Tim justifying selling a computer for more than 10k when that Mac Studio comes out

September.

I understood this as a “the next generation will cost more”. By now I am sure apple can fairly accurately predict device sales for each season and so they likely have a decent backlog for the current generation, procured at reasonable cost from hardware manufacturers.

It’s when they had to negotiate for the next generation where the price would be hiked.

Like the author I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on this though.

Slow news day, I guess.

This is understandable given the market but part of me really wishes this would wait a year even though it won't.

Mac hardware is so close to being really useful for local LLMs and it's shared memory architecture could be a direct shot across the bow of NVidia's aggressive VRAM Market segmentation but it just can't compete with the raw FLOPS and memory bandwidth of NVidia. You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.

It's safe to say that no current Apple product will get a RAM bump for the next 1-2 cycles at least.

I think this is going to impact NVidia too but in a different way. Normally in NVidia's product cycle we'd expect 50x0 Super mid-cycle refreshes. It's clear that's not happening this time around. We might expect the 6000 series late next year. I think there's zero incentive for NVidia to do that so that'll likely get delayed into 2028 or possibly 2029. 5090 prices keep going up even though it's 1.5 years old.

Anyway, as for Apple I'm keenly watching for the anticipated refresh of the Mac Studio lineup. The previous gen (M3 Ultra, M4 Max) just don't have the raw horsepower even though they had configs up to 512GB (512GB and 256GB now discontinued). It'll be interesting to see what the max config is and when these come up. Q3 2026 is widely expected but I wouldn't be surprised if it slips into 2027.

This was inevitable. The better question is if AI related hardware costs drop after the AI bubble implodes, will Apple drop the prices? My answer is negative.

>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle

This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!

Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading. Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.

I think it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to raise prices anytime from now till new products are announced in September. It doesn’t match Apple’s brand image (like the author says). As pointed in another post by John Gruber, Apple kept selling the trash can Mac Pro for a very high price for years without any updates. So it can certainly afford to bear this pain for a couple of more months and bundle all the price hikes together.

The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.

A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.

I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.