Apple issues price hikes for most of its hardware
Apple has raised the price of its iPads, Macs, and more
Apple has refreshed its website with an entirely new price list, and it’s not good news for Apple fans. Most of Apple’s hardware appears to have received significant price increases, including their recently released MacBook Neo. Apple’s £599 MacBook Neo 256GB now costs £699. The time for memory-related Apple price hikes has come.
Apple has confirmed that these price increases are due to higher memory and storage costs. These price increases have impacted most products, with iPhones, AirPods, Studio Displays, and accessories being notably unaffected. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, recently stated that the “price increases are unavoidable”, comparing the memory shortage to a “hundred-year flood”. Cook also said that “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
Below is a list of known price increases.
- HomePod mini: $129, up from $99 (+$30)
- HomePod: $349, up from $299 (+$50)
- Apple TV: $199, up from $129 (+$70)
- iPad: $449, up from $349 (+$100)
- iPad mini: $599, up from $499 (+$100)
- iPad Air: $749, up from $599 (+$150)
- iPad Pro: $1,199, up from $999 (+$200)
- MacBook Neo: $699, up from $599 (+$100)
- MacBook Air: $1,299, up from $1,099 (+$200)
- MacBook Pro: $1,999 up from $1,699 (+$300)
- iMac: $1,499, up from $1,299 (+$200)
- Mac mini (M4 Pro): $1,599, up from $1,399 (+$200)
- Mac Studio (M4 Max): $2,499, up from $1,999 (+$500)
- Mac Studio (M3 Ultra): $5,299, up from $3,999 (+$1,300)
- Vision Pro: $3,699, up from $3,499 (+$200)
– Info compiled by MacRumors
Typically, Apple absorbs the cost of changing memory and storage prices. Historically, Apple’s margins have been large enough to accommodate that. Today, this is not the case. Apple is now passing its rising costs onto customers, highlighting just how high today’s memory prices are. Even Apple, which is known for charging huge amounts for memory upgrades, can’t afford to take the hit anymore.
Why are memory and storage prices so high? The answer is AI. AI datacenter buildouts are gobbling up the world’s DRAM and NAND supply, so much so that consumer-grade DDR5 kits are now over 4x as expensive as they were this time last year. AI superscalers are hoarding RAM for their AI datacenters, leaving consumers with much higher prices and many smaller companies unable to acquire enough RAM for their products.
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