It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell, and likely dont have enough allocation of at least some of those chips.
Sure, they could have thought it'd only sell a tiny number of units, but if they thought that, they wouldnt have launched the product.
> It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell,
Hate to be contrarian here but this is a known marketing trick to make product appear as selling faster than it does to create hype. I'm sure you waited in line to a club/bar for 30 minutes only to realize club/bar was empty?
They are still a for-profit company and I totally expect those batches' shipping times to actually reduce soon. An order placed right now would ship in August and at this point it must be cutting into their earnings because any regular, walk-in type of customer is not gonna wait this long for their laptop.
This seems unnecessarily cynical. Telling your customers
> 'No, we won't sell you our most expensive new laptop config at all, and if you want the other cheaper configs, you will need to wait at a minimum until August'
is not a very effective marketing stunt.
Besides, Framework has a very consistent history at this point of quite frank, open communication. If they didn't have this history, I might lend more credence to your point of view, but my experience is that these are people that are pretty allergic to that sort of bullshit, and will just say what they mean.
I really can't imagine why they'd try and undermine that reputation just to counterproductively tell people they can't buy a laptop from them.
I am not saying you're wrong, I am just saying we can't draw serious conclusions based on pure speculation. They absolutely need to built their brand first and foremost to scale up and hyping up the brand by "selling out the stock on first day" is a legitimate way to do so. They can't stand clear of regular, high-school marketing for too long. Again, this is a for-profit endeavor with serious investors expecting a return.
I am baffled by how people commonly parrot that flawed logic. Hint: by not seeling those laptops to Linux users they're not making money at all, neither on hardware nor on services.
By selling laptops to users who will never spend on highly profitable recurring revenue stream Apple would be depleting precious Ram stock for tiny one time profit.
So you're suggesting company would rather not sell a product now but rather wait until a "proper" Apple customer is ready for an upgrade? Product that has a significant profit margin upfront?
Also, have you heard about Apple's multi-billion RAM contracts they sign every few years to lock in the prices and supply?
> What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
You can't lock-in Linux users because vast majority of them won't switch to macOS and ecosystem at large. This is simply a currently untapped market they could easily almost entirely own if they wanted to. With growing Linux popularity, extra 3-4% of the laptop market share is nothing they can ignore in front of shareholders.
I am not convinced they would "entirely own" the market - they have a small range of hardware. Even less so in the long term. That extra few percentage points would be a lot less profitable as they would only have the margin on extra hardware sales so would not add much to profits - not enough for shareholders to care about.
It also risks existing users switching to Linux which could be a huge loss. Apple has a very loyal user base how do not try anything else and the last thing they want to do is risk encouraging them to try alternatives. Losses could be quite significant: if an existing user switches to Linux not only might you lose software and services sales, but you also risk losing future hardware sales (longer replacement cycle, and no barrier to switching to other hardware).
> I am not convinced they would "entirely own" the market - they have a small range of hardware. Even less so in the long term. That extra few percentage points would be a lot less profitable as they would only have the margin on extra hardware sales so would not add much to profits - not enough for shareholders to care about.
I am aware of that, but there's another factor here: accelerating Windows users switching to Linux on Apple hardware. Those Linux MacBooks would be killer devices that nothing in Windows world can compete against! I mean we can all agree the tech social media would go bonkers over that, wouldn't it? If a couple of YouTubers were able to bump those Linux numbers significantly and spearhead gamers questioning their choices, imagine the dent Apple would make. I am absolutely certain Apple would gain couple extra percentage points with Apple on Linux devices within first year and make Microsoft shit their pants in the process.
> It also risks existing users switching to Linux which could be a huge loss. Apple has a very loyal user base how do not try anything else and the last thing they want to do is risk encouraging them to try alternatives.
Aren't you contradicting yourself here a bit? If they're very loyal, there isn't much risk of them switching, is there?
But yeah, Product Cannibalization is always a risk, though it doesn't mean they couldn't actually embrace Linux and offer ecosystem integration there. iCloud integration? Sure, why not? iPhone integration? Why not? Apple TV app? Again, especially to attract those Windows users making a switch, who are much more used to paying for services and software?
Heck, they could even port AppStore over and improve Swift's cross-platform compatibility, especially considering Swift is fairly cross-platform already. I doubt many software products wold get ported, though. Besides, macOS AppStore is not a huge earner for Apple, considering the platform is open, unlike iOS, so macOS users switching to Linux don't have to imply a significant loss of income from ecosystem spending. Also, many loyal macOS users would likely dual-boot and be happy to continue to buy and use macOS-exclusive software as needed.
This isn't unrealistic, I seriously think it's a matter of time when those numbers start making sense for Apple. Also, if US administration changes, both US and EU regulation bodies will be back on Big Tech asses and for Apple to open to Linux to say "hey, we're pretty open" is another win.
> Aren't you contradicting yourself here a bit? If they're very loyal, there isn't much risk of them switching, is there?
That needs clarification. They are loyal because they do not try anything else and often make assumptions that other OSes are worse than they actually are. They often assume a lot of features (e.g. shared clipboards across devices) are Apple only. They will not take the risk of buying non-Apple hardware to try another OS.
> Product Cannibalization is always a risk, though it doesn't mean they couldn't actually embrace Linux and offer ecosystem integration there. iCloud integration?
