Apple has been weathering this for a while. Maybe it was bad timing with a contract rollover but they seem to have lost their primacy with TMSC.

I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.

But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.

Even when the M5 Pro MacBook 16 released, they did raise the price $100 but upped the hard drive to 1TB. I really thought they would wait to raise prices until the next cycle but this is a bit alarming.

If they never raise their prices, they can't drop them.

Or it's just a bluff since their memory upgrade prices were actually some of the lowest compared to the rest of manufacturers.

Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.

Apple is perpetually doomed with the stock market Intel and IBM have more pull.

RAM prices started climbing more than 18 months ago. Apple’s contracts are long-term but not that long-term: they probably just expired. (If you assume a 3-year contract, 18 months is how long it would take on average for a specific market shock to hit you)

That's a double edged sword. Assuming it's an 18 month contract, even when ram prices do go back to "normal" it's a year and a half until Apple has savings to pass onto to customers.

Raising prices allows Apple to reduce demand, possibly creating some flexibility in the durations of the current contracts.

If Apple knows it's been overpaying, you can be sure that they will leverage that in future negotiations.

Right — if we can know how long ago the contracts were agreed we can predict how much more the price will have to rise, because 20% sounds like the beginning of the problem.

Apple is notorious for their prices being extremely stable for a given SKU. If anything, this is Apple getting out ahead of where they expect memory prices to be long-term, so they can rip off the band-aid once and don’t have to do it again.

Well, hopefully :-)

I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.

This kind of broad mid-cycle price update is essentially unprecedented for Apple. Their price points are extremely reliable, and even only occasionally do they tweak an individual product price up or down during a refresh.

I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.

If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.

The longer you lock in contracts into the future, the more expensive they get. And Apple also doesn’t want to lock themselves into volume commitments for specific production lines and at certain prices that might not make sense anymore a year or two down the line. So even Apple has limits to how much long-term contracts make sense.

It’s not a storm anymore but the new normal. People waiting for prices to come down are going to be very disappointed.

Its a very, very long “storm”, at some point you have to re-adjust, even if it is very painful

Including Covid, it’s been like 6 straight years of supply constraints