Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that price increases are unavoidable as surging DRAM costs become unsustainable.
Confirming what many people suspected was inevitable, Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that RAMaggedon will be pushing up the price of Apple products in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “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.”
Cook told the WSJ the situation was like a "hundred-year flood," adding "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."
Details are non-existent, so we don’t know the scale, the timing, nor which product lines will be most affected. Apple’s next major product launch will be the iPhone 18 lineup in September, which is still widely expected to include a new foldable iPhone. With Siri AI also due to emerge from beta at the same time, and to be instrumental in selling the new devices, Apple will want to hold prices to a bare minimum.
Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac mini last month and nerfed the base storage option. Given the customisability of Mac machines, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the decision whether to pay more for more memory passed on to the consumer rather than taken in-house.
The long and the short of it is, if you want a new Mac it might be a good idea to jump now. Buyers normally track the upgrade cycle, but the pressures on the DRAM market show no sign of abating just yet (2028 is considered to be the best case for an easing according to many analysts).
And phones? Even though Apple’s markups on products are famously high, its probably absorbed all the price movement in the market that it can. Expecting the 18 series to cost more than the 17 series seems like a fairly safe bet. Omdia's smartphone market analyst Chiew Le Xuan told the BBC that Apple's new phones are likely to cost up to $150 more than the iPhone 17s.