M5 Max outperforms the M3 Ultra currently shipping in the Mac Studio, so buying an M3 Ultra Studio right now would be a terrible idea.
Every mathematician and computer scientist should feel deeply confused that the M... Ultra is more powerful than the M... Max.
Why? Because if something is the maximum, there doesn't exist anything larger/better. :-)
Well, for iPads, the base has (had? Haven't closely followed them for a while) an older CPU for some reason. And the Air is actually a "Pro-lite", rather than a weight optimized version.
Don't get started on where the mini sits, or what happens if you want "nicer" features like 60hz+ displays in a small form factor... a feature that budget android tablets have had for years.
Also the 512 GB ssd version has a slower SSD than anything 1 TB and up. The new SSDs on the M5 I believe are much faster and what's coming likely will receive that.
There's no doubt there's a ram shortage, and price increases, and the biggest companies in the world lock in their pricing well in advance, and the remaining leftovers are where the consumers experience shortages.
I guess it gives more credence to stitch a few more of them togther in the meantime.
Going beyond 512gb and into 768gb memory is something of a threshold that will allow Apple to claim local capability for significantly more models. Qwen3-235B, Minimax M2.5, and GLM 4.7 could kind of run with no quantization on 512gb, but they'll comfortably run at 768gb. DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM 5 may also work at some level of quantization.
> A powerful Neural Accelerator is built into each GPU core of the M5 family of chips, which dramatically speeds up AI tasks like image generation from diffusion models, large language model (LLM) prompt processing, and on-device transformer model training. [1]
Just kidding, I'm sure you're aware. I just wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see them go well beyond that.
Or they could finally make the Mac Pro respectable and have it two M5 Ultra Mac Studios stuck together (or give it NUMA RAM: on chip + expandable).
https://cottonbureau.com/p/TR4KZV/shirt/mac-pro-believe#/300...
I know everyone thinks they're going to just kill it, but I don't see it. Apple's move under Tim Cook has been to exhaust supplies (see: filling the Intel Mac Pro chassis with air and not updating the CPU), letting people predict its death (see: 2013 -> 2019 Mac Pro silence), and then redesigning it into something people want while utilizing it as an opportunity to segment specs across their SKUs.
The Studio will remain the high-powered creator machine, whereas the Mac Pro will be retooled into an AI beast.
znpy•1d ago
PostOnce•1d ago
*Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint
MaxikCZ•1d ago
PostOnce•18h ago
znpy•1d ago
And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.
tonyedgecombe•1d ago
znpy•1d ago
hylaride•1d ago
Apple isn't a just a consumer computer company. Both iPhones and Macs have very large business markets. In fact, I'd argue that the primary reason Apple hasn't locked down MacOS as much as iOS is that it'd absolutely kill the demand from software developers.
citizenpaul•23h ago
carefree-bob•23h ago
storus•1d ago
appreciatorBus•1d ago
> The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499.
Number of people willing the number of people willing to spend $10,000 on a computer is pretty tiny. Maybe they are common enough in HN circles, but I doubt any one at Apple is losing sleep over them.
dangus•1d ago
Just a guess, but I think it’s entirely possible that Apple sold through the full production run that they intended for this generation of the machine and they don’t want to order a new batch before the next generation of processors come out.
I have to think that Apple is close to replacing the M3 Ultra with an M5 Ultra or something of the sort.
storus•1d ago
__patchbit__•1d ago
rattray•1d ago
jonhohle•1d ago
storus•1d ago
ganoushoreilly•1d ago
I was really excited to see where the GB300 Desktops end up, with 768gb ram but now that data is leaking / popping up (dell appears to only be 496gb), we may be in the 60-100k range and that's well out of my comfort zone.
If Apple came out with a 768gb Studio at 15k i'd bite in a heart beat.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/dell-pro-max-nvidia-ai-dev
storus•1d ago
irusensei•1d ago
Good thing is they only seem to charge when device ships so if an M5 comes along you should be able to cancel the m3 ultra and get the m5.