Price Increases for Apple Products Are “Unavoidable” Due to Memory Crisis, Tim Cook Says

Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that the ongoing memory and storage crisis will force the company to raise the price of its products. The executive commented on the AI-fueled chip shortages in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, but he didn’t say when Apple plans to adjust its pricing structure.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said. “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’s comments come a couple of weeks after Apple stopped selling its $599 Mac Mini with 256GB of storage, forcing customers to opt for the $799 model with twice the storage. The M5 MacBook Air that launched in April came with 512GB of storage by default, but at $1099, it’s $100 more expensive than the base M4 model with half the storage.

In the interview, Cook explicitly mentioned DRAM shortages, which come at a time when Apple is finally ready to launch a revamped Siri AI that will require a minimum of 12GB of RAM to run AI models locally. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook said. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Cook hinted that Apple was ready to use its massive amount of cash to compensate for the memory and storage drain. “We’re willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution,” the exec said. “Obviously, more capacity is needed.”

It remains to be seen if the upcoming iPhone 18 series will be more expensive than the current generation. The recent launch of Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo was also a wake-up call for the PC competition, but maybe the company won’t be able to keep selling its new entry-level MacBook at such a low price.