As far as prices go, Apple is kind of a reverse canary in the coal mine.
With its famously generous margins and immense purchasing volume, it can afford to ride out price fluctuations in its supply chain in a way no other consumer tech company can. So when Apple raises prices across nearly all of its product lines, you know that shit is well and truly real.
That’s what happened earlier today: Apple increased pricing across Macs, iPads, HomePods, and even the Vision Pro. Prices jumped hundreds of dollars in many cases. The MacBook Neo’s key feature — a $599 starting price — is now $699. The iPhone appears to be safe for now, but I’d be shocked if we don’t see higher starting prices on the iPhone 18 series when it debuts in a few months.
It’s all so alarming because Apple doesn’t typically mess with pricing on its current models. It certainly doesn’t participate in anything as common as a sale. If you walk into an Apple store to buy a new MacBook, you can count on it being the same price no matter what day or week or month it is. Sure, you’ll find discounts from third-party sellers on certain products, or maybe a gift card with your purchase if Apple is feeling really generous. Otherwise, an iPad generally costs the same price, year-round, right up until the day a new model is introduced. If the price is going to go up, it’ll go up on the new model; the current one holds steady.
But even for a company like Apple, the memory crisis is re-writing the rules of consumer tech pricing. First it came for the game consoles: the Playstations, Xboxes, Switches, and Steam Decks. They all received price hikes, blamed squarely on the memory shortage. It came for laptops. Phones have suffered, too. The Pixel 10A is a barely warmed over version of the 9A, and its best feature is that it didn’t get any more expensive than last year’s model. Samsung’s S26 phones were victims, with less storage and higher prices than the previous models. Every corner of the industry has been touched by the crisis, and Apple’s price hikes today underscore what a crappy year it’s been for consumer tech.
The funny thing is, more than a few tech companies picked this year to debut unique, premium devices. It’s the unfortunate reality of the years-long R&D cycle. Apple is poised to launch its most expensive iPhone ever if it debuts a folding iPhone as rumored. Valve released its much-anticipated Steam Machine at twice the price of PS5. Samsung released the Galaxy Z Trifold for a small fortune. An ambitious game console from a company with a great track record of improving its existing hardware? That might just weather the storm. But a big, expensive phone with a questionable value proposition? Well, we already know how that went.
If nothing else, RAMageddon is going to quickly sort out the winners and losers. And if there was any doubt remaining, we know now that every consumer tech company is being forced to reckon with the memory shortage — even Apple. The company may have stumbled its way to the other side of its AI debacle and right into a crisis of another kind.
