AI has taken your memory, and Apple has put the bill on you today.

Apple today raised prices across the board for the entire line of Mac, iPad, HomePod, and Vision Pro, with increases ranging from $100 to $200.
Cook described this memory shortage as a “once-in-a-century flood,” saying that in 40 years in the tech industry, he has never seen anything like this.
Apple’s stock fell 6% on the same day.
The underlying reason is this: AI data centers are competing with consumer electronics for memory.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted a large amount of production capacity to high-bandwidth memory, leaving less and less ordinary DRAM and NAND for the consumer end. Memory prices have doubled over the past year. Apple held on for a long time, but today it can’t hold out anymore.
MacBook Neo rose from $599 to $699, MacBook Air from $1,099 to $1,299, and MacBook Pro is already at $1,999.
This time, iPhone didn’t move, but Apple hinted that there will be further adjustments later on.
Apple isn’t the only one doing this. On the same day, Microsoft announced that Xbox prices will be raised by $100 to $150 for the exact same reason: memory and storage costs have doubled, and they are expected to double again by autumn 2027.
The market is now worried about two things.
First is demand. Apple users are highly sticky and less sensitive to price, but price hikes will further lengthen replacement cycles.
The key question is by how much sales volume will drop after the price increase—and whether it can be offset by revenue gained from higher unit prices. This will have to be verified with subsequent sales data; for now, the market has already built pessimistic expectations in.
Second is inflation. Consumer electronics have a very small weight in the CPI. Even if the entire category rises by 20%, the direct pull on the CPI would be no more than 0.15%, so the impact of this item alone is limited.
But if the cost of AI infrastructure starts flowing outward through cloud services, software subscriptions, and communication services, these three together account for about 2.8% of core PCE. A broad 10% increase would lift core PCE by nearly 0.3 percentage points—meaning it would not be just noise for the Federal Reserve.
Yesterday, PCE already reached 4.1%. It is basically impossible for the Fed to cut rates this year. If AI infrastructure continues to push up these sub-items, the period of high interest rates can only last longer.
Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix have already made it clear that the memory shortage will last at least beyond 2027, with the fastest release of new capacity only then.
In a call, Cook said: “The impact of memory costs on Apple’s business is still deepening.”
On the same day, Micron’s revenue beat expectations by 17%. Q4 guidance was $50 billion, gross margin was 84.9%, and the stock rose 16% after hours.
At both ends of the industrial chain, one is shouting that it’s too expensive, and the other is counting the money. In the end, it’s the consumers who foot the bill.