Apple has announced price increases for its MacBook laptops and iPad tablets, the tech giant’s first official move to pass on the cost of higher memory and storage to consumers. CEO Tim Cook said the price increases were inevitable.
Apple has announced price increases for its MacBook laptops and iPad tablets, the tech giant’s first official move to pass on the cost of higher memory and storage to consumers. CEO Tim Cook said the price increases were inevitable.
According to CNBC, the decision to revise prices has already had an impact on the market. On Thursday, after the publication of the updated prices, Apple shares fell by almost 5%, which was the worst performance for the company since February. Before the price update, Apple’s official online store briefly suspended operations.
The changes affected key product categories, including the recently introduced ultra-budget laptop:
MacBook Neo (base model) — price increased from $599 to $699;
MacBook Air (512 GB) — from $1099 to $1299;
MacBook Pro (1 TB) — from $1,699 to $1,999;
iPad Air (128 GB) — from $599 to $749;
iPad Pro Wi-Fi (256 GB) — from $999 to $1,199.
«The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers has caused an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage devices. We have never seen such a significant and rapid increase in component prices,» Apple said in an official statement.
The company added that they had reached a point where it was no longer possible to contain costs on their own, and hinted at the possibility of further increases in the price of equipment in the future.
Tim Cook, in a commentary for The Wall Street Journal, compared the crisis in the semiconductor market to a natural disaster: «This is the flood of a century. In more than 40 years of work, I have never seen anything like this in any industry.»
According to Counterpoint Research, the price of memory chips and storage media has quadrupled over the past three quarters. Suppliers are shifting production capacity to high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is critical for AI servers. This has already led to profit-taking by manufacturers such as Micron, whose revenue has quadrupled and gross margin has soared to 84,9%, outpacing Nvidia and Meta.
At the same time, the development of artificial intelligence is forcing Apple to increase its hardware requirements. According to IDC, all future iPhone models will receive at least 12 GB of RAM to ensure the operation of local functions of the Apple Intelligence package and the updated Siri assistant. This will allow the company to partially justify higher prices for the end consumer by the appearance of new useful features.
Previously, the boom in artificial intelligence and the accompanying memory shortage played a cruel joke with the prices of Valve’s «PC in console format» Steam Machine. Fans of the Valve and Steam brands have been preparing for difficult compromises for the past few months, given the general increase in semiconductor prices. However, the final price disappointed many users who hoped that Valve would sell the hardware at a loss for itself, as classic console manufacturers do.
