Apple has confirmed the inevitable news fans had been dreading – the Cupertino company is not immune to the price hardware increases enforced by the ongoing RAM shortage and it’s likely products from smartphones to laptops will be affected.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the increases “unavailable” despite attempting to protect Apple fans from the industry-wide pressures that have seen significant price hikes over the last twelve months.
“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 did not indicate which sectors of Apple’s hardware offering will the subject to the price increases, but Mac models and iPad tablets appear to be the most likely. Could Apple launch an iPhone 18 range that’s much more expensive than its predecessors? That’d be a risky strategy, especially with the company’s first foldable expected to arrive this autumn.
As the WSJ points out, Apple began this process earlier this year when it raised the starting price of the Mac mini without introducing a new model and simply eradicating the base storage model. Now it appears more widespread and deliberate increases are on the way.
Apple fans will hope the increases don’t mirror those announced by Microsoft this week. New Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models arrived with starting price increases of $500 and $600 respectively.
Cook also says (via 9to5Mac): “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
It’s hardly great timing for Apple’s outgoing CEO who won’t really want one of his last official acts to be presiding over what are likely to be price increases. Cook will pass the CEO torch to hardware chief John Ternus later this year, but will remain as Apple’s executive chairman.
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