Well it happened today. Apple jacked up their pricing today, likely to deal with the increase in DRAM and NAND flash over the past while.
Honestly I’m a little surprised that it took this long for them to go and follow all the others who have already moved up and increased pricing over the last couple of years. I was kind of expecting that they would be doing this in conjunction with new devices being released but I guess it’s gotten to the point where they were not willing to just sit on it further.
The thing is that the increases in pricing have started to make some things actually look reasonable in the current market. The Framework desktop is one of those devices. It was released after the price increases in DRAM really hit so it’s always been a pricy option in my opinion, but now that other things are catching up it’s not looking like a hugely bad idea to pick one of them up.
Conversely the Steam Machine that just hit the market is something that I really don’t care for the pricing of. For the price there’s not enough performance, memory, or storage in there to justify the price. If it was sitting around the 800$ mark I might be interesting in looking at one but for over 1000$ that’s kind of a hard pass for me. Especially when I can build something almost the same size for less money that I can upgrade the CPU on and put a dedicated GPU into.
And yes, I can’t build one quite as small as the Steam Machine, but I can get pretty darn close with a Mini ITX build at a lower price point.
I’m kind of glad that I picked up a laptop when I did. The M3 that I’m running is fast enough for anything that I want to do and while the M4 would have been nice to have at least I was able to dodge the price increases.
My Desktop machine however is getting a bit longer in the tooth and could benefit from a upgrade but I think that I’ll hold off until I can get some DDR5 at a more reasonable price.