Apple raises prices, blames memory cost

Apple raised its prices on many products today, sometimes adding hundreds of dollars to the price of a new Macintosh. The entry-level MacBook Neo that cost $599 is now $699. The previously $1,299 iMac will become a $1,499 iMac. The $1,699 M5 MacBook Pro is now $1,999. And at the high end, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio—which has 96GB of memory—is seeing a price increase of $1,300 to $5,299.

The iPad line is also going up in price, between $100 and $200, depending on the model. A small price increase has been applied to products such as the Apple TV and HomePod. The price of iPhones has remained unchanged, until now.

Guilty? The high cost of memory, according to interview which Apple CEO Tim Cook gave to The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “Unfortunately, inflation is inevitable,” Cook told the paper. “We are doing everything we can to limit the large increases that are being offered to us, and we have been trying to protect our customers from the increase, but things have gotten out of hand.”

As AI investments have taken off, chipmakers have focused on profitable memory used in data centers rather than memory designed for consumers.

Hence, lack of bandwidth and high memory costs it has affected The technology companies for months now, have been driving up the prices of many consumer electronics and making others unaffordable. For example, in March, Apple quietly removed memory-heavy configuration of the M3 Ultra Mac (which had 512GB of memory) from its store.

For long time Apple customers who remember how much Apple charged for RAM during this time PowerPC days, This price hike may cause a bit of déjà vu.