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Apple has shot up the prices of its devices, iPads and Macbooks, on Thursday. Chief Executive Tim Cook had already warned that the higher prices are inevitable. The reason is the heavy memory chip demand, a victim of the AI boom and massive data centers.
iPhone had been lucky in this price surge as it had been left out. The product is the company’s biggest moneymaker and best seller. Still, Apple decided to increase the costs of the cheapest Neo laptop from $599 to $699. Months before the product was on sale.
Apple’s website showed the MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage rose to $1,299 from $1,099. The MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage climbed to $1,999 from $1,699. The iPad Air with 128 gigabytes went from $599 to $749. Apple also raised prices on both versions of its HomePod speaker and its Apple TV box.
Apple’s statement to the press expressed the dire need for this surge. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products.”
After the announcement, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is facing its worst day since April 2025 as the shares have taken a hit of 6%. Dell dropped more than 8%. This is because analysts said rivals may have to raise prices even more than Apple, since Apple’s close ties to suppliers have softened the hit.
Many also expect the iPhone to be next. “The iPhone isn’t spared, its hike is coming,” said Nabila Popal, a senior research director at IDC, who added that announcing the changes before the fall iPhone launch was a smart move.
Micron locks in high prices for years
The root of the problem lies with memory makers like Micron, which have a reason to keep prices high for years to come.
On Wednesday, Micron said it had found a way to hold prices up for another five years by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements,” or SCAs, that lock in a floor price the company says brings “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.”
Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra laid out the deals in prepared remarks on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, reported by Cryptopolitan.
He said most of the 16 agreements run from 2026 to 2030. Each one ties a buyer to a set amount of product paid for within a price band that has both a floor and a ceiling. The floor locks in those high margins, while the ceiling shields buyers if memory prices climb even higher.
Mehrotra said customers were willing to commit despite the rich margins because they expect shortages to last.
“Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve,” he said. “Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand.”
Why new factories won’t fix it soon
He said building new chip plants offers little quick relief, because more complex memory takes longer to produce, and even when new plants open, there still will not be enough room to make both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and the other types of NAND and DRAM.
“Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply,” he said.
The SCAs do not lock up all of Micron’s stock. Mehrotra said the deals will make up 40% of the company’s revenue, leaving most of its supply free to sell at prices it can bargain over.
He offered one piece of good news, saying Micron’s DRAM output in 2026 should “grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook.” He also noted that SCA customers pay up front, which helps Micron fund the expansion of its plants.
Prices for dynamic random access memory rose as much as 98% in the first quarter of 2026 and could climb another 58% to 63% this quarter, according to TrendForce, a surge some have called “RAMageddon.”
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