Apple Hardware Price Hikes
Osmond Chia (Hacker News, 9To5Mac, Engadget):
Apple plans to raise the prices of its products as the cost of the memory chips it uses has surged, the technology giant’s boss has said.
Tim Cook, Apple’s outgoing chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that price increases were “unavoidable” as the situation around memory chips had become “unsustainable”.
During its holiday quarter, Apple’s profit margin on hardware was 40.7%; in its most recent quarter, that dropped to 38.7% — a remarkable figure for physical products. It is these high margins that led to analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo to claim Apple would keep prices more-or-less stable and offset the additional costs through its even higher-margin — 76.7% — services business.
Winkler suggests in his summary that Apple has absorbed the cost increases so far because it has always treated memory and storage upgrades as profit centers. That’s no surprise to the Apple community, which has long chafed at Apple’s premium prices for memory and storage. But now, for instance, the price of standalone internal flash storage is closer to and sometimes even higher than Apple’s upgrade prices.
[…]
Obviously, Apple could absorb such costs and more if it were to accept dramatically lower gross margins. But as high-minded and customer-focused as Apple is, the company is still in business to maximize profit.
I was recently looking to add another SSD and a few hard drives to my setup. Normally, prices go down over time, but currently it SSDs are about double the price I paid last year, and large hard drives are almost triple.
Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs.
Chance Miller (Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users):
Apple has raised prices across the board for many of its products today. MacBook Neo now starts at $699 (up from $599), while MacBook Air now starts at $1299 (up from $1099). Other impacted products include MacBook Pro, iPad, iPad Air, and many more. iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods pricing is unchanged.
Earlier this week, I outlined three reasons for agreeing with Mark Gurman that the Apple price increases could be imminent, and that indeed proved to be the case.
iPhones have escaped the increases, but they are otherwise both broad-reaching and pretty dramatic. But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the MacBook Neo has been included …
Apple today increased the starting price of the Mac mini with M4 Pro chip by $200, taking the higher-tier model up to $1,599 on its online store.
[…]
Apple had already raised the Mac mini’s effective starting price in May by discontinuing the $599 configuration with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, leaving the $799 model with a 512GB SSD as the new entry-level option. Interestingly, the 16GB RAM / 256GB storage option has now been reinstated, but the $799 starting price remains.
Stephen Hackett has a table of the old and new prices.
Pre-announce it with a small delay, thus giving you a temporary sales boost as people scramble to get their orders in at current prices, and to soften the blow when the increases hit.
I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September.
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
Previously:
- SpaceX Acquires xAI, Goes Public, Acquires Cursor
- MacBook Neo Sales
- Hetzner Price Hikes
- 1Password’s Price Hike
- Pair Networks Price Increase
- Apple Services Price Hikes
- Price Increases for Developer Tools
Update (2026-06-26): Hartley Charlton:
Micron’s chief business officer has hinted, without calling it out by name, that Apple’s tough supplier negotiations contributed to the conditions behind the global memory shortage.
For years, Apple has been able to dominate and dictate to their suppliers thanks to their scale. But the Asian operations which Tim Cook so famously set up, have been upended, like most everything else, by AI. From TSMC on down, Apple is no longer the customer dictating terms for the entire industry, it’s now the company which has taken over the mantle as the most valuable one in the world: NVIDIA.
Apple’s stock price dropped 6% on the day — its largest single-day loss since April 2025.
Here’s a table with most of the base models whose prices increased[…]
[…]
iPad prices mostly went up 20–25%, but the hardest hit was the no-adjective base model, which rose almost 30%, from $350 to $450. That’s a big increase for a product meant to appeal to buyers for whom price is obviously their biggest concern.
Anyone who purchased a MacBook Neo for $600 (or $500 with education discount) between March and this morning purchased the lowest-price MacBook Apple has ever sold — and perhaps the lowest-price MacBook they ever will sell.
Apple’s full statement:
The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
[…]
Apple indicating that it needs to “begin” raising prices suggests that additional price increases might occur later.
“and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.”
I find this to be the most confusing part. Do we believe this to be a genuine effort? Even if so, how would a “solution” actually work? Would they actually lower prices if a solution were to be found?
They also just said they “will continue working” on bringing Siri AI to the EU right before saying in a different venue that they’d stopped working on it.
In a statement about the price increases, Apple said, “We can no longer shield customers from our 39% gross margin.”
Like, truly laughable. $200 for a 64GB Apple TV 4K that is almost 4 years old?
But even setting aside the prices of competing devices, it just feels wrong to hike prices this much for four-year-old hardware running five-year-old pre-AI silicon. The higher-end model’s price went up 67 percent!
