GoKawiilApple has confirmed that its products will see price increases in the future due to ongoing memory supply constraints. Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the bad news in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
Cook cited the ongoing RAM supply shortage as reason for “unavoidable” price increases. From the WSJ story published today:
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “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.” Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.
As the Journal notes, Apple raised the starting price of the Mac mini desktop computer recently. It did so by dropping the base storage option from the lineup. The price of the Mac mini with higher storage technically didn’t change.
But going forward, it sounds like Apple is planning to increase the starting price of hardware products in a more significant way. That’s at least what the message from the Journal interview excerpt seems to be.
Here’s more from the story published today:
Cook said prices for memory and storage are both issues for the company, though he focused on the DRAM market in particular, calling out the increased allocations going to so-called high-bandwidth memory that is used for AI servers. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Cook delivers the message just months before stepping out of the role of CEO. On September 1, John Ternus will take over as CEO of Apple. Cook will serve as executive chairman of the board.
Apple’s planned price increases to deal with RAM costs comes after Apple introduced its most affordable Mac notebook ever with the MacBook Neo. The cheaper laptop only comes with 8GB RAM, which is less than many iPhones, iPads, and other modern Macs. Customers considering a higher-end MacBook Pro might want to lock in current prices.
The article doesn’t specify when Apple plans to increase prices on products or if price changes are coming to existing products. You can read the piece in full here.