Cook says Apple price increases are coming as memory costs climb
Apple’s CEO told The Wall Street Journal that rising RAM costs have made price increases unavoidable, though he did not name affected products.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
3 min read
Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company is preparing to raise prices because of rising memory costs, according to an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The comments signal that the global RAM shortage could reach Apple customers after already pushing up prices across parts of the consumer tech market.
Cook told the Journal that Apple has tried to absorb or reduce the effect of higher component costs, but he said those efforts can no longer fully offset the pressure. “We’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” Cook told the Journal.
Cook did not say when Apple would raise prices, and he did not identify which products would be affected, according to The Verge. That leaves open whether the increases will hit the iPhone, iPad, Mac or only certain configurations that use more memory.
Memory pressure has already reached Apple’s lineup
Apple has already made some product changes tied to memory-heavy configurations, according to earlier reports cited by The Verge. MacRumors reported in March that Apple stopped offering the Mac Studio with a 512GB RAM option.
The Verge also reported that Apple raised the Mac Mini’s entry price to $799 after removing the lower-priced $599 model from the lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan has suggested Apple could drop the base configuration of the MacBook Neo while keeping a $699 version with 512GB of storage, according to The Verge.
Those changes do not reveal Apple’s broader pricing plans. They do show how memory and storage costs can affect which versions of a device remain available, especially at the low end of a product line.
AI demand is tightening supply
The Verge reported that demand from AI companies has increased the strain on memory suppliers as data centers require more RAM and storage. Cook told the Journal that supply has tightened while consumers still want devices, and that memory makers are passing higher costs through the chain.
“We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products,” Cook told the Journal.
The same shortage has contributed to price increases for other devices, according to The Verge, including game consoles, laptops and Raspberry Pi products. The pressure has also affected the retail SSD market, according to The Verge’s continuing coverage of the memory shortage.
Apple is expected to introduce its next iPhone lineup later this year, according to The Verge. Cook’s comments do not make clear how much the memory shortage will affect those phones, or whether Apple will limit changes to Macs and other products with higher RAM and storage configurations.
For buyers, the immediate takeaway is narrower than the broader market anxiety: Apple’s CEO has now publicly tied future price increases to component costs. The company has not yet given customers a schedule, a product list or price amounts.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.