Apple raising hardware prices because of AI-driven memory demand is a clean example of how fast the AI capex cycle is bleeding into the real economy. This is no longer just hyperscalers lighting money on fire in data centers. It is showing up in the price of a laptop.
There is insatiable demand for inference, both and local and cloud. And with the strong momentum in open source models (surprisingly out of the CCP), demand for local inference hardware will only accelerate. If frontier-ish models can run on local machines, demand shifts from the cloud to the hardware. It also means the physical world starts mattering again: chips, memory, power, cooling, supply chains. Software may eat the world, but hardware sends the invoice.