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AI was supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, it’s about to make your next iPhone pricier. Apple plans to raise prices across its product lineup, CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview. Cook blames a shortage of memory chips driven by AI demand. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said.
Here’s the rub. AI companies like Meta and Amazon are spending hundreds of billions building data centers, and those servers devour the same memory and storage chips that go into iPhones, Macs and iPads. Prices for those chips have quadrupled in the past year. Even Apple — one of the world’s largest chip buyers — now has to wait in line behind the AI giants.
The result of all of this is that the next iPhone Pro could cost about $270 more, pushing it to roughly $1,299, according to research firm TechInsights. Cook, who has spent more than 40 years in the electronics supply chain, has never seen anything like it. “This is a hundred-year flood,” he said.