I wonder if Apple will budge. The margins on their RAM upgrades were so ludicrous before that they're probably still RAM-profitable even without raising their prices, but do they want to give up those fat margins?
I know contract prices are not set in stone. But if there’s one company that probably has their contract prices set for some time in the future, that company is Apple, so I don’t think they will be giving up their margins anytime soon.
Perhaps I don't understand something so clarification would be helpful:
I was under the impression that Apple's RAM was on-die, and so baked in during chip manufacturing and not a 'stand alone' SKU that is grafted onto the die. So Apple does not go out to purchase third-party product, but rather self-makes it (via ASML) when the rest of the chip is made (CPU, GPU, I/O controller, etc).
That whole square is the M1 package, Apple's custom die is under the heatspreader on the left, and the two blocks on the right are LPDDR packages stacked on top of the main package.
Sadly everything in the general direction of RAM or SSD chips is getting more expensive because a lot of production capacity is redistributed to serve AI chips and everything around.
Even lower end GPUs are getting more expensive even if they are not really useful for AI.
But they still contain <some> chips and ram which is in high demand.
So yes, Apple will likely also have to pay higher priceses when they renew their contracts.
I'd like to believe that their pricing for ram upgrades are like that so the base model can hit a low enough of a price. I don't believe they have the same margin for the base model compared to the base model + memory upgrade.
Apple doesn't own any foundries, so no. It's not trivial to spin up a DRAM foundry either. I do wonder if we'll see TSMC enter the market though. Maybe under pressure from Apple or nvidia...
on one hand they are loosing profit, on the other hand they are gaining on market share. They will probably wait a short while to assess how much they are willing to sacrifice profits for market share
Not me. It’s wildly unusual for Apple to raise their prices on basically anything… in fact I'm not sure if its ever happened. *
It’s been pointed out by others that price is part of Apple's marketing strategy. You can see that in the trash can Mac Pro, which logically should have gotten cheaper over the ridiculous six years it was on sale with near-unchanged specs. But the marketing message was, "we're selling a $3000 computer."
Those fat margins leave them with a nice buffer. Competing products will get more expensive; Apple's will sit still and look even better by comparison.
We are fortunate that Apple picked last year to make 16gb the new floor, though! And I don't think we're going to see base SSDs get any more generous for a very, very long time.
* okay I do remember that Macbook Airs could be had for $999 for a few years, that disappeared for a while, then came back
