Apple is going to raise prices, and Tim Cook is no longer pretending otherwise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the chief executive said the company could not keep absorbing the soaring cost of memory and storage chips.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. The line is notable mostly because Apple has spent so long avoiding saying it.
The cause is the same one rippling through the rest of the electronics industry. A surge in AI-driven demand for data-centre memory has set off a fierce scramble for a shrinking pool of chips, driving prices sharply higher and pulling supply away from consumer devices.
Cook framed Apple as a company that has been shielding customers from those increases for as long as it could, and has now run out of room. “The situation has become unsustainable,” he said.
He was careful about what he did not say. Cook did not specify when prices would rise, by how much, or which products would be affected, leaving the announcement as a statement of direction rather than a price list. That vagueness is itself information: it signals the increases are coming without committing Apple to numbers it may want to adjust as the supply picture shifts.
