personal tech
Fondleslab and Mac prices rise by hundreds; phones safe ... for now
The online Apple Store went offline Thursday morning, but instead of such a move marking the launch of upgraded products, it came back online with nothing new to offer but higher prices.
The budget-priced MacBook Neo wasn’t even spared from the spike, with its entry-level price climbing from $599 to $699. Along with the Neo, entry-level MacBook Air prices rose by $200 and base MacBook Pro machines increased by $300, putting the lowest-spec machines in the lines at $1,299 and $1,999, respectively.
iPads also went up in price, with the base-model iPad Air (11” w/128GB of storage) jumping from $599 to $749 and the basic iPad Pro (11”, 256GB of storage) now priced at $1,199 up from $999.
iPhones were spared from the price increase, for now at least, but that may not last either if the current trend in hardware pricing is any indicator.
As we’ve been covering of late, and pretty much everyone is well aware, memory prices are skyrocketing thanks to the AI and datacenter boom, leading to shortages, longer lead times, and the need to increase prices on everything that contains even the barest minimum of anything that looks slightly like RAM. With entry-level MacBooks now starting at a minimum of 16 GB of sweet, sweet integrated memory, it’s no wonder the prices are increasing alongside everything else.
Terminal Apple CEO Tim Cook even warned that price hikes were coming in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, telling the publication that increases were “unavoidable.”
“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 told the WSJ in an interview.
Cook didn’t give any details on the what or when of Apple price increases, but there’s no reason to guess any longer.
Microsoft has been affected by memory crunches too, and quietly rolled out a 12" Surface Pro and 13" Surface Laptop with a paltry 8 GB of memory this week. Given they have half of the minimum RAM spec needed to run Copilot+, the two machines are devoid of the AI marketing suffusing everything else that Microsoft now sells.
As for when iPhone price increases may rear their heads, that’s still unclear, but don’t expect it to take too much longer.
Micron, one of Apple’s RAM suppliers, said in its Q3 earnings call that it had signed agreements with 16 of its commercial customers to lock in historically high memory prices through 2030 on the back of continued uncertainty.
“Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve,” Micron CEO, president, and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra said during this week’s earnings call. “Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand.”
In other words, if that iPhone is looking long in the teeth, it might be time to upgrade before those prices, too, begin to climb.
We reached out to Apple for comment, but didn’t hear back. ®