Apple ratchets up prices, blames the cost of memory

Apple bumped its prices across much of its product lineup today, in some cases adding hundreds of dollars to the cost of a new Macintosh. An entry-level MacBook Neo that cost $599 is now $699. The formerly $1,299 iMac will now be a $1,499 iMac. An M5 MacBook Pro that was $1,699 is now $1,999. And at the very high end, an M3 Ultra Mac Studio—which features 96GB of memory—sees a $1,300 price increase to $5,299.

The iPad line is also getting more expensive, between $100 and $200, depending on the model. Smaller price increases have been applied to products like the Apple TV and HomePod. The price of iPhones remains unchanged, at least for now.

The culprit? The soaring price of memory, according to an interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook gave to The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook told the paper. “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.”

As AI investments rocketed, chipmakers increasingly focused on the more profitable memory used in data centers rather than the memory intended for consumer products.

Consequently, supply shortages and high memory prices have been affecting the tech industry for months now, driving up the prices of many consumer electronics and causing others to disappear from sale. For example, in March, Apple quietly removed a memory-heavy configuration of the M3 Ultra Mac (which featured 512GB of memory) from its store.

For long-time Apple customers who remember how much Apple used to charge for RAM during the PowerPC days, these price rises might induce a little déjà vu.