Wasn't it because of this?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-update-ram-res...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nand-ssd-prices-2020-going...

Yeah, I was going to say these sorts of price hikes are like a canary in a coal mine for the industry.

Yet the demand must be way down, I'd guess demand could be down at least 25% just based on the economy and people buying less stuff, following through to phones and computers.

I realize I'm responding to speculation with anecdotal evidence, but I've seen lots of mentions of people having issues acquiring PC parts and full laptops. A lot of workplaces suddenly needed to purchase a lot of laptops for remote workers. A lot of parents needed to purchase computers for their children who now need to do school remote. A lot of gamers seem to have decided that they might as well build a new PC if they're going to be stuck at home.

> Yet the demand must be way down

How do you figure? A large % of the population is now work from home and seeking to equip their home offices.

We're in the process of moving our entire data center into the cloud before the end of July. I'm anticipating an announcement that our office will not be reopening and that we're all now remote staff.

I have to schedule an appointment to go into the office to retrieve my personal belongings from my desk as well as any equipment I'd like for my home office.

I see conflicting things, increases in work from home for knowledge workers and others, yet vast decrease in spending for people that lost jobs and can't buy a new car, phone, computer, ipad, etc.

Demand for cars and other big price things is down.

If anything many people are investing in new computers, or cameras or video games than ever before.

At least in my country, lockdown is just starting and I got a new laptop last week.

As an "early adopter", I bought the Surface Pro 3, Surface 3 LTE, Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, and Surface Book 2, and have tried all of them extensively.

The Surface line is Microsoft's best chance at their own hardware, and I kept buying Surface after Surface, hoping it would get better. Unfortunately, they have all had build quality issues, hardware problems, or just some kind of strangeness that pushed me over the edge to buy an iPad Pro, and when that happened, I was dumbstruck how Apple entered the market much later than Microsoft and yet Apple still nailed the handwriting feel much better. Windows 10 is a real operating system, which is great and makes the Surface feel like a real computer, but the pen quality differences are too great to ignore, and the notetaking PDF apps for iOS are in a different league (Goodnotes 5, Notability). OneNote is not as good.

Have you tried the reMarkable tablet?

If you have, how does it compare with the iPad Pro?

The Surface Pro 7 upgrade is DDR4, the X1 and Apple are DDR3.

And for even more relevant comparison.

MacBook Pro 2019, MacBook Air 2020, and and previous MacBook has always charged $200 for 16GB or 512GB upgrade.

And the original $100 dollar upgrade was very non-Apple.

Which makes me think it was an error from their part and they decide to fix it at start of the month due to whatever accounting / operation reason.

My question to Apple (and others) would be:

Why is in 2020 a "Pro" laptop coming with only 8 GB of RAM?

Apple's Sales Distortion Field. offer a must-have device without something it clearly should have, only to unveil that feature later as a new Apple perfection. It goes all the way back to copy and paste on the iPhone.

Because the “Pro” thing has been marketing bullshit for at least 5 years.

For software development even 16GB is not enough these days. But for many other tasks 8GB is OK. iPad Pro max memory is 6GB and with right applications it is rather good at video and graphical editing.