Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+):

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“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 declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.

The memory shortage in particular has been debilitating for the tech industry. A new Raspberry Pi — a small computer with 4 gigabytes of memory — costs $150. Similar models used to cost around $100. The shortage, driven by a supply-and-demand issue of RAM manufacturers diverting resources to artificial intelligence servers, has already hit Apple. Earlier this year, it was forced to discontinue the base-model Mac mini and high-end configurations of the Mac Studio with 128 gigabytes of memory and higher storage capacity. It is unprecedented for Apple to flat-out discontinue an existing computer with no mention of its return — Cook’s supply chain prowess ensures that even high-demand configurations will always be in stock at some point. (Just take the MacBook Neo as an example.)

There are two basic, first-year economics solutions to this: decrease demand or increase supply. One is better for consumers than the other. If the AI bubble pops after the initial public offerings of the major AI companies, RAM prices will steadily decrease as data center construction grinds to a halt and the demand for inference slows. Perhaps this could even happen sooner than we initially thought because OpenAI can’t afford to build new data centers. If the bubble never pops, however, we’ll see more capital investment in RAM and storage production to meet demand, and prices may slowly come down. The former situation will have a much more immediate, drastic effect, however, as there’s not much incentive for RAM manufacturers to lower their prices at all if demand keeps rising. (The RAM industry operates as an oligopoly, and increased demand for inference only encourages it to form a cartel.)

While the game plays out, this ought to be quite unfortunate for iPhone and Mac buyers in the fall. I expect iPhone prices to go up by at least $100 in September — and a real price increase at that, not a storage bump like last year due to tariffs. The new MacBook Pro (or, maybe, MacBook Ultra) will probably see even steeper price hikes, though Apple may try to justify them with the new organic-LED touchscreen and new design. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if Apple discontinues more base-model products, like the cheapest MacBook Neo, older-model iPhones, and base-model iMac. If the price of RAM and storage really begins to devour Apple’s margins, I could even see the base-model MacBook Air being discontinued. All of these changes will be unfortunate.