Apple raises Mac and iPad prices up to $500 as AI memory shortage hits consumer electronics

Apple raises Mac and iPad prices, spares iPhone for now

Amid a worldwide memory shortage driven by the AI buildout, Apple is raising prices of its Mac and iPad lineups, as reported by Bloomberg. For the moment, there is no rise in iPhone prices, but there is a possibility that it could arrive later in the year. The new entrant to the MacBook lineup, MacBook Neo, will now cost $699 instead of $599. The company also raised the base MacBook Air's price from $1,099 to $1,299 and the MacBook Pro's price from $1,699 to $1,999. The desktop-class Mac Studio now costs $2,499 up from $1,999 iPads also received a price bump: the Air now costs $749, up from $599, and the Pro now costs $1,199, up from $999. Apple's smart home devices are costlier as well. The standard HomePod is up from $299 to $349, HomePod Mini is up from $99 to $129, and the Apple TV box is up from $99 to $129. "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," the company told CNBC in a statement. "We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions," it added. Last week, Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price hikes for Apple's products were "unavoidable," as memory and storage component prices keep rising because of the AI boom. In March, analyst firm Counterpoint noted that smartphone DRAM prices have jumped by 50%, and NAND Flash storage prices have jumped by over 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026. "We have reached a point where absorbing memory price hikes is impossible unless one wishes to run a business at a major loss. Memory prices have increased more than fourfold since Q4 2025, and this single component has eroded the profit margins of most consumer electronics players. Apple has done well to hold prices steady until now, though it hinted at increases last week," Tarun Pathak, Research Director at Counterpoint, told TechCrunch. "The growing demand for AI infrastructure has fundamentally changed the memory supply chain, meaning higher BOM (Bill of Materials) costs are now a lasting challenge. We also expect other PC and tablet OEMs to follow Apple's example. They may raise prices on select products, cut discounts, or adjust their product lines to focus more on premium devices," he added. While the AI chip crunch is affecting consumer companies, suppliers like Micron are reaping the benefits. The company clocked in a 4x jump in year-over-year revenue in its most recent earnings.

Apple Raises Prices on Macs and iPads Amid the A.I. Boom

The tech giant cited the soaring costs of memory and storage chips as it increased prices more than $200 on some devices. Apple on Thursday raised the prices of its Macs and iPads, citing the soaring costs of memory and storage chips as the artificial intelligence boom has created a frenzy for the components. Apple increased prices on some laptop and tablet models $200 or more. A base model of the MacBook Pro, for example, now costs $1,999, up from $1,699. Apple's entry-level laptop, the MacBook Neo, now costs $699, $100 higher than when it was unveiled in March. The price of an iPad Air increased $150 to $749, while the price of an iPad Pro jumped $200 to $1,199. The increases show that even Apple, with its sprawling supply chain, is not immune to a global shortage in memory and storage chips. A.I. chipmakers like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have demanded more of the components for their own chips, which are then used in data centers for developing and running A.I. systems. The surge in demand has led memory chip manufacturers like Micron to focus on producing for data centers, which tend to use more expensive chips than consumer electronics. As a result, those companies are making more money but shipping fewer consumer-grade chips, which have become more expensive. Memory and storage chip prices have quadrupled over the past year, according to analyst estimates, and the cost of those components are expected to continue to rise. Those costs are now being passed on to consumers. Microsoft also raised prices for its Surface laptops in April. "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," a spokesman for Apple said in a statement. "We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices." Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, said during an investor call in April that the company expected "significantly higher memory costs" for the quarter, which runs through June. "Beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business," Mr. Cook said on the call. The company also said it expected its profit margins to decline slightly for the quarter. Apple on Thursday also raised the prices of its HomePod speaker and its Vision Pro mixed reality headset. The timing for the price increases was unusual. Apple typically raises prices when it releases new or refreshed products. Last September, Apple released new iPhones and raised the prices for some models $100.

Apple raises Mac and iPad prices as the AI memory crunch reaches the shelf

Tim Cook calls the increases "unavoidable" as data centres swallow the memory supply that consumer devices used to rely on. The AI boom has been an abstract thing for most consumers, a story about data centres and model launches happening somewhere else. This week it arrived somewhere concrete: the price of a Mac. Apple is raising prices on Macs and iPads to offset the soaring cost of memory and storage chips, the bill for an industry-wide shortage that the company says it can no longer absorb on its customers' behalf. Tim Cook, who hands the chief executive role to John Ternus on 1 September, put it plainly. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," he told The Wall Street Journal. "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." The cause is memory, and the culprit is AI. Demand for the memory and storage chips that go into servers has surged as companies race to build out AI infrastructure, and that demand is hoovering up supply that used to flow to consumer devices. By one widely cited estimate, data centres are expected to consume as much as 70% of total memory production in 2026. For every ten chips coming off a line, seven head to server farms, leaving phone makers, PC builders, and the rest of consumer electronics to compete over the remaining three. Cook reached for a flood metaphor to describe the scale of it. He likened the shortage to a hundred-year flood, and said he had never seen anything like it in over 40 years in the industry. Coming from a chief executive who built his reputation on supply-chain mastery, the comparison carries some weight: this is the operations specialist saying the operations problem is outside the normal range. Some of the increase has already landed. Apple raised the entry price of the Mac mini from $599 to $799, not by relabelling the same machine but by eliminating its lowest-tier model, which has the same effect on the shelf. It is the cleanest example so far of how the squeeze reaches buyers: not always as a higher sticker on the same product, sometimes as the quiet disappearance of the cheaper option. Cook did not specify which other products will rise, or by how much. Macs and iPads are flagged as next. The iPhone is also exposed: the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, due in September, could carry higher prices than the current 17 Pro line, though Apple has not confirmed figures. What makes this awkward for Apple is that it is, in a sense, paying for its own industry's success. The same AI demand that has lifted the broader technology sector is now raising the cost of the components in a laptop. The bill for the buildout has reached the checkout, and for the first time in a while, Apple has decided its customers will see it.

