Among many masterworks in London’s National Gallery is one you cannot fail to notice because of its brilliant ultramarine blue.

The Virgin’s cloak in Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer (1640-50) looks as if it was painted only yesterday rather than almost four centuries ago, and that colour makes you stop in your tracks and draws you into the painting, like no other pigment can.

At that time there was only one source of the lapis lazuli that was ground to create ultramarine, and it cost as much as gold. When a patron commissioned a painting that would use ultramarine, the pigment could be more costly than the artist’s labour. Then in 1828 Jean Baptiste Guimet and C G Gmelin of Tübingen discovered independently how to make synthetic ultramarine, and commercial production started within two years.

By 1889, when Vincent van Gogh painted A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, the cost of synthetic ultramarine was so low that he mixed it with yellow for some of his greens, a practice unheard of until ultramarine could be manufactured cheaply.

Ultramarine is a classical demonstration of the effects of supply and demand on costs, as we’re currently experiencing with memory, SSDs and even the SoCs to go into new Macs. Last week I illustrated this with a price comparison between my Mac mini M4 Pro when I bought it on 8 November 2024 for £2,699, and an equivalent Mac mini M5 Pro now costing 25% more at £3,399. Put another way, when you order a new Mac mini today you should expect to pay around £25 per GB of memory and £500 per TB of SSD.

Even when you can afford to pay today’s prices, taking delivery could take longer than you’d expect. Although you should be luckier ordering a high-end Mac mini, a maxed-out Studio M5 Ultra, costing an incredible £18,299, won’t be available for another 10-12 weeks.

As I’m sure you already know, the reason isn’t because memory, SSDs or chips have suddenly become far more expensive to produce, but because demand has outstripped supply. To equip even half the data centres being built is consuming close to the total production capacity of high-speed memory and SSD NAND chips, and even for the fabrication of SoCs like Apple silicon chips. If Apple were to cut its margins to the bone and bring its prices down, it couldn’t satisfy the resulting orders and would end up in the grave predicament of falling margins and static sales, as has been all too common in its past.

For many this has struck at an awkward time. Although Apple silicon Macs have had undoubted advantages, there has been relatively little apart from AI that late Intel Macs couldn’t do almost as well, and hanging back had seemed a shrewd choice. As macOS 27 and 28 pursue a more independent path and diverge from legacy code and features long since deprecated, our modern Macs should at last be able to demonstrate what they can do with their hardware. And who better to lead this than John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on Tuesday.

Later this year the situation could get even worse, as the US is considering whether to impose further tariffs and import controls on semiconductors. Despite strong industry representations, opinion is that the cost of most computers and devices will be driven even higher, at least in the USA.

The hope is that during the year of Golden Gate, markets will sort themselves out and supplies will recover, allowing prices to fall again. In the longer term we could even see a rebound similar to the introduction of synthetic ultramarine. But that’s going to require more constructive economic policies, less dogmatic meddling on the part of politicians, and a fair bit of luck. Cross your fingers and think of Sassoferrato’s prayer and Vincent van Gogh’s wheatfield.