Apple has raised prices on several iPads and MacBooks, a sign that the artificial intelligence boom is now pushing up costs far beyond data centres and into everyday consumer gadgets.
The company said on Thursday it could no longer absorb surging memory and storage chip costs caused by the global rush to build AI infrastructure, marking one of the clearest examples yet of how the race to power artificial intelligence is beginning to hit consumers directly.
The price hikes spare the iPhone, Apple’s biggest revenue generator, but affect some of its most important computing products, including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iPad Air and the low-cost MacBook Neo. The Neo, launched only months ago to help Apple compete more aggressively in the budget laptop market, will now start at $699 instead of $599.
Apple said it had tried for months to shield customers from higher component costs, but the scale of the increase in memory prices had made that increasingly difficult.
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