Apple Just Confirmed Micron's Biggest AI Prediction - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU)

The price increases affect products including the MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPad Air, HomePod, HomePod mini and Apple TV, while iPhone pricing remains unchanged. Apple attributed the increases to tightening supplies of memory and storage components as AI infrastructure spending accelerates. For Micron investors, however, the announcement may represent something more significant: real-world evidence that the AI memory crunch the company has been warning about is beginning to ripple beyond data centers and into consumer electronics. Micron CEO Warned Memory Shortages Would Persist During its fiscal Q3 earnings call, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the company still sees no clear end to tightening memory markets. "We currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand," Mehrotra told investors. "We expect tight conditions to persist beyond calendar 2027." The executive argued that artificial intelligence has fundamentally reshaped the memory industry, with AI systems requiring increasingly larger amounts of high-performance memory to support training and inference workloads. "Memory has become a strategic asset," Mehrotra said, adding that AI system performance is "architecturally dependent on memory subsystem performance and capacity." AI Data Centers Are Reshaping The Memory Market The connection between Apple's pricing decision and Micron's outlook highlights how AI infrastructure spending is increasingly influencing markets far beyond semiconductors. Cloud providers and AI developers have been aggressively expanding data center capacity to support generative AI applications, fueling demand for advanced DRAM and NAND memory. That demand has helped tighten industry supply, allowing memory manufacturers to secure stronger pricing and long-term customer agreements. Micron recently disclosed that customers have committed approximately $22 billion through strategic agreements, providing additional visibility into future demand as the company ramps production of high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. If Apple's explanation proves to be an early indication of broader industry trends, the impact of AI-driven memory shortages may no longer be confined to hyperscale data centers. Instead, consumers purchasing everyday devices -- from laptops and tablets to smart-home products -- could increasingly feel the effects of a market Micron believes will remain supply-constrained for years. For investors, Apple's price increases may be the clearest sign yet that Micron's AI memory thesis is beginning to play out beyond the walls of the world's largest data centers. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads as memory costs skyrocket

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple raised iPad and MacBook prices on Thursday, saying it could no longer shield customers from soaring memory and storage chip costs driven by the AI industry's datacenter buildout. The move does not affect Apple's main cash cow, the iPhone. But it would take starting price of the Neo - its lowest priced laptop aimed at winning marketshare from affordable Windows and Chromebook laptops - from US$599 to $699 months after launch. The increase shows even the world's most valuable consumer electronics company with supply chain relationships that are the envy of the industry is not immune to a memory price surge that has dulled the outlook for smartphone and PC sales. Memory makers such as Micron have in recent months prioritized orders from AI chipmakers like Nvidia helping them earn record profit but leaving little supply for electronics makers that have been forced to increase prices. "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," Apple said in a statement. "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." Apple hiked the price of MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage rose to $1,299 from $1,099, while the MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage rose to $1,999 from $1,699, according to updated prices on its website. The iPad Air with 128 gigabytes of storage rose from $599 to $749, among other changes. * Latest technology news on BNNBloomberg.ca Apple also raised prices for both versions of its HomePod smart speaker and Apple TV set-top box. Shares of the company fell nearly 5 per cent, while rival Dell was down more than 8 per cent. Rival device makers may have to raise prices even more sharply than Apple, whose deep supplier ties have cushioned it from the full hit, several analysts said. "The memory environment is tough and remains structurally tough for the foreseeable future," said Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies. Apple said in April existing inventories had helped it keep its gross margins above Wall Street expectations but that rising memory costs would start to catch up by the end of this month, with profitability expected to fall slightly. "We expect significantly higher memory costs," CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call with analysts in late April. "Where we don't give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business," Cook had said. MEMORY SURGE ADDS PRESSURE ON ELECTRONICS MAKERS Apple has not disclosed what steps besides price hike it has taken to address rising memory costs. "We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions," the company said on Thursday. Analysts expect Apple to increase iPhone prices in the coming months and said the latest hike could prompt some potential buyers to advance their purchase decisions. "The iPhone isn't spared, its hike is coming," said Nabila Popal, a senior research director at IDC. "It was incredibly strategic for Apple to make the price hike announcements prior to the iPhone fall launch, so the headlines at launch is not the price hikes but the value the new phones bring." Prices of dynamic random access memory, used in virtually all modern tech gadgets, rose as much as 98 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 and is set to jump by another 58 per cent to 63 per cent in the current quarter, according to industry tracker TrendForce. That surge, dubbed by some experts as "RAMageddon," has been driven by a boom in AI data center construction, with companies like Nvidia signing long-term deals with memory makers who are racing to increase capacity. Micron said on Wednesday it has locked in $22 billion in such long-term commitments from customers looking to secure their memory supplies. The rising costs are expected to weigh heavily on device sales this year, with research firm IDC estimating that the smartphone market would see its biggest-ever annual decline of nearly 14 per cent this year while the PC market will fall 11.3 per cent. Among the notable bright spots has been the MacBook Neo launched in March, which helped power Apple's strong sales forecast for the June quarter and has even led some industry watchers to revise their estimates for PC sales. With its increased price, it has now lost a $100 advantage over the $699 XPS 13 laptop that Dell unveiled last month especially to take on the Neo, while also making it more expensive than some Chromebooks from Lenovo and Asus.