By Rajesh Pandey •
Apple will raise the prices of its products to offset the impact of the rising memory and storage chip prices.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” said Tim Cook in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The AI and data center boom is driving DRAM and NAND prices to record highs. Memory chips now cost 3–6 times more than they typically do, making them some of the most expensive components in smartphones and laptops.
To offset the higher component costs, all major consumer electronics companies have either raised prices or downgraded their product specs.
Apple was somewhat of an outlier, not increasing the prices of the iPhone lineup. It continues to offer the iPhone 17 at $799 even as other smartphones have become more expensive. The company absorbed the higher component costs by taking a hit on its margin in a bid to expand its market share.
However, it appears the situation is “unsustainable.” Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that price hikes are “unavoidable.”
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line,” said Cook
Apple’s CEO did not say which products would become more expensive or when the price hikes would take effect. The company could raise prices starting with the iPhone 18 lineup this September, if the situation does not worsen further by then.
Other products may get a price hike sooner than that. Apple already launched the M5 MacBook Pro and Air family with a higher price tag than their predecessors. However, it also bumped their storage capacity to justify the higher MSRP.
To protect its margins, Apple discontinued the $599 Mac mini with the M4 chip and 16GB RAM in April this year. The cheapest Mac mini now costs $799 — $200 more than before.
Further, it stopped selling the Mac Studio with 256GB and 512GB of system memory. The machine is now available with a maximum of 96GB RAM.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
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