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Apple on Thursday announced that it raised prices on its iPad and MacBook devices because of rising memory and chip costs amid the rapid buildout of the AI industry.
The tech giant excluded its primary cash cow, the iPhone, from the price hikes but will raise prices on the other devices as Apple said it couldn’t afford to continue insulating consumers from the mounting cost of memory and storage chips.
“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for the iPad and Mac.”
The price hikes show that even the world’s most valuable consumer electronics company and its strong supply chain relationships are not immune to the surge in prices for memory chips that has dampened the outlook for smartphone and PC sales.
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Memory chipmakers such as Micron have moved to prioritize orders from AI chipmakers like Nvidia in recent months, which has helped them earn record profits but has constrained supplies available for the makers of electronic devices and prompted them to raise prices.
Apple’s Neo, the company’s lowest priced laptop that aims to compete with affordable versions of Windows and Chromebook laptops, is one of the products that will be subject to the price hikes and will go from $599 to $699 months after launch.
The company also raised the price of the MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage from $1,099 to $1,299; while the MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage price rose from $1,699 to $1,999; and the price of the iPad Air with 128 gigabytes of storage rose from $599 to $749.
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| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | APPLE INC. | 278.55 | +3.40 | +1.24% |
Apple also hiked prices for both versions of its HomePod smart speaker and Apple TV set-top box.
The announcement comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an interview earlier this month that “price increases are 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 said in the interview.
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Cook also said on a late April conference call with analysts that, “Where we don’t give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business.”
Rival device makers may be forced to raise prices even more sharply than Apple, whose deep supplier ties have cushioned it from the full hit, several analysts said.
“The memory environment is tough and remains structurally tough for the foreseeable future,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies.
Reuters contributed to this report.
