The AI boom has been an abstract thing for most consumers, a story about data centres and model launches happening somewhere else.
This week it arrived somewhere concrete: the price of a Mac. Apple is raising prices on Macs and iPads to offset the soaring cost of memory and storage chips, the bill for an industry-wide shortage that the company says it can no longer absorb on its customers’ behalf.
Tim Cook, who hands the chief executive role to John Ternus on 1 September, put it plainly.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
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“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.”
The cause is memory, and the culprit is AI. Demand for the memory and storage chips that go into servers has surged as companies race to build out AI infrastructure, and that demand is hoovering up supply that used to flow to consumer devices.
By one widely cited estimate, data centres are expected to consume as much as 70% of total memory production in 2026.
For every ten chips coming off a line, seven head to server farms, leaving phone makers, PC builders, and the rest of consumer electronics to compete over the remaining three.
Cook reached for a flood metaphor to describe the scale of it. He likened the shortage to a hundred-year flood, and said he had never seen anything like it in over 40 years in the industry.
Coming from a chief executive who built his reputation on supply-chain mastery, the comparison carries some weight: this is the operations specialist saying the operations problem is outside the normal range.
Some of the increase has already landed. Apple raised the entry price of the Mac mini from $599 to $799, not by relabelling the same machine but by eliminating its lowest-tier model, which has the same effect on the shelf.
It is the cleanest example so far of how the squeeze reaches buyers: not always as a higher sticker on the same product, sometimes as the quiet disappearance of the cheaper option.
Cook did not specify which other products will rise, or by how much. Macs and iPads are flagged as next.
The iPhone is also exposed: the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, due in September, could carry higher prices than the current 17 Pro line, though Apple has not confirmed figures.
What makes this awkward for Apple is that it is, in a sense, paying for its own industry’s success. The same AI demand that has lifted the broader technology sector is now raising the cost of the components in a laptop.
The bill for the buildout has reached the checkout, and for the first time in a while, Apple has decided its customers will see it.
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