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personal tech
Puts a whole new spin on ‘Cheap as chips’
Laptop-maker Framework has decided to refund some of its customers who paid high prices for its model 13 Pro laptop due to the soaring cost of RAM.
In July, the company told some customers who had ordered its very repairable machines that if they ordered 64GB of RAM, they would get just 32GB.
“We recently received a cost update from our LPCAMM2 supplier that goes far beyond anything we had predicted and anything we’re able to absorb without placing our ability to operate at real financial risk,” the company wrote at the time. The company expected the price it paid for LPCAMM2 would go up by a low-to-mid double digit percentage from Q2 to Q3. Instead the price it paid was more than double the cost of its previous shipment.
The company said the decision to reduce RAM in some machines “minimizes the impact of this challenge.”
On Tuesday, Framework revealed that it has just scored “a limited quantity” of Micron 32GB and 64GB LPCAMM2 memory modules that it was able to acquire “at lower cost.”
“While these new costs remain above our original pre-order launch baseline, they are lower than the last cost update that drove our current pricing for new pre-orders,” the company’s post states. Framework is therefore “rolling out price reductions across both already shipped and a subset of currently pending pre-orders.”
That decision means customers who bought Framework laptops when it was paying top dollar for memory can get a refund for price difference between July and now.
Customers who ordered when memory prices were high, but haven’t yet received a machine, will see the price of their orders fall. They can also edit their orders to acquire more memory at the new, lower price.
Framework is not alone in eating the cost of increased memory costs. Storage vendor Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) promised to honor prices it quoted to customers before solid state disk prices soared. HPE recently promised to honor quotes from the day it issues them until it ships hardware, despite the fluctuating cost of memory.
Such pledges probably aren’t altruistic, because major memory makers Micron and SK Hynix have offered long-term deals that reduce exposure to big price swings for buyers willing to commit to years of future purchases. Memory-makers’ margins are currently enormous, so if these deals sometimes mean they miss out on maximum profits it’s survivable. If HPE and Everpure have signed such deals, they get better visibility of future costs, and perhaps a little discount for committing to years of purchases.
Others are hiking prices. Apple, which made $30 billion of profits in its most recent quarter, yesterday lifted the price of iPhones by $100. ®
English (US) ·