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Comment by locusofself | Hacker News Reader

Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..

The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level, they still have margin in there even at market prices, and they are notorious for supply chain management and locking in contracts/prices ahead of time. So doubt Apple will change anything here short term.

On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 years ahead of PC, the price of base models was super competitive, now that the ram is super expensive even the upgraded versions are competitive with the PC market. Oh and Windows is turning to an even larger pile of shit on a daily basis.

Yeah, but the Linux support is still quite poor unfortunately.

I'd buy a mac in a sec otherwise.

Yes, that’s the reason I am holding back too.

If Apple fully supported the Asahi Linux project, I 'll switch in a heartbeat.

Apple is releasing new devices next week, I wonder if they will take the opportunity to increase memory prices.

> The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level

Probably not quite, but I was pricing a Lenovo laptop last week and this is the first time the lenovo price for RAM upgrades was lower than 3rd party RAM.

The mac chips are ahead in single threaded performance and maybe performance per watt but thats about it. Factoring cost they're competing against the top x86 chips which out preform them in nearly every workload while remaining upgradable and stable.

2 years ahead?

Intel latest series 3 is catching up to M3 level performance ?

My canonical example is I bought 12 sticks of 64GB DDR4LRDIMM for 400-430$. Now each stick costs 320$... Just a year ago...

That's insane! I think SSD prices have also skyrocketed but to a lesser extent

Yes, ssds also rose, but much less so. IIUC, definitely didn't double.

Apple also uses a different kind of RAM (iirc a custom LPDDR5X to use with their Unified Memory SOC - not the same kind as the commodity RAM that everyone is putting in their PCs. So they aren’t competing with everyone on it. Plus they probably locked in their rates back in 2024 with their suppliers.

The packaging might be different, but they're still competing for the same fab capacity.

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