It reduces the lock-in the have with existing customers. Having that lockin over the whole stack is what keeps them in the ecosystem.
> Also, if US administration changes, both US and EU regulation bodies will be back on Big Tech asses and for Apple to open to Linux to say "hey, we're pretty open" is another win.
I have less faith in the regulators than that. The push to open has never been that strong. No-one has challenged things like limiting software installation to the app-store, and Google is confident enough that no-one will to be switching to the same with Android in a few months time.
> Besides, macOS AppStore is not a huge earner for Apple, considering the platform is open, unlike iOS, so macOS users switching to Linux don't have to imply a significant loss of income from ecosystem spending
Not yet. They have the option of gradually making "side loading" harder (for our own security, of course) and increasing that profit.
Well, agreed on all points. I guess the conclusion is time will tell, but I am sure Apple is legitimately looking into this on some level, especially since Steam is doing so well and keeps expanding Linux user-base.
As used by commercial hardware and software vendors, "support" can mean anything from "we'll come fix it for you when it breaks, or your money back" to merely "theoretically, it should work, and we won't get in the way of you trying". Likewise, "unsupported" can mean anything from "don't complain to us if it doesn't work" to "we're going to spend significant engineering effort to prevent it from working".
A stance of "here's some hardware documentation, implement the drivers yourself" definitely falls within that spectrum of "support", and is the kind of "support" for Linux that some hardware vendors have in the past been lauded for, eg. when AMD started documenting their GPUs.
That level of "support" from Apple for running Linux bare-metal on Apple Silicon would be an improvement from the status quo, and in practice would probably be sufficient to get good drivers written and upstreamed in short order, given how much interest there is in running Linux on these devices.
We're talking about "people walking into Genius Bar expecting help with Linux" support. It's not philosophical discussion on what support is, there's literally a specific thing discussed here.
That's one of the several forms of support under discussion, under the specious claim that it would become the expected level of support as soon as Apple declared any level of support for Linux. But as the comments you're refusing to understand have explained, Apple could meaningfully "support" Linux in the form of providing hardware documentation, without making any promises to help any customers troubleshoot Linux running on that hardware.
I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.
Why will Anthropic be able to do that? That assumes there won't be competition and switching costs will be high. That doesn't seem to be the case to me.
There are no places in the US that Tmobile is the only wireless mobile network provider. While all 3 mobile network providers have weak coverage areas, Verizon is considered to have the most reach.
I think about this a lot - on HN and elsewhere online, there's an outsized portion of people who are likely to see use in AI. If you're online, you're on a computer and you're likely to also do office work that an AI can help with / do for you.
I don't think a majority of people will find it actually useful in the long run. I do game development as a hobby outside of work and every artist I know is outright hostile towards any sort of AI, to the point that they are dropping out of any community that so much as allows any mention of AI workflows.
I know that OpenAI is at least exploring "AI as entertainment" (Sora) but it has yet to be seen if that will be widely accepted or profitable. I've also been reading about teens talking to chatbots more and more rather than talking to real people, which seems like it will only end in mental health disasters.
$100/month isn't much for developer tooling. If you add up how much I spend on hardware upgrades, other SaaS products like backup services, software licenses, and other things it's easy to justify $100/month for a powerful tool.
I pay for my own AI provider subscriptions because keeping work and personal strictly separated is important for me. I do know some people who secretly pay $200/month for Claude and use it at their job even though it's not approved. I do not recommend doing that, but it shows that some people value this for their work.
For developers earning more than $10K per month, spending less than 1% of salary on tooling to make the job easier is easy to justify.
I’ve been a copilot and ChatGPT subscriber for probably close to two years now, give or take a couple of months, and I had a trusted friend telling me for months to give Claude a try.
It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.
I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.
I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.
The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.
Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.
If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.
Because I don’t believe 50% gross margins at face value, as being discussed in this thread I think the economics of all of these things are far more complex than that.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t staked my investment portfolio on there being a bubble, I’m just preparing for the worst and doing as much work as I can with Claude before a potential massive rug pull happens.
>If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?
I'm not who you were replying to, but:
My work pays for $100/mo Claude, I pay another $100 to bring it up to $200/mo level because:
- Partly: I got in the habit back when work was only paying $20 and I was paying the $180.
- It is not worth it to me to spend braincells trying to optimize my use to slip into the $100 plan, I give everything "Opus, effort max" and with the $200/mo plan I never run out ($100 I'll run out mid-morning).
- I run a *lot* of experiments, including work-related and personal, to try to understand and improve my AI use skills.
- I also use it for a lot of personal things, right now I'm using it to help me plan a backyard studio and ADU.
It's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie.
You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
How does that work? Are you using separate accounts? Do you just max out one of them and then switch to the other one?
We need to run a SotA coding agent basically 24/7 uninterrupted and so far we didn’t find an easy solution for this (you can get provisioned TPUs for Gemini on GCP but it costs a fortune).
Surely that’s possible for under $5k a month? $10k?
It's a mathematical reality rather than 'feeling'. It has become that a few years ago. It becomes even more serious when you consider that the Chinese models are just as good, and they are being just given away to run locally like Deepseek.
Why should anyone feed the SV AI bubble if they can just use cheap Chinese models, even locally if they want to...
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