Apple shares fell more than 6% on Thursday after the company raised prices on several MacBook and iPad models, its first formal move to pass higher memory and storage costs on to consumers. The stock decline was Apple’s sharpest fall since April 2025.
The company said the consumer electronics industry is facing “an unprecedented challenge” as the rapid expansion of AI data centers drives extraordinary demand for memory and storage components.
“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement.
The company added that it had “reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products,” suggesting more increases could follow.
Apple’s online store briefly went down Thursday morning before returning with the updated prices.
The changes include:
MacBook Neo entry model: from $599 to $699
MacBook Air 512GB: from $1,099 to $1,299
MacBook Pro 1TB: from $1,699 to $1,999
iPad Air 128GB: from $599 to $749
iPad Pro Wi-Fi 256GB: from $999 to $1,199
“We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions,” Apple said.
CEO Tim Cook warned last week in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Apple could no longer fully absorb the spike in component costs tied to the artificial intelligence boom.
“This is a hundred-year flood,” Cook told the Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
Memory and storage prices have quadrupled over the past three quarters, according to Counterpoint Research, as suppliers shift more production toward high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers.
The memory crunch has been a major boon for suppliers such as Micron, which reported that revenue in its latest quarter more than quadrupled. The company also said its gross margin rose from 39% a year earlier to 84.9%, surpassing Nvidia and Meta.
Apple has historically used several pricing strategies to increase the amount consumers pay, including removing lower-cost configurations, making higher storage or memory the new entry point, or steering buyers toward Pro models and higher-capacity versions.
CEO Tim Cook
(Photo: Reuters)
The Mac mini offered an early sign of that approach. In May, Apple stopped selling the lowest-priced configuration, removing the $599, 256GB model from its lineup. The remaining entry-level model started at $799.
Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, estimates that higher component costs could add about $200 per iPhone for Apple. He expects price increases of about $150 to $200 across the lineup, with the impact likely to be heavier on higher-memory configurations than on base models.
The AI push gives Apple another reason to emphasize devices with more memory.
IDC expects all new iPhone models to move to 12GB of RAM as Apple tries to avoid selling new devices that cannot support the full suite of Apple Intelligence features.
More advanced on-device AI tools require additional memory, and Apple’s new Siri experience will work only on newer hardware. IDC estimates that about 54% of iPhones shipped since 2022 will not support the full new Siri experience.
That gives Apple a way to frame higher prices around more capable hardware, rather than simply as a pass-through of component inflation.
IDC expects Apple’s average selling price to rise 12% this year, helped by a richer product mix and the expected launch of a foldable iPhone.