dailynewsnblog
In what might be the most unsurprising news of the week, Apple has heavily implied that its hardware is going to get more expensive. Amidst the ongoing memory shortage that has hit virtually every sphere of the tech industry and has seen hardware costs spike dramatically upward, Apple CEO Tim Cook described potential price increases as being “unavoidable.”
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. 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 said to The Wall Street Journal. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices, and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.”
Cook–who will step down as CEO on September 1 and take up a new executive chairman role at Apple–didn’t specify when the company will increase prices and which products will be impacted. One of its products, the Mac Mini, has already increased in price from $599 to $799 for the base model, which should be a clear indicator of how much extra consumers could be expected to pay for high-tech Apple products in the future. As for iPhones, starting prices for those smartphones have generally been around $699 – $799 since 2020, with more advanced models that have bigger screens and more storage capacity costing more.
A 256GB iPhone 17, for example, is priced at $799 on the Apple Store, while an iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199. Apple’s smartphones also function as handheld gaming consoles, capable of playing AAA games like Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, thanks to the advanced chipsets inside them. Coupled with a controller cradle and a subscription to a service like Apple Arcade, the unit functions well as a multi-functional Switch 2 challenger.
Apple isn’t alone when it comes to passing on higher production costs to consumers, as both Sony and Microsoft have had to raise the price of their respective consoles. A base model PS5 or Xbox Series X now costs more today than it did when it first launched in November 2020, and the Switch 2 will also be more expensive come September.
