They bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet.
replyCommodity futures made sense to me at FedEx- they would pay money with a supplier for the option to buy gas/oil at X price at Y date in the future. It costs more than just agreeing to pay for it at that price in the future, but if deliveries went way down (or prices) it'd be less costly to "back out".
replyI wonder if there's a fab time secondary market where Wall Street types are making millions off speculating fab time.
Their margins may not have changed actually. https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o
replyThis is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.
replyM5 Max starts at 36GB memory at $3599. M4 Max started at the same memory at $3199.
They have doubled the default storage from 1TB to 2TB, that's a $400 increase I'm paying even if I don't want the extra 1TB.
replyThey raised the base price by $200.
replyApple's previous policy of price gouging for RAM means no need to raise prices yet, they still have a buffer.
replyThey also have long term contracts with the suppliers in all likelihood
replyThey do. They announce those. 1.5b USD was the most recent, iirc.
replyIn practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB during the old Intel days.
replyThey advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit.
replyMost people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling.
Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.
If anything, it's less, because you're giving up more RAM to the GPU.
replyWhich, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating if it's time to upgrade my m2 max.
But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it isn't for me.
RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
replyRAM isn't just RAM though. Unified memory on Apple Silicon provides significantly better memory management and efficiency compared to trad RAM
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