Apple CEO Tim Cook says the iPhone maker must raise its prices to offset the impact of the rising memory and storage chip prices. According to one estimate, this year’s iPhone 18 Pro could cost as much as $1,299!
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said Wednesday in an interview with 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.”
‘Unavoidable’ price hikes coming to Apple products
Why the Apple pricepocalypse? The AI and data center boom is driving DRAM and NAND prices to record highs. Memory chips now cost three to six times more than they typically do, making them some of the most expensive components in smartphones and laptops.
To offset the higher component costs, all major consumer electronics companies have either raised prices or downgraded their product specs.
So far, Apple has remained somewhat of an outlier, not increasing the prices of the iPhone lineup. It continues to offer the iPhone 17 at $799 even as other smartphones have become more expensive. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099.
Apple absorbed the higher component costs by taking a hit on its margins in a bid to expand market share. However, it sounds like that’s about to change.
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Apple’s pricing reset is already underway
Apple’s CEO did not say which products would become more expensive or when the price hikes would take effect. The company could raise prices starting with the iPhone 18 lineup this September.
While Cook said Apple is “still working through that,” The Wall Street Journal crunched some numbers to come up with that eye-watering $1,299 price tag for the iPhone 18 Pro.
“Our analysis — based on the current markup of memory and storage chips and projections from research firm TechInsights –shows why the price of the base model could rise by $200 or more,” the publication wrote.
And it remains unkown how the price pressures will affect other Apple products.
The company launched the M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineups with higher price tags than their predecessors. However, it also bumped up the laptops’ storage capacity to justify the higher MSRP.
To protect its margins, Apple discontinued the $599 Mac mini with the M4 chip and 16GB of unified memory in April. The cheapest Mac mini now costs $799 — $200 more than before.
Further, it stopped selling the Mac Studio with 256GB and 512GB of system memory. The desktop computer is now available with a maximum of 96GB RAM.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
3 responses to “$1,299 iPhones?!? Why Apple products are about to get more expensive.”
Unfortunately even Apple buying power is not immune to the outrageous memory price increases as well as shortages. Sticker shock definitely coming this Fall with Apple products.
Well Apple could lower their insane margins just a little bit – that would sure help.
They only made $112 BILLION in net profits last year, they can’t afford a loss right?