In an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook confirmed that price hikes across Apple’s product lineup are now “unavoidable” due to skyrocketing costs and tightening supply of memory and storage chips.
“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.
The root cause is explosive demand for DRAM (memory) and NAND (storage) chips from AI data centers. Major cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have dramatically increased their capital spending, causing prices for these components to quadruple since last year. TechInsights estimates that simply passing on the higher costs while preserving margins could add roughly $270 to the price of the next iPhone 18 Pro model.
Cook highlighted the DRAM market in particular, noting that suppliers are prioritizing high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, leaving less capacity for consumer devices. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” he said. He described the situation as a “hundred-year flood” unlike anything he’s seen in over 40 years in the supply chain.
• Apple’s next major launch is expected in September 2026 with the iPhone 18 series, including a new foldable model.
• Price increases could arrive even sooner for Macs and iPads (Apple already raised the starting price of the Mac Mini recently).
• The company also needs more DRAM to support advanced on-device AI features, including the newly announced Siri upgrades.
Apple spends tens of billions annually on memory and storage and has historically used its buying power to secure favorable pricing. Now, even Apple finds itself waiting in line behind deep-pocketed AI buyers who are locking up supply with multi-year contracts and large prepayments.
Cook said Apple is willing to use its strong balance sheet to help increase supply, but ruled out building its own memory factories. He also suggested that loosening certain national-security restrictions on dealing with Chinese memory suppliers “needs to be on the table.”
Of course, other consumer electronics makers (HP, Dell, Nintendo) have already raised prices or adjusted specs. Analysts from Morgan Stanley warn of potential 15% price increases for smartphones and PCs in the U.S. this year, with consumer-grade memory supply possibly falling 15% short of demand by 2027 even as total production capacity grows.
The era of relatively stable pricing from Apple may be ending — at least until memory markets stabilize. As Cook put it, the company has tried to absorb the pain as long as possible, but that strategy has now reached its limit.
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Source link: https://macdailynews.com/2026/06/17/apple-to-raise-prices-due-to-memory-chip-crunch-says-outgoing-ceo-tim-cook/
