Osmond Chia (Hacker News, 9To5Mac, Engadget):
Apple plans to raise the prices of its products as the cost of the memory chips it uses has surged, the technology giant’s boss has said.
Tim Cook, Apple’s outgoing chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that price increases were “unavoidable” as the situation around memory chips had become “unsustainable”.
During its holiday quarter, Apple’s profit margin on hardware was 40.7%; in its most recent quarter, that dropped to 38.7% — a remarkable figure for physical products. It is these high margins that led to analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo to claim Apple would keep prices more-or-less stable and offset the additional costs through its even higher-margin — 76.7% — services business.
Winkler suggests in his summary that Apple has absorbed the cost increases so far because it has always treated memory and storage upgrades as profit centers. That’s no surprise to the Apple community, which has long chafed at Apple’s premium prices for memory and storage. But now, for instance, the price of standalone internal flash storage is closer to and sometimes even higher than Apple’s upgrade prices.
[…]
Obviously, Apple could absorb such costs and more if it were to accept dramatically lower gross margins. But as high-minded and customer-focused as Apple is, the company is still in business to maximize profit.
I was recently looking to add another SSD and a few hard drives to my setup. Normally, prices go down over time, but currently it SSDs are about double the price I paid last year, and large hard drives are almost triple.
Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs.
Chance Miller (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Apple has raised prices across the board for many of its products today. MacBook Neo now starts at $699 (up from $599), while MacBook Air now starts at $1299 (up from $1099). Other impacted products include MacBook Pro, iPad, iPad Air, and many more. iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods pricing is unchanged.
Earlier this week, I outlined three reasons for agreeing with Mark Gurman that the Apple price increases could be imminent, and that indeed proved to be the case.
iPhones have escaped the increases, but they are otherwise both broad-reaching and pretty dramatic. But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the MacBook Neo has been included …
Apple today increased the starting price of the Mac mini with M4 Pro chip by $200, taking the higher-tier model up to $1,599 on its online store.
[…]
Apple had already raised the Mac mini’s effective starting price in May by discontinuing the $599 configuration with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, leaving the $799 model with a 512GB SSD as the new entry-level option. Interestingly, the 16GB RAM / 256GB storage option has now been reinstated, but the $799 starting price remains.
Stephen Hackett has a table of the old and new prices.
Pre-announce it with a small delay, thus giving you a temporary sales boost as people scramble to get their orders in at current prices, and to soften the blow when the increases hit.
I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September.
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Business iPad iPad Air Mac Mac mini MacBook Air MacBook Neo MacBook Pro RAM Solid-State Drive (SSD)
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