The only way this makes sense is if these prices are really meant for the upcoming new hardware, and those new models are more ambitious home hubs that warrant $200–250 prices.
Previously:
Update (2026-06-29): Zac Hall:
The Financial Times reports that Apple is seeking clearance from the Trump administration to purchase memory chips from a blacklisted Chinese company. The move would help it meet demand for product manufacturing during the ongoing global memory supply shortage.
Perhaps this is the “working tirelessly” that Apple was referring to.
Apple previously sought permission from the Biden administration to do the same thing back in 2022, and that did not go well – despite promising to use the chips only for iPhones sold in China …
Something happens — outside the company’s control — that causes those essential components to rise in price significantly.
[…]
What you cannot do is hold a philosophically consistent logically coherent view where your answer to how a company should respond in such a scenario is contingent on what the “something happens” is that caused component prices to rise.
Maybe—but that’s only relevant if you accept the premise that it was out of Apple’s control. I don’t know the details of the deals, but there’s an argument that the rising costs to Apple are to some extent Apple’s “fault.” If Tim Cook gets credit for helping suppliers expand capacity and locking in contracts for memory at low prices over the past two decades, doesn’t the same logic apply in reverse? The AI-driven shortages were foreseeable—and publicly discussed years ago. If you believe Micron that Apple chose to prioritize its own past numbers rather than securing its future supply, doesn’t that make today’s situation different from, say, a tsunami that unexpectedly wiped out a bunch of factories? I don’t know exactly how the increased costs should be apportioned, but I think the reasons for the costs are relevant, and I don’t think they’re fully exogenous.
sid:
If Apple has the balls to raise the prices of their products, they should also have the balls to increase trade-in values for older devices.
Update (2026-06-30): Kif Leswing:
But while tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, which both announced price hikes this week, have a hefty cash cushion, supply chain leverage and customers numbering in the millions or billions, a much wider swath of businesses face potentially dire straits. Most consumer electronics companies have little margin to spare and can’t confidently raise prices in an economy already grappling with inflationary pressures.
GoPro, the struggling maker of action cameras, warned this month that it might go out of business after memory costs shot up between 80% and 115% at the end of the first quarter. And shares of speaker maker Sonos are down 23% this year as memory prices pressure margins.
Update (2026-07-06): Basic Apple Guy:
Below you’ll find a bunch of charts chronicling the current state of RAMmaggedon, the global memory-chip crisis we currently find ourselves in.
20 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Everyone: “Vision Pro is great but the price is a big problem.”
Apple: “We are finally changing the price of the Vision Pro. Now it costs more.”
Let's show them ... why 2026 ... won't be ... like 1988.
See: Computer Chronicles 1988, "Laptop Peripherals", 22m30s.
Macintosh II: $3769 => $4869
Macintosh SE: $2769 => $3169
LaserWriter: $4599 => $4999
Apple IIgs: $999 => $1149
See also: Steven Levy, "Adventures in the RAM Trade" about the US gov't-driven DRAM crisis of 1988 that spurred these price hikes.
The 4x4TB Samsung 990 Pro M2 drives, plus the Highpoint PCI card with 4 independent 4 lane PCI channels (so it can fully soak an x16 PCI slot) cost significantly less than a single 4TB Apple SSD kit for a 2019 Mac Pro (which is 2x2tb modules).
Faster performance on the Samsungs, as well.
That was before Apple discontinued 2019 Mac Pro storage as a purchasable item a couple of years ago.
If the price increase was due to component cost increases, are they also offering more for device trade-ins? This increases the value of older devices, too, right?
--
I never expect these new baseline prices to come back down.
Well, dodged that bullet. Heard Gruber pontificating about how Apple wasn’t going to raise the price until new models came out and pulled the trigger on an upgrade I was eyeing. Is he even 50/50 these days on predictions?
Will there be a point in buying a MacBook Neo after this price increase?
I mean, it’s less cheap now. And, because it was cheap, it was somehow OK that it was not able to run many new features of the upcoming major downgrade of macOS.
It’s also hard not to notice that Apple ships price increases way faster than the new Siri or bug fixes.
These seem egregious. Even the lower increases seem clearly higher than any increase in component costs could justify
I think they’re doing it because everyone else is so it won’t make them look bad
@gildarts Ditto. I'm so, so very glad that I followed my gut and took the plunge now, even though I won't actually need the machine until next year when it replaces my Intel iMac. A 29.9% increase/markup on my M5 Max MBP means I've saved £2800, which I would quite simply never have considered paying otherwise. And that's after reluctantly giving up hope for an M5 Studio *and* having to swallow Apple's RAM costs that aren't optional as they were with the iMac. Really, between Apple's greed and the RAMpocalypse, it's the absolute pits.
