Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices

Price hikes could be coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Apple is planning to raise prices in response to the ongoing memory shortage. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook says “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 doesn’t say when Apple plans on raising prices or which products will be affected. The company has already stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM in March and later raised the starting price of the Mac Mini to $799 after dropping the cheaper $599 option from its lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan also suggested that Apple could discontinue the base configuration of the MacBook Neo, while keeping the $699 model with 512GB of storage.

As AI companies continue to demand more memory in their sprawling data centers, suppliers are struggling to keep up. The shortage has led to surging RAM and storage costs, as well as price increases across game consoles, laptops, and other devices.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook tells the WSJ. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.”

Apple is getting ready to take the wraps off its latest lineup of iPhones later this year, though it’s unclear how big an impact the memory shortage will have on pricing. The WSJ estimates that the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro could cost $1,299, a jump from the $1,099 iPhone 17 Pro.

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Posted Thursday 18 June 2026 at 2:30 pm AEST (my time).

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