US Apple buyers face the steepest device price hikes in years after chief executive Tim Cook conceded that absorbing surging memory chip costs has become 'unsustainable,' with the memory components that go into every iPhone, iPad, and Mac now costing roughly four times what they did a year ago.
Cook, who hands over the role to John Ternus on 1 September, told the Wall Street Journal on 17 June that 'unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable', signalling that the autumn iPhone 18 launch and forthcoming Mac and iPad refreshes are likely to ship with sharply higher tags. He framed the squeeze as a hundred-year flood driven by artificial intelligence (AI) data centres hoovering up the world's supply of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and storage chips.
