Due to the excessive demand for AI tasks, we have been dealing with this ongoing memory crisis for several months. At first, Apple was bold in telling its customers that it would keep product prices as low as possible, but unfortunately, Apple CEO Tim Cook officially told The Wall Street Journal that the company would raise its product prices to offset rising costs of memory and storage.
“Unfortunately, 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.” -Tim Cook.
While this may not come as a huge shocker, given that other competitors have seen price hikes across their products, it would be another tough pill to swallow. When Apple updated the MacBook Air with the M5 chip and the MacBook Pro models with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips back in March, it doubled the base storage across those products, but the starting prices also went up. For the Mac mini and the Mac Studio, Apple has axed several memory configurations, and to add insult to injury, it discontinued the base 256GB storage configuration for the Mac mini (M4), raising the starting price from $599 to $799.
It’s unclear which Apple products will see actual price hikes. Since we expect the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro models in a couple of months, it’s very possible that we could see price increases for those models. Who knows? iPads and Macs could see overall price increases without further notice or even before they get some sort of hardware update.
I’d say if you’ve been eyeing to upgrade at least one of your Apple products, I’d say the best would be now rather than later. Don’t wait for Black Friday or the holiday season; just get a machine with the specs that you need, as more RAM could now be a worthy investment to future-proof your purchase.
