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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.

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Not if their margin on the completed product is higher than the potential profit on the memory.

My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.

Or they believe the long term value of two customers is bigger than one.

It can be about more than the single sale.

That doesn't take into account the profit generated by selling the mac in itself

Or the fact that if they sell all their RAM without putting it in devices, they won’t be able to sell devices, and some portion of their customer base will leave their ecosystem, possibly forever.

The story is literally about them cancelling a product variant...

And you think this is the first sign that they’ve decided they’re going to spend the next few years being a RAM reseller before starting to sell consumer products again?

No, but "shipping less RAM" is clearly on that spectrum. The point wasn't about literal product strategy, it's that there's a limit to what actions are financially feasible and it's set by "what else could you do with that junk?"

Yea, wwdc is happening soon and the M5 ultra is in production . The new pricing will be respective on the highest config (768 gb is rumored) though.

M5 Max has still only 128GB RAM at most; one would expect 192GB if there was any indication M5 Ultra would have 768GB RAM?

The maximum memory configuration for the M3 Max MBP was also128GB.

That's my whole point. M3 Max 128GB -> M3 Ultra 512GB. M5 Max 128GB -> M5 Ultra 512GB. But if M5 Max 192GB -> M5 Ultra 768GB, i.e. Ultra having 4x the memory of Max.

It is a rumor at this time and we are going from M3 to M5 on the Ultra not the M4 to the M5

it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market

other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly

but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with

But they did raise the price of the 256GB model.

Yep, but it they had to double or triple it on short notice, they'd have just removed it from the store instead, and I imagine that the RAM is going into 256GB systems for more $$$ but still nothing really that alarming for the consumer.

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