Apple’s threatened product pricing hike arrived Thursday with steep increases landing across all its products (except the iPhone) — and rapidly accelerating RAM prices are to blame.
Apple CEO Tim Cook had warned last week about the need for price increases, with Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman subsequently telling us these were “imminent.”
The increases have been imposed as a result of the massive demand for memory and storage components generated by the rapid investment in AI servers. Prices have increased to meet this demand, with vendors shifting manufacturing to the advanced memory modules demanded by AI companies. In doing so, they have not invested in additional production capacity, further exacerbating the demand/supply imbalance.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook 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 price increases are going to hurt
