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Comment by admiralspoo | Hacker News Reader

Apple wants to be the next SGI and from the M1 is it clear where they want to make profit -- memory and storage upgrades.

I expect these monsters to have oodles of HBM, and the Mac Pro with a TB or more could approach house-levels of pricing, like SGI workstations of the past.

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I'm pretty sure that their future higher end CPUs, especially desktop ones, will vary in the number of cores, and the higher core count ones will cost obscene amount of money, as per usual. So unfortunately not only memory and storage.

The seem to be aiming at keeping the base price stable, or in some cases at the low water mark for prices for recent models. The new Air starts a hair below $1k as before.

After market RAM upgrades on Mac laptops haven't been possible for quite some time now, so I don't think a strategy to try and leverage more profit that way is a change. We'll have to see how they approach that for the higher end kit.

Gawd, I used to loooove SGI. It is really nice to see some variation in computer architecture come in to the mainstream. (aside from the awesome GPU tech wars)

These chips mean Apple makes more money as well. Each chip now costs them pennies, as opposed to hundreds they were paying Intel and AMD. And their design costs are basically paid off by the iOS devices.

Pretty much everything they were paying Intel and AMD (for graphics) is now profit in their pockets.

Likely 40% cost savings at best.

All the Rnd Apple put into to make the new CPU's has to be amortised

Exactly. A chip design team as large as Apple's costs hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries alone. Mask costs in 5nm are about $30 million. EDA physical design tools have list prices of over $1 million per license.

Marginal cost is not pennies. They still have to pay TSMC. With the premium to book their new nodes that's got to be a decent cost.

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