Originally published at: Apple Raises Prices for Many Products - TidBITS
When Tim Cook very carefully told the Wall Street Journal about upcoming price increases (see “Tim Cook Confirms Apple Will Raise Prices Due to Memory and Storage Costs,” 18 June 2026), we didn’t know whether it would happen right away or with the release of new products. Now we know—the company has just raised the prices of Macs and iPads, plus the Apple TV, HomePod, and Vision Pro. It also issued a statement to the press, saying:
The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. 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, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.
Unaffected—at least for now—are the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Studio Displays. I suspect that the AirPods and Studio Displays have little enough memory that their margins are relatively unaffected by higher component costs.
The iPhone and Apple Watch are a different story. The fact that Apple is willing to accept lower margins on them may mean that Apple feels that keeping prices lower will result in enough additional sales to offset the reduced profit per unit. It’s also possible that new models are due soon enough—probably in September—that it’s worth keeping prices stable until then.
For the products whose prices did go up, the range is quite significant, as you can see in this spreadsheet I built with assistance from Claude and ChatGPT. The Apple TV 4K increased from $129 to $199, a $70 or 54% increase. That’s particularly odd, since the Apple TV only has 64 GB of storage and 4 GB of memory. It was already priced at a premium compared to competing products from Amazon, Roku, and Google, and the increase would put it at an even greater disadvantage. Community discussion suggests that Apple may be increasing the Apple TV’s price now in advance of a major hardware refresh that will seem more reasonably priced given the features it offers.
On the low end is the Vision Pro, which increased from $3499 to $3699, a $200 or 6% increase. I’m surprised that Apple bothered to increase the Vision Pro’s already steep price, though I suppose that anyone willing to spend so much on such an unnecessary piece of hardware won’t blink at another $200.
The average price hike was $266, and the average percent increase was 21%, although both were jacked up by a few outliers: the M3 Ultra Mac Studio’s $1300 price bump and the Apple TV 4K’s 54% increase. Speaking generally, it seems safe to say that Apple raised prices by 20%.
But beyond that, I can’t really see any obvious trends. Devices with more memory and storage saw greater raw price increases, of course, but they already had higher prices, so their percentage increases weren’t necessarily larger.
It’s also important to note that memory and storage upgrade prices have also increased. I wasn’t able to find a good source of data on what each upgrade cost previously, but some have jumped significantly. At Daring Fireball, John Gruber says most went up by 50%–67%, with the 64 GB and 128 GB memory upgrades for the M5 Max models of the MacBook Pro doubling in price.
Ultimately, I suspect there’s little to be gained in trying to understand specific increases. Apple undoubtedly has a big-picture view of its product line that takes into account unit sales for each product, the type and quantity of chips each requires, and how soon a revision will be available to adjust pricing variables. In other words, each individual price increase—or lack thereof, in the case of the iPhone and Apple Watch—is just one piece of data in a much larger equation.
Practically speaking, some retailers may not have raised prices yet, so you might still be able to score a Mac or iPad at the previous price, but that won’t last long. If you’re thinking of buying an iPhone in the near future, I would normally recommend waiting until September for the new models, but they’ll likely debut at higher prices. Buying a current-generation iPhone now may be the better deal. I’ve also seen rumors suggesting that Apple will introduce only high-end iPhone 18 models in September, with the more affordable models held until the second quarter of 2027, which would encourage buying sooner rather than waiting. That iPhone 17 is looking pretty good at the moment.
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