Apple is about to raise product prices – Gurman

If you’re thinking about purchasing a new Apple product, today is the day to roll over to Amazon to order what you need (affiliate link), as Mark Gurman warns component-cost-driven price hikes in Macs, iPads, iPhones and potentially everything else are “fairly imminent”.

There is little doubt that when Gurman uses a word like that, it means something.

Many think that means next week.

This suggests the $599 or $2,599 Mac you need may cost much more as soon as next week, though Apple hasn’t told us which products it will raise prices on, nor how much that hike will be.

All we do know is a hike is going to come.

Causes include the ongoing inflation that is the pre-burst AI server deployment bubble, which bounced memory prices. TSMC was also thought to be pushing for processor price increases last winter.

The unwanted war in the Middle East has of course had serious inflationary impacts across every supply chain, many of which remain to be felt, but none of which will be avoidable.

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What Apple must do

Apple has been able to navigate the huge price increases in memory, processors, and other components for the last few months, but the scale of those costs has reached a point where even for a company of its size they have become “unsustainable”.

Appe CEO Tim Cook compared the crisis to a “hundred-year flood” in its magnitude.

“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,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal.

There is some thought that Apple may maintain some of its prices, particularly on strategically important products such as the MacBook Neo, but the company is far from being alone in feeling this pressure. Competitors are raising prices, too.

All the same, he probably echoed the entire industry when he said, “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.” 

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