Never seen anything like it, says CEO Tim Cook as Apple increases prices big time
Apple has raised prices of iPads and MacBooks by as high as Rs 1 lakh due to rising memory costs. Apple CEO Tim Cook has compared the current memory crisis to a “hundred-year flood.” And here is the full picture.
On Thursday, Apple’s online store went offline. Usually, this happens right before a new product is announced by the company. But this time things were different. Apple was raising prices. The Cupertino giant hiked the prices of its iPads and MacBooks by up to Rs 1 lakh. Why? The rise in memory prices due to demand from AI companies. Something that even Apple is not immune to.
You see, every electronic device, be it your smartphone, laptop or a server in an AI data centre needs memory to run. And this is where the problem arises. Since AI models have grown in popularity, companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to grab as much supply of memory as possible. This, in turn, has reduced the supply of RAM for consumer devices – like your iPhone.
As economics tells us – more demand, less supply leads to higher prices.
A hundred-year flood
And the situation has reached such a stage that companies like Apple have no choice but to raise prices to cover this cost. Just a week ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that he had never seen such a drastic rise in prices for a single component in the tech industry. He told the Wall Street Journal, “This is a hundred-year flood.” He added, “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years,