Greg Lippert on RAMageddon has turned existential for smaller tech - 'That doesn’t mean there will be a someday reckoning'
on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'Volume was pretty high, ~50M shares. Looks like $300 is just around the corner.'
on RAMageddon has turned existential for smaller tech - '“Politicians are losing their seats, as in Utah, because of their datacenter support.” I actually think that’s sad, Richard, because it may be their support is firmly grounded in being tech supporters in general. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the concept of data-centers, provided they “play nice”. But, like the gold-miners in the US, much bad can be done in the name of getting rich, or even having the chance of getting rich. And that’s where we are in this laissez faire political environment: Which, ironically, isn’t “fair” at all, since this modern day gold rush for wealth is burying fairness, and the most vulnerable are the ones being injured the most.'
on Horace Dediu expects iPhone prices to go up $100 - 'Bart, What may happen is that some people may push their phone purchase forward a quarter in order to have a new phone(albeit an older model) instead of having to pay for the price increases. We will have to see how that all goes. Lots of different pathways for this to go down. Although a new model phone with extra capabilities has always enticed many people to pay for the upgrade. Thinking about it, the companies that may be somewhat bigger losers in this are the carriers if they absorb the cost increases to try to entice people to switch services with a low cost to a new iPhone, especially if they don’t have a way to pass the costs onto their consumers.'
on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'Now in the last hour of trading and Meta is up 9.46% at $616.55 on news the company is building a cloud infrastructure business to see excess AI computing capacity to outside customers. Corning is selling off after a recent fast and strong run-up in the share price. The shares are off 13.53% today at $220.86. Apple is up today $5.19 or 1.79% at $294.55. Apple first traded in today’s range in early May.'
on Horace Dediu expects iPhone prices to go up $100 - 'One of the issues about how much impact high ram/memory prices for Apple turns into higher prices for the products it sells does depend somewhat on the architecture of the device being talked about. I think the price rises on Mac and Ipad storage and memory may be harder for Apple to maintain margins on due to the expected specifications of the devices involved. For instance the Mac I am typing this on has Ram of 48GB, and an SSD of 2TB. When I bought this in December 2025 I paid around 3300 dollars. Now in July of 2026 with an upgraded processor, an extra 24GB of ram to 48GB and an upgrade of standard 1TB to a 2 TB SSD Apple price ends up at $4099. (Without any sales which many shoppers take advantage of.) As part of the higher price Apple now charges $500 for the upgrade of the SSD from 1 TB to 2 TB. Might be considered a bargain compared to a Ram upgrade. For the Ram Change the price is an extra 600 to go from 24GB to 48GB. 600 more for 24GB in memory does seem high. But for many users it might not be necessary so this might be something users will pass on. I bet economies of scale are involved in these prices and increases. Many people buy too much computer compared to the way the actually use it. Throwing extra Ram into an Apple device is not as needed for most software as people think. But who wants to guess wrong. If I look at my Iphone 17 Pro a search reveals it comes with just 12 GB Ram and a 512GB storage capacity. So a fairly robust Iphone 17 Pro does not use as much Ram/Storage as a high capacity Mac (not the highest) So if the new Iphone comes out with a small increase in Ram as standard like 4 more GB (to 16GB) a smaller price increase would seem to be predicted in the range . Of course if there was no shortage of fabs prices likely wouldn’t be going through the roof as manufacturing changes and efficiencies would allow upgrades to Ram and storage to grow without much extra manufacturing costs. Ipad Pros are somewhat more like iPhones in terns of Ram and Macs in terms of storage. It may be that the storage is driving the increases for iPads not as much the Ram use. So based on the various capacities needed I could easily see 100 to 200 dollar price increases for an Iphone compared to the larger increases we have seen for Macs. And larger storage capacity Ipad’s as well.'
on RAMageddon has turned existential for smaller tech - 'I think a datacenter bust will change Micron’s opinion. And one reason I might support your idea of Apple buying its own memory foundry — use it as as a threat inm negotiations, especially with Micron. It would really put them back into line. Losing 15% of their revenue would hurt. That is business they might never get back. Especially when the memory glut reverses.'
on Horace Dediu expects iPhone prices to go up $100 - 'Neil, those would be great numbers but even Apple faces some demand destruction with increased prices. If you assume enough sales to drop the hardware revenue in some combination to say $25B, about 63% (down 37%) of $40B, that’s still $25B in additional hardware revenues over $307B hardware revenues in FY2025, +8% for hardware growth conservatively. That compares favorably with 4% growth Hardware growth in FY2025 YoY. Looking at Q2 results without major visible price hikes, for 1H FY2026, hardware revenue is already running at 16.4% growth YoY, and that was capacity constrained in some respects. But add in the additional services revenues growing at 14-15%/yr and now we’re talking about back to 10% to 15% overall revenue growth.'
on Apple's contempt in Epic case goes to the Supreme Court - 'I sure hope you are a lawyer, because if you are not, then you missed your calling.'
on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'I hope this is the July low that Gregg’s model predicts the increase from.'
on RAMageddon has turned existential for smaller tech - 'I’m not convinced that this tremendous rush to build out data centers will end well. Nothing like pouring money into assets that depreciate rapidly combined with business models that all feature hockey-stick growth in revenues. Meanwhile, lots of collateral damage as too much money chases resources with long scale-up times. There’s no market discipline on this build out when capital is so easily raised for the “next big thing”.'
on RAMageddon has turned existential for smaller tech - 'Gregg, I think Horace laid down a strong argument for Apple to not do that, but to dig deep to establish other suppliers. Do you know of a similar list of US flash memory manufacturers? I’d submit that’s the more critical resource for Apple, since so much of Apple’s chips have integrated memory these days, but ‘persistent storage’ is still a commodity that Apple has to buy on the market.'
on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'At the Open the Nasdaq dropped as much as ~$459 (~1.8%), while AAPL is printing gains of about $3.xx.'
on Apple's contempt in Epic case goes to the Supreme Court - 'Agree. The judge set herself up to be the regulator of one vendor’s digital marketplace fees. But that is not the role of judges, IMO. It’s a huge slippery slope. As we transact digitally more and more, digital marketplace fees grow larger everyday.'
