apple This is the company’s first formal move to pass on rising memory and storage costs to consumers, after CEO Tim Cook said price hikes were inevitable.
The company’s stock price fell more than 6% on Thursday following the price change, its worst decline since April 2025.
Here are the latest changes from Apple:
MacBook Neo entry increased from $599 to $699 MacBook Air 512GB increased from $1099 to $1299 MacBook Pro 1T increased from $1699 to $1999 iPad Air 128GB increased from $599 to $749 iPad Pro Wifi 256GB increased from $999 to $1199
Apple’s online store was briefly down Thursday morning and updated with price changes.
“The consumer electronics industry is facing unprecedented challenges,” the company said in a statement. “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has led to an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen component prices rise so quickly.”
“We have reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on many of our products,” Apple added, adding that it remains open to further price increases.
“We know this is not welcome news and we are working tirelessly to find a solution,” the company said in a statement.
Cook told the Wall Street Journal last week that Apple can no longer fully protect customers from rising component costs associated with the artificial intelligence boom.
“This is a once-in-a-century flood,” Cook told the Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like that in any area in over 40 years.”
Apple stock price chart.
According to Counterpoint Research, memory and storage prices have quadrupled in the past three quarters as suppliers pivot to ramp up production of high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers.
The memory crisis has been a huge boon for suppliers including: micronjust reported that its revenue quadrupled and that its gross profit margin rose from 39% a year ago to 84.9% in its latest quarter, outpacing sales. Nvidia and Meta.
Apple’s pricing strategy has historically included removing the lowest-cost options, starting with more storage and memory, and steering buyers toward Pro models and higher-capacity versions.
The Mac mini showed an early sign of that approach. In May, Apple stopped selling its cheapest configuration and removed the $599 256GB option from its lineup. The remaining entry-level models start at $799. Apple has also long used storage upgrades to increase the price consumers pay for its devices.
Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, estimates that higher component costs could add about $200 per iPhone to Apple. He expects prices to increase by about $150 to $200 across the lineup, with an emphasis on configurations with more memory than base models.
The AI push gives Apple another reason to focus on high memory configurations.
IDC expects all new iPhone models to move to 12GB of RAM as Apple seeks to avoid selling new devices without access to the full suite of Apple Intelligence features.
More advanced on-device AI features require more memory, and Apple’s new Siri experience only works with new hardware. IDC estimates that approximately 54% of iPhones shipped in 2022 and beyond will not fully support the new Siri experience.
This gave Apple the potential to command higher prices around more capable hardware, rather than simply passing on component inflation. IDC expects Apple’s average selling price to rise 12% this year, boosted by a broader product mix and the expected launch of a foldable iPhone.
Spotlight: Apple passes on rising memory costs to consumers
