Apple to Increase Prices on Devices --- Cook says soaring costs of memory and storage make the move necessary

“Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

 

"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," he said. "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 declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases or which products will be affected. Apple's next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.

 

Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner.

 

Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.

 

Skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from artificial-intelligence companies has pushed up their cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins.

 

Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, estimates research firm TechInsights.

 

Chips for memory and storage are key components inside most computing devices, including smartphones, laptops, game consoles, medical equipment and even cars. But now AI servers are gobbling up rapidly increasing volumes of those chips, so even a company as rich and powerful as Apple is struggling to secure supply.

 

Since last year, when Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon began announcing big increases in their capital spending budgets, the prices for memory and storage chips have both quadrupled. TechInsights expects both prices to continue increasing into 2027.

 

Memory, also called DRAM, and storage, also called NAND, are like elements of a mid-20th-century office: The memory is a desk that holds all the papers a worker needs to perform a task, while storage is the filing cabinet that holds everything else. Smartphones use DRAM memory to run apps currently in use; they use NAND storage to file away photos and videos, for example.

 

Cook said prices for memory and storage are both issues for the company, though he focused on the DRAM market in particular, calling out the increased allocations going to high-bandwidth memory that is used for AI servers.

 

"There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," said Cook. "We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That's the bottom line."

 

Three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory: Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea and Micron in the U.S.

 

Makers of NAND storage include those three companies as well as Kioxia and Sandisk. Their stock prices, along with their profits, have exploded over the past 12 months. Micron and SK Hynix shares have risen more than 800% while Kioxia and Sandisk have risen 4,600%.

 

Memory companies are building more factories: Morgan Stanley forecasts that production capacity for DRAM wafers, the silicon discs on which chips are patterned, will grow by 30% by 2027. Yet as suppliers give priority to the specialized AI memory, wafers for consumer tech will fall as much as up to 15% short of demand, Morgan Stanley estimates.

 

China has national-champion companies in memory and storage, but due to national-security rules, American companies would likely require licenses to work with them.

 

When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said: "I think everything needs to be on the table," adding, "I think we should look at all supply."

 

Companies that make PCs, game consoles, smartphones and more have raised prices, including HP, Dell and Nintendo. A consortium of industry associations recently sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick complaining about the allocation of memory to AI buyers and asking for help to increase supply.

 

Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for prices of smartphones and PCs in the U.S. this year. This price increase will have a limited impact on the consumer-price index, which has only a small weighting for such devices. Yet any price increase on the popular iPhone is likely to grab Washington's attention.

 

Compounding the issue is Apple's need for additional DRAM to support more AI features, including a rebooted Siri announced last week.

 

 And the company has long used NAND storage upgrades to boost profit, charging $100 to $200 for extra increments that cost it just a fraction of that.

 

In the interview, Cook said Apple stands ready to use its cash reserves to boost memory supply. "We're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution," he said. "Obviously, more capacity is needed."

 

Cook declined to offer specifics.

 

It is unclear how Apple could match, let alone beat, the deal terms that AI hyperscalers are offering to lock up supply. Those companies are signing three-to-five-year agreements with huge cash prepayments that Apple is unlikely willing to match, given its history of disciplined spending.

 

Cook said Apple wouldn't use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," said Cook. "We know what we're good at."

 

Apple spends in the low tens of billions of dollars a year on memory and storage, according to people familiar with its costs, making it one of the largest customers in the world. Historically it has used its heft to wring the lowest prices out of suppliers, playing them off each other and leaving them little profit.

 

As AI companies have stormed into the market, suddenly Apple has to wait in line.

 

"This is a hundred-year flood," said Cook. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."” [1]

 

1. Apple to Increase Prices on Devices --- Cook says soaring costs of memory and storage make the move necessary. Winkler, Rolfe.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 June 2026: B1.