by easton 18 hours ago
Memory increase to 12GB, guess they still have reasonable pricing.
At this scale, don't companies lock in their prices well in advance instead of paying spot prices?
Don't vendors as big as Apple lock in their prices and contracts years in advance?
Rumor has it that Samsung hit them with a 100% price increase on RAM and Apple took it without even trying to negotiate
If that rumor's true then Apple has a memory fab hidden somewhere that's going to be revealed soon.
They have like 40%+ margin on hardware, even when raw mem chips quadruple in price I doubt they lose more than a few single digit percent of margin and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to take the hit to keep their pricing the same as they always are.
Keep in mind that before the whole memory price hike crisis they were already charging ~3x what the competition charged for ssd/ram upgrades
Apple is likely a large enough consumer to fully utilize a fab.
Floating 100% price increase, or did they lock that number in as a ceiling for some period of time?
Bringing their profit margins down from ludicrous to just absurdly high.
The base model has only 128GB of storage. IMO they are pushing uses to upgrade storage more aggressively than ever. This should make up somewhat for the increased cost of volatile and non-volatile memory.