Back in May, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company was having to deal with "significantly higher memory costs" that likely meant price hikes would be happening in the near future. Now, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Cook has confirmed that those price hikes are going to happen.
"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said to the WSJ. “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 also confirmed that memory and storage costs are issues for Apple at the moment, particularly the DRAM which is being increasingly used by AI servers. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” he said “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Cook didn't offer any specifics about future price increases, though. So we have no idea when they might happen, which devices will be affected, or how much more money Apple will ask people to pay.
Apple price hikes — what we know
We've already seen at least one relative price increase, with Apple scrapping the $599 Mac mini M4 with 256GB of storage. That means the cheapest Mac mini you can currently buy is the $799 model with 512GB of storage space.
It's possible that price hikes could happen as early as this September, with the release of the iPhone 18 Pro and foldable iPhone Ultra. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are both expected to come with at least 12GB of RAM, and with the cost of RAM skyrocketing, it wouldn't be surprising to see the current prices rise to compensate.
There have been rumors that the standard iPhone 18 could limit the amount of RAM to help cut costs, but I don't see that happening with the Pro models. Apple has already confirmed that 12GB of memory is required to access all the newest Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features, and it would be a very bad look if the newest Pro-tier iPhones weren't able to access them all.
Cook confirmed that Apple is prepared to use its cash reserves to help boost the supply of memory, and noted that more capacity is needed — even if it means potentially loosening restrictions about Chinese RAM providers. However, Cook also confirmed that it wouldn't be building its own production facilities to mitigate the damage caused by RAMageddon. “We can’t do everything,” said Cook. “We know what we’re good at.”
Apple used to have a lot of purchasing power, which it utilized to leverage cheaper prices for the many components it needs. If it's feeling the squeeze of the memory shortages, then things must be pretty bad. Apple may not be willing to confirm when price hikes will happen, but it's important that we all prepare ourselves to have to pay even more for our fruit-themed devices.
