I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Well it means nobody can avoid their extortionate upgrade pricing anymore so I think that decision paid off well for them.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
AIUI for volatile parts the buyer can agree a contract to secure supply, but the price is only set at ship time. And the buyers can't complain about that imbalance because there is always someone else that the seller can offload their stock on to at the higher price.
Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
Delivery times on many custom things was through the roof, likely we now know why.
They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
512GB of matched DDR5 DIMMs at retail will currently run you $14k-20k+ depending on speed. So I’d imagine a now-hypothetical upgrade to 512GB on the Mac Studio would be in that ballpark.
Long term contracts probably don’t last forever and probably don’t represent 100 percent of their demand. My guess is that they’re already having to pay inflated prices for some non-trivial fraction of their inventory.
I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!