Apple is raising prices: Tim Cook now confirms memory costs are to blame

Apple says some of its products are going to get more expensive in the coming months. The reason is simple enough: memory and storage have gotten absurdly expensive, as Softonic recently reported, and that extra cost is starting to show up in the price of the devices people use every day. Tim Cook put it plainly in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: these price hikes aren’t avoidable.

Pressure from the memory chip market

The Wall Street Journal reports that demand for chips tied to artificial intelligence has surged, creating a shortage that has sent memory and storage prices through the roof. Apple has spent months trying to absorb those higher costs, but it has now reached the point where it can’t keep doing that.

One clear example came just a few weeks ago with Apple’s Mac mini. Its entry price effectively rose from $599 to $799 after Apple dropped the base model. Some forecasts now suggest the iPhone 18 Pro may need a $270 price increase to maintain the same profit margin. Those same projections suggest the iPad and Mac could be headed the same way.

Cook also told The Wall Street Journal that Apple will use part of its cash reserves to lock in enough memory supply and keep Apple devices available. In the meantime, buyers should expect price increases that have already become common across other brands and components, but hadn’t really hit Apple until now. The big question at this point is how steep those increases will be.