"Will there be a point in buying a MacBook Neo after this price increase?"
Given the sales numbers before the price hike, Apple probably regretted pricing it so low.
Was there a point in buying it before the price hike? Not really, given the availability of much better second-hand options. But it was a huge success anyway.
My son will begin highschool after the summer and he was thinking about getting a Mac. I told him to wait for the student discount and get a Neo.
Now it'll be a second hand Pro I guess.
“The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
That’s a good thing Apple does not provide any working AI feature for its platforms and so can’t be blamed for the need for more data centers. Otherwise there would be some kind of hypocrisy with this statement…
From a business/management perspective this is pretty funny - to me, at least.
The long-term play would have been to absorb the price increase while investing in the supply chain to shore up Apple's own component supply over the next 12–24 months. Given Apple's margins, market power, and cash position, they clearly could have done this. Yes, the share price might conventionally have taken a hit, but Apple would have come out the other side stronger.
Instead the focus has been - as so often in the Cook era - on the share price itself. So prices were pumped to preserve margins and protect the stock. But Mr. Market didn't cooperate: $250 billion has been wiped off Apple's valuation, with no certainty about what the future holds for supply - the very thing the long-term play would have secured.
I'd also bet that $250 billion is more than it would have cost Apple to invest in one or two suppliers to expand RAM and storage capacity while eating the current component increase.
And given Mr. Market's current fervor for anything AI, had Apple made the long-term play and invested in suppliers, the share price might well have risen anyway - despite reduced profits over the next 12–24 months.
Hilarious.
Apple’s share price will come back, and probably quite quickly.
Everyone else’s RAM prices also went up, and probably by more than what Apple pays. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is planning for extended high RAM prices and is biting the bullet now as its own contracts run out while prices are still high in a year or three.
Maybe Apple is probably talking about contracting Intel to manufacture RAM in the USA. That should be well within Intel’s abilities, and then Apple will have its own dedicated lines. More vertical integration, less dependence on the market. The issue is less money but rather time to set up manufacturing and supply chains.
I don’t understand what Micron is complaining about. If it had a long-term deal with Apple, it had the money and confidence of positive cash flow. It’s probably griping that Apple exercised its contractual options to buy more RAM at a previously agreed price while the market spot price shot up.
@MD @Someone else I think Micron’s claim is that Apple drove such a tough bargain years ago that they couldn’t make the longer term investments that would have been needed to increase capacity—which otherwise would already be online now. They say that their margins turned negative, but they were stuck because of the previously negotiated Apple deal. Sure, that’s partly on Micron for misestimating their costs, but it’s also kind of a reversal for Apple, which had historically invested in suppliers to help them build more capacity.
Also, WRT to increases… let’s see what other companies charge for more RAM. One of Cook’s strategies here would be to increase market share while its cost of goods is lower. (That’s why they kept selling older version iPads and the iPhone SE as long as they could… likely the real reason they stopped is EU forcing a switch to USB C)
If Apple has lower locked in supplier prices than everyone else (and I’d wager they do since they’re probably biggest buyer on the planet), I’d guess that their new prices will still be ‘desirable’ vs the competitors’ new increased prices. (And desirable here might mean you’re still willing to pay it vs switching to windows or Linux… just like usual)
@Michael Tsai No doubt the way Apple treats its suppliers is a factor here.
As a long-time Mac developer like yourself, I've seen exactly this pattern. When Apple's doing it tough, they fall over themselves to help us (I still vividly remember the phone call out of the blue begging me to come to WWDC, offering to subsidise the trip). When they're doing well, we're at best something to exploit; at worst, dogshit on their shoes.
I can't find it now, but I'm sure I read some Microsoft management goon saying this was basically Apple's own fault, given how hard they screwed suppliers in the past. Rich, coming from Microsoft - but, as you suggest, not wrong.
Still, if Apple had been a little less the bastard, this wouldn't be such a thing. Combined with my earlier point, it could actually have been a strength for the company. Now? Who knows.
Anyway, I still find this all extremely amusing. Don't get me wrong, I'm welded to the Mac (the closest I've ever come to anything but was a Mac clone). But still, I'm sure there's some German word to describe what I'm feeling.
It might be harder for Apple to negotiate prices now that:
A suppliers have been burnt by long contract deals
B there are plenty of other buyers with mad money in their pockets
We will see
