Tim Cook confirms Apple price hikes are coming, iPhones could jump $200 or more

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Ripple effect: As demand from AI data centers pushes memory and storage costs to stratospheric highs, hardware manufacturers across the tech industry have raised prices while seeing shipments decline. Apple's outsized supply chain muscle has mostly shielded it from the trend so far, but the tech giant's CEO recently admitted that even it can't simply absorb rising component costs forever.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told The Wall Street Journal that raising prices across its product lineup will become unavoidable this year due to continually inflating memory costs. The company has not yet determined which devices will see hikes or how severe they will be, but WSJ estimates that base-model iPhones could rise by more than $200.

Since AI data centers began siphoning most DRAM and NAND production capacity last year, building PCs with DDR5 RAM has become virtually impossible, the retail SSD market has almost vanished, and knock-on effects have cascaded throughout consumer tech.